Microservice culture is great. Nevertheless, the data that resides behind still need to be interconnected; how do you solve that problem?
Here at CreditorWatch (the most innovative and customer-centric credit bureau in Australia), we love to play with technology, and we are passionate about all the AWS ecosystem! Taking care of our customers and industry feedback, we had the opportunity to create CreditorWatch Bankruptcy Search to reduce risk when providing credit to companies, sole traders, and partnerships.
With the support of Australian Financial Security Authority CreditorWatch now stores current and historical bankruptcies, updated hourly.
Just a little background
Some time ago (2/3 years ago, actually…), we discovered the lambda function and the FaaS world. Everything started because one of us brought a Raspberry Pi and…
Table of Content
Introduction
* What are Fonts?
Using Normal / Custom Fonts in AWS Lambda V2
* How to use the fonts in my environment?
What is FontConfig
* Why use libfontconfig?
Compile fontconfig
* Packaging the Library
Installing libfontconfig on your Lambda Linux 2
* Configuring the LD_LIBRARY_PATH
* Configuring FONTCONFIG_PATH
Introduction
Whenever you are using Lambda version 2.0 (Amazon Linux 2 base image) you’ve noticed that the underlying environment has been stripped more than the slimmest Alpine version! This means that you need to install everything from scratch, including the fonts!
What are the Fonts?
Fonts are the characters that are contained…
How to create micro service for a production environment using AWS ECS, Route 53, AWS Load Balancer and the ECS Cluster.
I bet so! Wouldn’t be fantastic If you can deploy it in production as soon as possible in the shortest amount of time, passing from your CI/CD pipeline and have all of this standardised across all your environment?
Well, docker can be your perfect companion:
- Standardisation (the same image you are running on your dev should be identical to the production one, apart from the ENV variable)
- Read-only container (ready to scale horizontally)
- Rapid Deployment (as soon as the image available, it takes less than 10 seconds to spin up a container)
- Isolation (You can define the amount of CPU/Memory…
This is a basic tutorial that explains the importance of tracking results and how to collect data using Custom Metrics using AWS CloudWatch Metrics.
The ultimate purpose of this story is to allow the reader to understand some of the terminologies of CloudWatch and to always push for challenging goal that leads to higher performance teams/individual.
Not interested in the business impact, jump directly to the technical side!
Business Impact (KPI)
A Key Performance Indicator is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company or an individual is achieving key objectives.
If you want to be successful in achieving your goal, you…
AWS DynamoDB Triggers (Event-Driven Architecture)
DynamoDB Streams
There are a lot of implementations to achieve event-driven architecture. However, today, we will focus on DynamoDB Streams. Thanks to this NoSQL database, you can leverage the power of a schemaless database and at the same time, the event-driven architecture pattern.
An example of this architecture is represented in the screenshot above us, where you have your System (“The Producer”) creating JSON Payload(s) that are sent to DynamoDB. After arrival, DynamoDB Trigger will execute the Lambda functions called consumers(*).
Whenever an item in the table is created/modified or deleted, a new stream record is written…
What is an AWS CloudFormation Template?
A template is a text file written in JSON or YAML that define a declaration of the AWS resources that make up a stack.
AWS Cloudformation contains six section: AWSTemplateVersion, Description, Metadata, Parameters, Mappings, Conditions, Transform, Resources, Outputs.
AWS Cloudformation display different event such: CREATE_IN_PROGRESS, CREATE_COMPLETE, DELETE_IN_PROGRESS or CREATE_FAILED where the Status Reason column displays the issue that caused the failure
Everybody loves statistics, and we are not excluded, working with a business model that require achievable goals, based most of the time on numeric targets, we will like to have an easy way to see the overall situation without running the queries by yourself.
Having this in mind, we decide to investigate in a solution that includes: extraction, collection and visualisation of statistics that can be used even by a non-tech person.
Extraction
We need to find a job system able to query the database at a specific interval, and prometheus-SQL is the tool that will do the job!
We can…
After looking everywhere for an excellent test suite and coming across Selenium, UFT, Waitr, TestComplete and few others, finally we have found a fantastic product to run our integration test, a product that I highly recommend to any QA lover that want simplicity but at the same time the possibility to write code and fully customise your testing.
Katalon Studio
It’s a free product; you can download at https://www.katalon.com/katalon-studio/ and is promise is:
A simple and powerful automation solution. A viable alternative to costly commercial automation solutions
Apart from the marketing slogan, I never see a product so easy to use and…
In the modern world of IT Industry, we usually hear a lot of buzzwords, one of them is “one-on-one”, regardless the popularity of this word is concerning how often people don’t know what’s the theory behind and the real benefit of having a one-on-one with your employee.
Consisting of or involving direct individual communication; person-to-person.
In the business world one-on-one is a meeting that provides an ongoing feedback strategy to keep both manager and the employee’s updated on their status. The sessions are private and focussed toward performance management, problems solving and process enhancement.
Why is so important to have one-on-one with your team members?
This meeting is the best way…
Alberto Cubeddu
Passionate about people management, effective coaching and IT development. Currently Head Of Development, Scrum Master, AWS Certified, Surfer.
