Cloud
Performance improvements can be a daunting task. This post looks at some of the methods and tools available in GCP to help report the performance of your cloud application, how this can help communicate with the client and how it can enable you to narrow down performance issues in a pipeline made up of multiple services.
As a software engineer with an interest in cloud computing I wanted to look at how organisations can use the cloud to help reach net zero. I’ll share what I found out, including resources which organisations can apply to reduce the carbon footprint of their workloads.
Podman offers a like for like alternative to Docker Desktop that offers higher container security and no licensing costs. This post uncovers the steps required in order to be able to seamlessly replace Docker Desktop with Podman with very little effort
·
Video
Failures are inevitable. Although trying to prevent possible failures to a system is certainly worthwhile, we can also embrace failures and learn how to adapt. In this talk, I explore the importance of resilience and how experimentation can help us build more resilient systems.
Have you ever wondered how your AWS resources are distinguished from those that belong to other users? Here is a look at VPC components that offer control and security over your AWS networks
·
Video
In this talk, I explore some of the foundations and common approaches for designing resilient systems in cloud environments. I also look into how experimenting with our systems, by deliberately introducing failures, can help us better understand their behaviour.
As Cloud deployments become more powerful with increased provider competition, where does High Performance Computing (HPC) fit into the equation? This blog post explores the considerations for using HPC in the Cloud.
Pulumi is one of a number of newer IaC solutions, providing developers with real code for defining their infrastructure resources and services. This post assumes some prior knowledge of IaC concepts and technologies, particular Terraform and Serverless, along with CircleCI
In this hands-on tutorial, I'll introduce Google Cloud Platform and use it to develop a simple computer vision application. We'll make the most of its user-friendly interface, great developer tools and generous free tier.
·
Video
In this webinar, James maps out a set of well-defined and understood steps on an organisation's cloud journey, to help you plan your onward route towards cloud maturity.
·
Video
In this webinar, James provides a balanced and clear-eyed view of the pros and cons of migrating to the cloud in relation to four key factors - agility, cost, security, and vendor lock-in.
Transitioning from building monolithic applications to serverless applications is not always easy. This article explores the challenges that one developer from a monolithic background faced while building a serverless application on Amazon Web Services.
Using spaCy for Named Entity Recognition, summarisation and similarity analysis in an AWS pipeline. Lessons learned in a client project.
A summary of my experiences attending AWS Summit London, 2019. Highlights from talks that I found interesting and/or informative. Topics are mainly focused on high-performance computing, security and distributed architecture.
Comments systems appear across the web, I'll explain the process of using AWS' AppSync and DynamoDB to create a simple serverless version for use on a blog to provide a comment system that updates in real-time.
This post looks at how the experimental Async Hooks API can be used to support global state within AWS Lambda functions. Considering that this is an experimental API it's worth treating with caution, but it does provide an interesting potential solution to a common problem.
This month I have sat and passed the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. Like with many things, the journey is more exciting than the destination. In this article, I share lessons and observations I made along the way.
You may have heard of "Infrastructure as Code" - but have you heard of "Infrastructure as Code as a Service"? We wanted to reliably and routinely set up hardware on demand as and when we needed it; this was our approach.
In this post, I look at how WebAssembly can be used to create serverless functions and demonstrate an AWS Lambda function written entirely in Rust.
Cloud Custodian is an open source project from Capital One. It allows you to enforce your cloud compliance rules in an automated way. One key use case of Custodian is to reduce costs by shutting down unused resources. In this post, I'll walk through setting up a Custodian and writing a policy. This will shut down EC2 instances outside working hours to save money.
The popularity of Infrastructure as Code has skyrocketed in the last few years. Such tools allow the rapid and reliable provisioning of resources straight to the cloud, saving huge amounts of time and effort in the long run. One of the most prominent of these tools is Terraform, which this post will focus on, particularly with regards to AWS.
With AWS Lambda you pay for execution duration, which means that sleeping or waiting during execution has a direct impact on your bill! This blog post takes a look at how to make AWS Lambda functions sleep, without incurring costs, via AWS Step Functions.
I describe setting up feature branch deployments with Gitlab's Review Apps and AWS Elastic Beanstalk. This gives a fairly straightforward means of setting up automated deployment of PR branches, but I discuss some issues I encountered along the way.
With an objective of building some docker images on cloud CI infrastructure I introduce one build-template sledgehammer I've been using recently, multi-stage docker builds running in docker-in-docker host container, with examples of AWS CodeBuild and Gitlab CI, and musing on other options.
AWS recently announced a couple of new container services, EKS and Fargate, and I'll give a brief overview, a "first experience" walkthrough of Fargate, and discuss when you might want to choose it.
This post takes a look at the recently launched GitHub App platform, that allows developers to create integrations and services which can be shared with others. The post describes the development of gifbot, a simple and fun App!
This blog post describes the process of creating a GitHub bot, hosted as an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda function, that performs various checks on pull requests.
This post describes the Concourse build system and explains why declarative CI / CD is so compelling. No more pet build servers!
Inspired by Colin's article on building an expenses app with the Mondo API, I wanted to create something to make use of the webhook API which fires in real-time (ish) whenever a transaction happens. In this post I'll cover subscribing to the Mondo webhook, creating the glue code as an AWS Lambda and pushing pins into the Pebble Timeline REST API.
