I recently sat in on a demo for a new tool being developed by some engineer colleagues and noticed a troubling trend in how we choose infrastructure technologies. To set the stage, these engineers were hard at work for months developing a system that trained science models and presented the results to a UI in table form. Like any data exploration tool, an important need is to query by different fields, sort them by value, and other common methods to manipulate data. “The UI looks great”, the customer said. “But how do we sort the records by X field, or Y field, or Z field?”. The engineer givin ..read more

Not long ago, reading through application logs was a simple process. A typical log diving sessionwould include me SSHing onto a host or hosts, navigate to the log directory, and run a series of commands like grep for searching, awk for formatting, and cut/count for summing. With basic knowledge of these three commands—and a cheat sheet at your steady—you could pull out nuggets of insight from your log files. Once you spent a couple hours learning these commands well, you could apply them to other purposes like bash scripting or writing command line prompts. These classic commands were multi-pu ..read more

AWS Lambda’s launch in late 2014 marked a turning point in how developers think about and use compute infrastructure. Prior to Lambda’, the default choice for compute infrastructure was Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Despite being flexible, using EC2 came with its fair share of headaches: painful maintenance, security concerns, and of course the most important–cost.  Lambda’s introduction of the “pay for what you use” and “scale down to zero” model quickly lured developers away from their hard metal setups and onto managed compute infrastructure. It’s around this time that the term “Serverl ..read more

Reinvent 2023 just wrapped up and there have been a bunch of exciting updates that you need to know about. In this article, we’ll be recapping the top 7 announcements of the event. S3 Express OneZone Get ready for faster S3 performance with a new storage class called Express One Zone. This new classification offers single digit latencies and is ideal for frequently accessed and high performance applications. It’s cheaper too, coming out at 50% less than standard and can scale up to support millions of request per minute. To optimize even more, you can co-locate your compute infrastructure in t ..read more

AWS re:Invent 2023 is only two days away. In the lead up to the event, AWS announced several new AWS service enhancements and features that you should know about. This article contains a brief recap of 6 of these notable announcements. #1 – Code Whisper + AWS CLI The AWS CLI is a bit of a pain in the butt to work with. Now, with this new enhancement it will be a little bit less so! This new feature allows you to use CLI autocomplete and type ahead code suggestions in your favourite terminal. It also offers a second feature that focuses on natural language processing and command conversion. You ..read more

Amazon Bedrock is now GA In April, Amazon announced Amazon Bedrock as their center stage product for building generative-ai on AWS. Seemingly caught off-guard by the incredible power of existing models like OpenAI, Dall-E, and MidJourney, Amazon has been pouring resources into getting their hallmark competitor product to market. Their excessive usage of the term “AI” in recent shareholder letters, interviews, tweets, and pretty much any time Adam Selipsky gets near a microphone, telegraphs how much Amazon cares about this industry. Just a few days ago, Amazon Bedr ..read more

Triggering an event at a specific time is a common requirement for many software applications. Also known as sending timer based events, delayed event triggers allow applications to delay the invocation of an event until a predetermined time. In the world of AWS, there are two key ways to accomplish this task both with different pros and cons and slightly different, and sometimes unexpected, behaviour.  This article reviews the importance of timer based events and is followed by discussing the two ways to trigger these timers using AWS services. The Importance of Delayed Events Many use c ..read more

EventBridge Scheduler is a new addition to the EventBridge suite of services that allow you to trigger an event at a specific moment in time. Previously, triggering an event at a particular time was a painful process that required creating a Step Function and adding Wait Task that could read off the input to schedule an event in the future. This old process was overkill for such a seemingly trivial task. With the new EventBridge Scheduler feature released in November 2022, this job is much much easier. However, there are a bunch of traps you can fall in to that can mysteriously lead to EventBr ..read more

One of the most exciting moments of working with AWS is during the initial few days. You quickly sign up for an account and eagerly log in to the AWS console to get started tinkering in the maze of services. Many take assurance that despite ponying up your credit card details, AWS offers a Free Tier that provides access to many AWS products for no charge. Most assume that this must mean that we’re protected by accidentally clicking a button that can lead to a surprise bill. After all, advertising for the free tier is front and center on the AWS home page. It’s something that AWS takes pride in ..read more

Anyone that works with DynamoDB is probably familiar with the ConditionalCheckFailed Exception. This error occurs when a condition placed on your api request fails to be satisfied. Take for example a PutItem request on an Orders table to insert a new record. When using this API, it’s wise to use a ConditionExpression with the value attribute_not_exists. This ensures that if a record is already present with the same key, a ConditionalCheckFailed exception gets thrown. Receiving an exception indicates a problem occurred, but it doesn’t provide you additional context about the item that existed i ..read more