DevOps Posts

Where do you keep your DB credentials in your AWS Lambda functions that you use to access your Amazon RDS databases? Hardcoded? No! Environment variables? Well, you might be using AWS Secrets Manager, right? It would be great! But did you know that you can also use the IAM role of your AWS Lambda function and its temporary credentials to do this?

Yes, there are different ways to manage your database credentials in your AWS Lambda functions. In this post, I will talk about one of the most secure methods, using IAM authentication of Amazon RDS, with an example of an AWS Lambda function developed in Python. I will use an Amazon RDS - MySQL DB instance, but IAM authentication is also supported on PostgreSQL DB instances as well. Read more at AWS Lambda IAM Authentication for Amazon RDS With Python: Secure, But Limited post.

If you use Bitbucket for your private Git repositories, you cannot use AWS CodePipeline to create a CI/CD pipeline. Because CodePipeline does not support Bitbucket as a source repository. However, if you still want to use AWS developer tools to automate your builds and deployments, you have an alternative. AWS CodeBuild supports Bitbucket integration as source allowing to trigger builds after push requests to a Bitbucket repository by publishing it as a webhook to it.

By the way, Angular is one of the most popular frontend frameworks and you can deploy your Angular projects in a serverless manner. So it can be reliable, scalable and cost-effective by design. You can build your code, upload to an Amazon S3 bucket and distribute it via Amazon CloudFront.

In this post, I will make an example of using a Bitbucket repository for your Angular projects and triggering builds on AWS CodeBuild after pushing your changes to it. Then your AWS CodeBuild project can build your Angular code and deploy it to an Amazon S3 bucket making it ready for distributing via CloudFront. Read more at Building Angular Apps with AWS CodeBuild upon Bitbucket Pushes post.

Having a Ruby on Rails background, I got excited to try Ruby to code my AWS Lambda functions when its support for AWS Lambda was announced at Re:Invent 2018. Finally, to try Ruby on AWS Lambda, I developed a simple API using AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) to access an Amazon RDS MySQL database. I wanted to compare it with my experiences of doing this with Python and Node.js.

Although it may seem simple, installing mysql2 gem as a dependency proved itself to be challenging than others, because it has native extensions and depends on the environment you use bundler. As always, Docker simplifies our job by providing a similar environment that our AWS Lambda function runs inside.

In this post, I will make an introduction to AWS SAM CLI and using Ruby for AWS Lambda functions. Let’s begin! Read more at Serverless APIs With Ruby, AWS Lambda & AWS SAM CLI: Accessing Amazon RDS post.

AWS CloudFormation provides a handful of pseudo parameters which you can use along with your template conditions and parameters to increase the reusability of your templates. One of them is the AWS::NoValue parameter which acts as the null value in programming languages.

In this post, I will talk about some examples of its use cases.

I am happy to announce that my first online course, AWS CloudFormation Step by Step: Beginner to Intermediate, is now live on Udemy.

In this post, I want to introduce you with this new course. I will talk about the topics, what you will learn by taking it as well as the structure of the course. In addition, I will also share a free coupon that will be valid for a limited time with the followers of this blog. Read more at My AWS CloudFormation Step by Step: Beginner to Intermediate Course is Live on Udemy! post.