Category Archives: AWS

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Can You Stop An AWS Lambda Execution?

There are a few reasons why you may want to stop a Lambda. Either the Lambda is buggy or performing incorrectly, your Lambda is reading an event source like kinesis and you need to pause it, or your Lambda is being constantly retried.

Can you stop an AWS Lambda Function? There is no way to stop a currently executing AWS Lambda function. But you can stop future invocations by setting concurrency to zero or disabling integrations. 

So, there’s a few different aspects to the topic of stopping a Lambda. Let me take you through some different options for stopping your AWS Lambda function so that you can decide which one makes most sense for your situation.

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Can You Learn AWS On Your Own? How To Ensure Success.

There are many ways to learn AWS. But the thought of learning anything new on your own definitely seems daunting, right? So you might be wondering if AWS is one of those topics where it possible to teach yourself. Today, I’ll answer that.

Can you learn AWS on your own? Yes. Learning AWS can be done through self-study and that’s the same way that many learn AWS. There are also many online courses and communities to help you learn AWS on your own. 

So, there you have it! AWS can be learned on your own. But of course, there’s more to it than that. I do have a bunch of hints and tips that can make learning AWS on your own that little bit easier, if you’re curious, read on…

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What Are The Pre-Requisites To Learning AWS? 5 Topics You Probably Should Look Into First.

So, I’m guessing you’re new to AWS? If you are—you might be wondering what different things you should understand before deep diving into your learning. Well, you’re in the right place, since that’s exactly what we’ll discuss today.

What are the prerequisites to learning AWS? There are no mandatory pre-requisites to learning AWS. However knowledge of topics such as: the internet, command line interfaces, programming and “infrastructure as code” can be beneficial and might speed up the learning process. 

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But of course, it’s not very useful to just list these topics, let’s go through and discuss why and how these areas can help as pre-requisites to learning AWS.

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Does AWS Require Coding? Understanding When You Might Need To Code.

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a cloud computing platform popular with tech companies and engineers. When it comes to working with AWS a question that comes immediately to most people is: “Will I need to code to use AWS?”

Does AWS require coding? No. Getting started with and learning AWS does not require any coding skills, many basic tasks can be performed without coding. However dependent on the job / skills you have (or need) you may still be required to learn some programming skills. 

As always, there’s some nuances to the question. Whilst I might not know your exact personal circumstance, we can still look at examples of tasks you can complete in AWS with and without coding skills, and we can also go through and understand the situations that require coding and why.

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Can AWS Lambda Access A Database? And The Considerations You Should Be Taking.

Architecting solutions using AWS Lambda means understanding many nuances in how AWS works, and a main consideration for our application architecture is the database. So we’ll need to need to know whether AWS Lambda can connect to a database at all, and what our options are.

Can AWS lambda access a database? Yes. AWS Lambda can connect to an AWS hosted databases such as RDS or DynamoDB. AWS Lambda can also connect to external databases which are public or grant network access. 

Dependent on the database you’re using (or intending to use) there are some considerations you should address. Let’s now go through the different options you have for integrating a database with AWS Lambda, and address some of those considerations so you can make an informed decision.

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Is AWS Easy To Learn? (And How You Can Make It Easier)

Are you just starting out learning AWS? AWS has lots of services and it can be daunting when you’re just starting out. Staring at all those online resources, articles and courses gets you wondering: How easy will it be to learn all AWS?

So is AWS easy to learn? Learning AWS can be quick an easy and can take as little as a few days up to a few months. But, the exact time it’ll take you to learn AWS depends on your past experience.

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Okay, so that gives you a rough idea of how long you can expect to learn AWS. But exactly how easy AWS is to learn depends on your past experience. So let’s dig a little deeper into factors which affect how easy learning AWS will be.

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You’re Alerting Wrong: The Why & How Of Setting An AWS Lambda Alarm Using Error Rate Percentages.

When it comes to operating Lambda, we often want to configure alarms to alert us when things aren’t running smoothly. Naturally our first choice for Lambda alarms is CloudWatch, the default monitoring service that comes with AWS.

Alarm CloudWatch

CloudWatch gives us some custom metrics out-of-the-box, such as: errors and invocation rates. But there are some problems we run into when setting up alarms based directly on these metrics.

By the end of this article you’ll understand why alarms based on default AWS Lambda Metrics can cause difficulty, how AWS Metric Math helps us to apply “context” in our alarms and make them more effective, and how to setup an alarm using metric math to calculate an error rate percentage. 

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Should You Use Typescript To Write Terraform? (The Terraform CDK)

Recently, Terraform dropped an interesting new extension to their Terraform toolchain: the Terraform CDK. The new CDK allows you to write Terraform using TypeScript and Python — neat! But is the CDK as good as it seems?

Terraform Written In The CDK

I wanted to jump in to uncover the truth and understand whether writing Terraform in TypeScript really is the future, or whether it’s just another fad.

By the end of this article you’ll understand what the Terraform CDK is, how it works, and ultimately help answer the question: should you use it? 

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How To Setup Monitoring / Observability On Existing Software (e.g. A Web API): A Practical 5 Step Guide.

Recently I find myself in the position of applying monitoring to existing software applications quite often. Whilst I have been applying the monitoring tools, I noticed that I follow the same steps each time…

Request Invocations

Which got me thinking: “Could you create a ‘recipe’ or ‘cookbook’ for how to apply monitoring to an existing software application?”. I set to work writing this article, and I can conclude, the answer is: yes!

By the end of this article you’ll know the 5 steps you should take when setting up monitoring on an existing service. 

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How Do You Look at Console.Log Output of an Amazon Lambda Function?

Are you creating a lambda function? Are you currently debugging wondering where you can access the output of your console.log entries?

Understanding how logs work is a common confusion area when working with AWS Lambda. Today, we’re going to clear up the confusion and get your hands on your AWS Lambda logs so that you can start to debug your Lambda function.

By the end of this article you’ll understand how and where console.log output goes from an AWS Lambda function, and also how to debug your AWS Lambda setup if you’re still not seeing log output.