AWS Bites

Sometimes people talk about an MVP and then say "yeah but we deploy manually" or "we don't have tests yet". Is that really an MVP or is it something else? And what it takes to build a successful MVP when using AWS? In this episode, we discuss the differences between a prototype, a proof of concept, and an MVP. Then we debate about what's the minimum amount of work you need to put in place to have...

AWS Step Functions are all the rage right now! The visual editor is getting better and better and there are always new capabilities like the recently introduced intrinsic functions. In this episode we will try to answer the question “are Step Functions a Low-Code tool”? In the process, we will give our own definition of what Low-Code means, and we will describe the main characteristics of Step Fun...

This is a special episode recorded live during a live coding session on YouTube (2022-09-28). The audio-only experience might not be the best one, so if you are curious to see the video and enjoy our diagrams and screen sharing, please check this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/b-FoqIcOcPw . How can you build a WeTransfer or a Dropbox Transfer clone on AWS?  This is our sixth (and last!)...

This is a special episode recorded live during a live coding session on YouTube (2022-09-21). The audio-only experience might not be the best one, so if you are curious to see the video and enjoy our diagrams and screen sharing, please check this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TzfkbisMEA . How can you build a WeTransfer or a Dropbox Transfer clone on AWS?  This is our fi...

This is a special episode recorded live during a live coding session on YouTube (2022-09-16). The audio-only experience might not be the best one, so if you are curious to see the video and enjoy our diagrams and screen sharing, please check this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVic3oqqqfY . How can you build a WeTransfer or a Dropbox Transfer clone on AWS?  This is our fo...

This is a special episode recorded live during a live coding session on YouTube (2022-08-31). The audio-only experience might not be the best one, so if you are curious to see the video and enjoy our diagrams and screen sharing, please check this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlW_RwRgskI How can you build a WeTransfer or a Dropbox Transfer clone on AWS?  This is our thir...

This is a special episode recorded live during a live coding session on YouTube (2022-08-24). The audio-only experience might not be the best one, so if you are curious to see the video and enjoy our diagrams and screen sharing, please check this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4wCX32YUtMk How can you build a WeTransfer or a Dropbox Transfer clone on AWS?  This is our second live coding...

This is a special episode recorded live during a live coding session on YouTube (2022-08-17). The audio-only experience might not be the best one, so if you are curious to see the video and enjoy our diagrams and screen sharing, please check this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfRElTYilyY How can you build a WeTransfer or a Dropbox Transfer clone on AWS?  This is our firs...

In this special episode we announce our next initiative: starting some YouTube coding live streams where we build something on AWS. Specifically we are going to build a file transfer service, just like WeTransfer or Dropbox Transfer! In this episode we announce why we decided to start this, the logistic and some of the details of the product we are going to build. We are really looking forward to...

The public cloud gives you amazing machine learning powers with a low barrier to entry. Once you know where to begin, you can quickly build solutions to process images, video, text and audio, as well as structured data. In this episode we talk about the managed AI services that are available on AWS and that require zero machine learning expertise (Rekognition, Polly, Transcribe, Forecast, Personal...

If you are thinking of using an external CICD tool to deploy to AWS you are probably wondering how to securely connect your pipelines to your AWS account. You could create a user for your CICD tool of choice and copy some hard coded credentials into it, but, let’s face it: this doesn’t feel like the right - or at least the most secure - approach! In the previous episode we discussed how AWS and Gi...

Automated, Continuous Build and Continuous Delivery are must-haves when building modern applications on AWS. To achieve this, you have numerous options, including third party providers like GitHub Actions and Circle CI, and the AWS services, CodePipeline and CodeBuild. In this episode we focus on GitHub Actions and we compare it with the native AWS features offered by services like CodePipeline an...

We do love AWS, but sometimes we have to admit that it’s not always a silver bullet. There are definitely use cases where it might be worth considering alternatives to AWS. In this episode we will discuss some of these use cases and try to highlight what are the advantages that other platforms or services can have over AWS in very specific circumstances. First of all we clarify why we like AWS and...

We recently talked about migrating a monolithic application to AWS, using EC2, load balancers, S3 and RDS. In this episode we want to talk about a slightly different setup, where we are going for containers instead of EC2 and we want to deploy them in Fargate. In this We are going to cover all the components you will need in your architecture, the reasons to choose Fargate over any alternatives an...

Lambda functions are small units of code that achieve a specific purpose. It’s always a good idea to keep your code short, clean and simple. And yet, sometimes you find yourself writing lots of boilerplate code in every function to do common things, like parsing events, validation, loading parameters and lots more. The Middy.js framework was designed to help you keep Node.js Lambda function code s...

Identity Access Management, also known as IAM, can be an intimidating service when getting started with AWS. But IAM is also one of those core services that you can’t really avoid. In this episode we try to distill down everything that you need to know to understand IAM and start to use it proficiently. We cover what IAM is, why it is so important, how authentication and authorization work, what p...

When it comes to building and deploying microservice applications on AWS, there are 2 emerging best practices: use a separate AWS account per application (and environment) and decouple communication between separate systems using events (instead of point-to-point communication). Can we use these two best practices together? Yes, but we will need to find a way to pass messages between AWS accounts!...

When it comes to choosing compute services on AWS, there are a lot of options, including EC2, ECS, Lambda, EKS… New ones keep emerging all the time! Selecting the right one for each application is no longer an easy choice. In this episode we discuss why you need compute services and what kinds of problems should be offloaded to something else entirely. We suggest how you can develop a methodology...

Migrating monoliths to the cloud can be a scary, expensive and time consuming and time consuming activity. Many companies try to avoid it even if it could be beneficial for them, just because they think it would require too much work and be too risky. But there are interesting compromises and incremental approaches that can be used to simplify and de-risk this kind of migration. The idea is that y...

There are lots of options for programming languages on AWS these days but one of the most popular ones remains JavaScript. In this episode of AWS Bites we discuss what it’s like to develop with JavaScript, Node.js and TypeScript on AWS and what’s new in this field. We explore why you would choose JavaScript and what are the trade-offs that come with this choice. We present some of the main feature...

In the age of distributed systems we produce tons and tons of logs. This is especially true for AWS when using CloudWatch logs. So how do we make sense of all these logs and how can we find useful information in them? In this episode we talk all about logs on AWS and we discuss the main concepts in CloudWatch for logs like Log Groups and Log Streams. We discuss how you can consume logs and how thi...

CloudWatch is a great service for metrics. You get tons of metrics out of the box and you can also create your custom ones. One of the most important things you can do with metrics is to create alarms , so how do we get the most out of CloudWatch alarms? In this episode we share our insights and cover the different types of alarms that exist, how to create an alarm, what to do when an alarm is tri...

CloudWatch is the main Observability tool in AWS and it offers a wide range of features: logs, metrics, dashboards, alarms and even events (recently moved into EventBridge). In this episode we are going to focus on CloudWatch metrics. We are going to discuss the characteristics of metrics in CloudWatch: namespaces, dimensions, units and more. What metrics you get out of the box and how to create y...

What are the benefits of Tags? You have probably seen that you can add tags to almost every resource in AWS… but should you really do it? And if you do it, what are the benefits? In today’s episode Eoin and Luciano cover what tags are, some examples of how to use them and what kind of benefits they can give you and your team. Finally we’ll give you a bunch of ideas on how to build a tagging strate...

Should I use CloudFormation or should I use Terraform instead? If you are just starting to do Infrastructure as Code (IaaC) you probably have this question. In this episode we will discuss in detail how these two amazing pieces of technology compare against each other and what their features, weaknesses and strengths are. We will share our opinions based on our experience with these 2 technologies...