Python 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.

In recent days, I made some trials for connecting to MongoDB databases from AWS Lambda functions using Python. In today’s post I will share my experiences with you and take some notes about these trials for future reference. We will install MongoDB on an EC2 instance and develop simple Python functions to access it. Let’s start! Read more at Accessing a MongoDB instance from AWS Lambda using Python post.

Did you know that you can send SMS messages easily with Amazon SNS without subscribing any phone numbers to a topic? Let’s say that you have verified phone numbers and you would like to send text messages to them assuming that they opted in for this. Besides, you would like to pay only when you send. You can use Amazon SNS SDK for Python and automate this process using AWS Lambda. Read more at Sending SMS Messages with Amazon SNS, AWS Lambda and Python post.

While managing your resources on AWS, you may need accessing services programmatically. You may need to get information about an instance or modify some attribute. In some cases, you may need a cron job that runs every hours or once a day. For example, it can be a job getting the name of the current master node in an ElastiCache Redis cluster.

Writing Python scripts is an easy way to access and use your AWS resources. Besides, you can use Python for coding your AWS Lambda functions. In this blog post, I will give a simple example to listing VPC components using a Python script. Read more at Accessing AWS Resources Using Python Scripts post.