Keith is an architect by day, blogger by night. He’s responsible for all the content on this blog, and irresponsible for everything else.
Last week I took the AWS Certified Security – Specialty exam — and I passed with a score of 930 (Woohoo!!) In this post I cover why I took it, what I did to pass, my overall exam experience, and some tips I learnt along the way. So let’s go. Why? Why would anybody pay good money, subject themselves to hours of studying, only to end up sitting in a cold exam room for hours...
GitHub actions is the new kid on the workflow block. It allows users to orchestrate workflows using familiar git commands like push & pull requests, and un-familiar GitHub events like gollum, issue creation and milestone closures. In this post, we’ll use GitHub actions to orchestrate a build pipeline that will deploy lambda functions using the Serverless framework. There’s a lot...
In my honest (and truly humble) opinion, VPCs don’t make much sense in a serverless architecture — it’s not that they don’t add value, it’s that the value the add isn’t worth the complexity you incur. After all, you can’t log into a lambda function, there are no inward connections allowed. And it isn’t a persistent environment, some functions may...
Amazon KMS is one of the most integrated AWS services, but probably also the least understood. Most developers know about it, and what it can do, but never really fully realize the potential of the service. So here’s a rundown of the innards of the KMS service. What is KMS? KMS (Key Management Service) is an AWS offering that allows us to create, manage and use cryptographic keys. Like...
The system, which was introduced on the first day of the 2020 school session yesterday, takes only two seconds to scan a pupil’s face before his personal information, such as full name, pupil number and class, is stored into the school’s databasehttps://www.nst.com.my/news/nation/2020/01/552737/sk-taman-perling-1-uses-facial-recognition-scanners-mark-pupils A school in Johor became the first in...
This year I resolve to support the media that I like, i.e start paying for content I’ve been consuming for free all this time. I believe that if we want better media, we need to start paying for it, and it’s not a matter of quality content, a free and fair media, is an absolute necessity for democracy to operate — after all, people can’t make informed choices if they...
Last week, I launched a new pipeline for Klayers to build Python3.8 Lambda layers in addition to Python3.7. For this, I needed a separate pipeline because not only is it a new runtime, but under the hood this Lambda uses a new Operating System (Amazon Linux 2 vs. Amazon Linux 1) So I took the opportunity to make things right from an account hierarchy perspective. Klayers for Python3.7 lived in...
Had a blast at PyConSG 2019, really cool to be in the presence of so many pythonistas. Would definitely recommend, especially since python is one of the more broadly used languages (AI, Blockchain, RPA, etc). My talk was on AWS Lambda (naturally!). Slide deck can be found in this GitHub Repo. Let me know what you think either in the comments here or on Youtube. Or mail me keith [at] keithrozario...
Everyone knows that I’m a Lambda fanboy, and to be fair Lambda deserves all the praise it gets, it is **the** gold-standard for serverless functions. But yesterday, I gave Google Cloudrun a spin, and boy(!) is Lambda is going to get a run for its money. Which is surprising given Google has traditionally lagged in this area — isn’t it quaint that we use words like...
Lambda functions are awesome, but they only provide a single dimension to allocate resources – memorySize. The simplicity is refreshing, as lambda functions are complex enough — but AWS really shouldn’t have called it memorySize if it controls CPU as well. Then again this is the company that gave us Systems Manager Session Manager, so the naming could have been worse (much worse...