For me, serverless has become the default model of developing backend applications.
However, a meeting a few weeks ago was a reminder for me that not the entire world is embracing serverless applications already: I had the task to design an “Energy Data Importer”, an application that collects time series data from different locations, sanitizes and transforms them and stores them in a database for later lookup. So I went ahead and sketched the application with AWS serverless building blocks and patterns.

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There is a lot of buzz and marketing around the term “serverless”. This article aims to dismantle what’s serverless and what not - with practical examples.

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Situation

You want to upload a file to S3 with Axios and the PUT method.

Challenge

S3 needs a Content-Length for PUT requests, otherwise it throws an 501.

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When we begin doing some things in AWS, we usually start with a single AWS account and create our AWS resources in it. And things can become a mess very fast. This article should give you an overview why you should switch to a using multi-account architecture very soon for workloads on AWS.

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This is an annotated transcription from Paul O’Neill’s talk on leadership - in my opinion the most powerful and inspiring talk I have ever seen on leadership. I decided to transcribe it (well, Youtube did the most work with its automatic subtitles feature), because there are so many great quotes in it and I wanted to have it as a source for myself, e.g. for futures articles, so I always have a written reference.

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A recent challenge for one of the teams I am currently involved was to find a way in AWS CloudWatch:

1. To alert if the metric breaches a specified threshold.
2. To alert if a particular metric has not been sent to CloudWatch within a specified interval.

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Buchbesprechungen als Werkzeug für Organisationales Lernen

Auf den devopsdays 2015 in Berlin hatten wir eine Open Space Gruppe, die sich mit dem Thema beschäftigte: “Ich lese viele Bücher, Blogs etc, und würde dieses Wissen gerne in das Unternehmen tragen, in dem ich gerade arbeite”. Dabei kam die Idee auf, Lesegruppen zu bilden. Diese Idee fand ich so gut, dass ich sie direkt einmal ausprobiert habe.

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How to dynamically pass environment variables to Elastic Beanstalk.

Elastic Beanstalk is a great AWS service for managed application hosting. For me personally, it’s the Heroku of AWS: Developers can concentrate on developing their application while AWS takes care of all the heavy lifting of scaling, deployment, runtime updates, monitoring, logging etcpp.

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When deploying CloudFormation stacks in a “Continuous Delivery” manner with CodePipeline, one might encounter the challenge to pass many parameters from the CloudFormation stack describing the pipeline to another stack describing the infrastructure to be deployed (in this example a stack named application).

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Update 2019-01-24: CloudFormation now natively supports a update policy for replacments with the UpdateReplacePolicy.

Some operations in CloudFormation trigger a REPLACEMENT of resources which can have unintended and catastrophic consequences, e.g. an RDS instance being replaced (which means that the current database will be deleted by CloudFormation after a new one has been created).

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