Abhishek's blog

The previous blog post covered how to get started with cdk8s (Cloud Development Kit for Kubernetes), that is an an open-source framework (part of CNCF) using which you can define your Kubernetes applications using regular programming languages (instead of yaml).

You were able to setup a simple nginx Deployment and accessed it via a Service - all this was done using Go, which was then converted to yaml (using cdk8s synth) and submitted to the cluster using kubectl. This was a good start. However, since the core cdk8s library is pretty low-level (for a good reason!) the code involved lot of boilerplate (you can refer to the code here).

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a well established paradigm and refers to the standard practice of treating infrastructure (network, disk, storage, databases, message queues etc.) in the same way as application code and applying general software engineering practices including source control versioning, testing and more. For exampple, Terraform and AWS CloudFormation are widely-adopted technologies that use configuration files/templates to represent the infrastructure components.

Infrastructure-IS-Code - A different way of thinking about this

Imagine you have an application that comprises of a Serverless function fronted by an API Gateway along with a NoSQL database as the backend. Instead of defining it in a static way (using JSON, YAML etc.), one can represent these components using standard programming language constructs such as classes, methods, etc. Here is pseudo-code example:

Use change data capture with MSK Connect to sync data between Aurora MySQL and DynamoDB

This is the second part of the blog series which provides a step-by-step walkthrough of data pipelines with Kafka and Kafka Connect. I will be using AWS for demonstration purposes, but the concepts apply to any equivalent options (e.g. running these locally in Docker).

This part will show Change Data Capture in action that let’s you track row-level changes in database tables in response to create, update and delete operations. For example, in MySQL, these change data events are exposed via the MySQL binary log (binlog).

Integrate DynamoDB with MSK and MSK Connect

There are many ways to stitch data pipelines - open source components, managed services, ETL tools, etc. In the Kafka world, Kafka Connect is the tool of choice for “streaming data between Apache Kafka and other systems”. It has an extensive set of pre-built source and sink connectors as well as a common framework for Kafka connectors which standardises integration of other data systems with Kafka and making it simpler to develop your own connectors, should there be a need to do so.

This is the second blog post of this two-part series that uses a practical application to demonstrate how to integrate Redis with AWS Lambda. The first part was about the solution overview, deployment and hopefully you were able to try it out end to end. As promised, the second part (this one) will cover the Infrastructure aspects (IaaC to be specific) which is comprised of three (CDK) Stacks (in the context of a single CDK App).

Run your Go app on AWS App Runner service, integrate it with MemoryDB for Redis and use AWS CDK to package and deploy the app along with infrastructure

AWS App Runner allows you to deploy and run cloud-native applications in a fast, simple, and cost-effective manner. You can choose the programming language of your choice since App Runner can deploy directly from source code (in GitHub for example) or a Docker container image (from private or public repo in ECR) - all this without worrying about provisioning and managing the underlying infrastructure.

Hello and welcome 👋🏼 to this two-part blog series that uses a practical application to demonstrate how to integrate Redis with AWS Lambda. The first part (this one) covers the application - by the end of this blog, you should have the solution deployed, played around with it and in the process, have a good overview of the solution.

The second part is about the Infrastructure (IaaC to be specific) aspects - its mostly centred around AWS CDK along with some code walkthrough.

This quick-start uses AWS Cloud9 IDE to help you get up and running with MemoryDB for Redis, quickly

When I was initially exploring some of the AWS services (such as MemoryDB, MSK, Elasticache for Redis etc.), I usually followed the documentation that involved setting up EC2, SSH-ing into the instance, install/copy stuff (language, runtime, code, client etc.) and then try things out. Most often, the first step is the hardest, and it’s important for developers to have the least amount of friction as possible to “get going”.

This is a Go Lambda function that’s packaged and deployed using AWS SAM

Lambda Function URL is a relatively new feature (at the time of writing this blog) that provides dedicated HTTP(S) endpoint for your Lambda function. It is really useful when all you need is a single endpoint for your function (e.g. to serve as a webhook) and don’t want to setup and configure an API Gateway. Looks like I can’t seem to get enough of it! I have written a couple of blog posts on this topic that include a practical example of using it to build a serverless backend and then deploying that solution using AWS CDK.

Deploy a Serverless backend for Slack using Infrastructure-as-code (IaaC)

One of my previous blog post covered how to build a Serverless backend for Slack using by using Lambda Function URL as a webhook. Since I wanted to focus on the application itself, the infrastructure setup part was simplified - using AWS CLI, the function was packaged as a zip file, configured and finally a Function URL was created along with the required permissions.