AWS Bites

AWS Lambda just got a big upgrade in ephemeral storage: you can now have up to 10 GB of storage for your /tmp folder! Before this was limited to “only” 512 Mb… But is this really useful? What can we do now that we couldn’t do before? Also, is this going to have an impact on price? And how does it compare with other storage capabilities that are available in Lambda? Eoin and Luciano are on the case...

Eoin and Luciano take you through the ways serverless can give you more security out of the box. We cover the tradeoffs between having more security control and the responsibility that comes with this power. There are always new security challenges so we cover some of the common pitfalls with serverless and AWS security in general. Finally, we share some tips to make your serverless deployments mo...

Luciano and Eoin discuss their strategies and ideas to help new team members to start embracing cloud computing and get productive with AWS. What are the main concepts to focus on when bootstrapping this journey, how to make a plan and make sure it’s bespoke to the expectation of the new employee. How to do pairing sessions and make sure we can build hands-on experience. Finally we discuss buildin...

Eoin and Luciano try to answer the question of what AWS accounts do you need for your team and how to organize them. In this episode of AWS bites we discuss common ways to organize AWS accounts and environments from the perspective of a company running production workloads. We try to answer questions like “how many accounts and how many environments?”. We also discuss how you and your team can be...

Luciano and Eoin explore the wonderful world of data streaming using Kafka on AWS. In this episode we focus mainly on Managed Streaming for Kafka (or MSK) and discuss what are the main differences between MSK and Kinesis. We also explore the main features that MSK provides, its scaling characteristics, pricing and, finally, how MSK works in conjunction with other AWS services. We conclude the epis...

Eoin and Luciano are back with some more AWS messaging services material! This time we talk about Kinesis Data Streams and everything there’s to know about them! In this episode of AWS Bites, we cover the difference between data streaming and queue or message buses. How Kinesis can let you process large batches of messages in near real time. Why you might use Kinesis as a queue or pub/sub bus in s...

Luciano and Eoin deep dive into SNS discussing what it does, how it differs from EventBridge and SQS and how you can use it to send messages to customers but also for microservices communication. In this new episode dedicated to AWS events and messaging services, we learn everything there is to know about SNS including advantages, limitations and cost. This episode complements the episode about Ev...

Eoin and Luciano continue their series about event services. In this episode, they chat about EventBridge and explore why this AWS service has such a great potential for event-based serverless applications. This episode presents some interesting examples of when and how to use EventBridge. It also covers all the different classes of events that you can manage with EventBridge: AWS events, third-pa...

Luciano and Eoin take a deep dive into SQS as part of a series on AWS event services and event-driven architecture. We talk about the kind of problems SQS can solve, all of the SQS features and how to configure and use SQS to achieve reliability and scalability without all the complexity. We also take some time to detail how SQS works with Lambda in terms of scaling, batching and filtering. In thi...

In this episode of AWS Bites podcast, Luciano and Eoin talk about AWS services related to events and message passing like SQS, SNS, Event Bridge, Kinesis and Kafka (MSK). We discuss in which context is convenient to use messages and events and we deliver a quick walkthrough of all the services discussing major features and some practical examples on how to use them. In this episode we mentioned th...

In this episode of AWS Bites podcast, Eoin and Luciano talk about whether it is worth to get an AWS certification and why. We discuss why a certification can be important from the perspective of individuals and companies, what are the certifications available and how are they grouped. Finally we try to provide some suggestions for a study plan and give various useful resources and tips. In this ep...

In this episode of AWS Bites podcast, Luciano and Eoin talk about what the serverless Developer Experience (DX) is like and whether we should consider it still immature or not. In this context we discuss some of the struggles with local development, what are some tools that can make our lives easier and how we can improve the overall serverless experience. In this episode we mentioned the followin...

In this episode of AWS Bites, Eoin and Luciano discuss some interesting strategies to take a workload to the cloud. Most of this episode is built around “6 Strategies for Migrating Applications to the Cloud” by Stephen Orban: ( https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/enterprise-strategy/6-strategies-for-migrating-applications-to-the-cloud/ ) in which you can find the concepts of the “6 Rs for cloud migration...

In this episode of AWS Bites podcast, Luciano and Eoin talk about some ideas to stay update with the evergreen world of AWS. This is a much less structured episode than usual and we informally discuss some of our favourite resources including blogs, articles, YouTube channels, other podcasts and Twitter profiles. In this episode we mentioned the following resources: - AWS what’s new (official): ht...

In this episode, Eoin and Luciano explore the various pros and cons of AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK). We start by describing what CDK is and what it is used for. Then we spend a bit of time covering the details of how CDK actually works defining L1, L2 and L3 (patterns) constructs and the integration with CloudFormation. In the central part of the episode we deep dive into a bunch of pros and co...

In this extended episode, Luciano and Eoin try to cover a recurring topic around Serverless: is it a good or bad idea for startups? We start by giving a brief description of the different definitions and perspectives on serverless. Then, we try to explore some cases in which we believe serverless might not be the best fit for a startup. We follow on by revisiting some cases where instead we believ...

In this extended episode, Eoin and Luciano talk about Amplify with a particular focus on Amplify Studio, a new visual way to manage Amplify applications announced at the recent re:Invent event during Werner Vogels’ keynote. In this episode we mentioned the following: - Amplify Studio: https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/studio/ - Figma: https://www.figma.com/ - The 2021 AWS re:Invent Werner Vogels keyn...

In this special episode, Eoin and Luciano talk about their impression on the announcements from day 2 and 3 of AWS re:invent 2021. We mentioned the following resources: - Kinesis on-demand data streams - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/11/amazon-kinesis-data-streams-on-demand/ - Redshift Serverless - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/11/amazon-redshift-serverless/ - S...

In this special episode, Eoin and Luciano talk about their impression on the announcements from the first day of AWS re:invent 2021. AWS Lambda now supports event filtering for Amazon SQS, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Kinesis as event sources: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/11/aws-lambda-event-filtering-amazon-sqs-dynamodb-kinesis-sources/ Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer now detects hardc...

In this special episode, Eoin and Luciano talk about their wishlist for AWS re:invent 2021. Based on our experience and personal AWS pain points, we share some of our wishes for new announcements during the biggest cloud event of the year. We also discuss some of the biggest announcements of last year and a few tips on how to get ready to follow the announcements of the next few days. CORRECTION:...

In this episode, Eoin and Luciano talk about how to manage AWS credentials and different ways to manage them. From the more traditional (and not recommended) IAM credentials to SSO. In this episode we mentioned the following resources: - GitHub integration with OIDC: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/deployment/security-hardening-your-deployments/configuring-openid-connect-in-amazon-web-services...

In this episode, Luciano and Eoin discuss the good and the bad of the AWS Management Console (a.k.a. the web console) and why you should consider migrating to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) as soon as possible, especially for your production applications. In this episode we mentioned the following resources: - Cloudformation: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/ - CDK: https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/...

In this episode, Eoin and Luciano try to explain whether you should consider Lambda or Fargate for containers. We start by clarifying what we really mean by containers and what kind of container support you get in both Lambda and Fargate. Then we go into more detail about the characteristics of both services including limits and pricing. By the end of this episode you should be able to understand...

In this episode, Eoin and Luciano try to answer a beginner question: how to get started with AWS. Special thanks to Adam Mann ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-e-mann/ ) for suggesting this question! AWS is so big that it doesn’t make any sense to try to learn it all! It’s better to learn the fundamentals and then focus on specific areas of interest to get the best out of AWS. But what are these...

In this Halloween-themed episode, Eoin and Luciano tell some AWS horror stories! Get ready for some trick or treat! Of course we have to start with billing and we tell some of our failures with predicting cost ending up with a nightmarishly bad billing surprise! We also discuss some horror stories from the perspective of AWS developer experience and finally we touch on some Cloudformation terrors!...