All Posts on Shikisoft Blog - Page 7

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.

Continue reading the AWS Lambda IAM Authentication for Amazon RDS With Python: Secure, But Limited blog post.

Amazon RDS is the managed relational database solution of AWS. You leave the setup and maintenance of your database to AWS and focus on building applications using it. You can launch and maintain community edition MySQL, PostgreSQL databases as well as commercial Oracle and SQL Server databases on Amazon RDS. However, a few years ago, AWS developed its own cloud-native, enterprise-level database engine called Amazon Aurora, which provides MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. In this post, I will discuss some of Aurora’s unique features and why you should use it instead of an Amazon RDS DB instance with community edition MySQL or PostgreSQL databases.

Recently, AWS also launched the serverless and multi-master versions of Amazon Aurora, and any of these features can alone be the reason to choose it. However, in this post, we will focus on single-master Aurora deployment and its advantages over RDS.

Continue reading the Why Choose Amazon Aurora Over Regular RDS? blog 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.

Continue reading the Building Angular Apps with AWS CodeBuild upon Bitbucket Pushes blog 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!

Continue reading the Serverless APIs With Ruby, AWS Lambda & AWS SAM CLI: Accessing Amazon RDS blog 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.

Continue reading the AWS::NoValue on CloudFormation: Conditional Property Configuration blog post.