Amazon did a limited release of the programmable Dash button and unsurprisingly it got sold out within a day. It’s stated in amazon.com that “We don’t know when or if this item will be back in stock.”, hence you might need to wait to get one. I take this opportunity to write a post about how I used the AWS IoT button that I received in AWS re:Invent 2015 to show case AWS IoT to the team. Read more

Blue/Green deployment is a well-known method to deploy an application without any downtime. Performing DNS switch is one of the very common techniques to achieve this. Using DNS switch has a minor issue with DNS caching which might take some time for DNS change to be propagated. Apart from DNS switch, AWS gives us two different options to switch the stacks. One is to have single ELB and swap it across auto-scaling group and another is switching the launch configuration of the auto-scaling group. Read more

If you had noticed, there has been a gap of few weeks since my last post. I went off the radar to prepare for AWS Certified Solution Architect Professional exam. Lots of learning and completed it successfully. I can’t provide any details on the questions since I have signed a NDA. But I shall provide some suggestions based on my experience. Read through the blue print and understand the weight-age for different sections. Read more

CloudFormation uses a pre-signed S3 URL to receive the response back from the custom resources managed by it. There are few blue prints available for Node.js Lambda custom resources but nothing available for python yet. Hence I created this simple function which shall be used to send the response back to CFN custom resource by performing PUT request to the pre-signed S3 URL. import json import requests def lambda_handler(event, context): responseStatus = 'SUCCESS' responseData = {} if event['RequestType'] == 'Delete': sendResponse(event, context, responseStatus, responseData) responseData = {'Success': 'Test Passed. Read more

I prefer creating the base AMI using packer; RDS snapshot using a Jenkins job which get triggered whenever there is a change in the database schema in the SCM. In case of installers, binaries, etc. it would be best to store them in a single S3 bucket. In all the above mentioned scenarios I prefer to share those resources to a 3rd party AWS account and remove the share when not needed. Read more