20 posts tagged with "Cloud"

Motivation and Background​

While I’ve used Kubernetes professionally in a few capacities (particularly in customer engagements while working at AWS), I wanted to cement my knowledge and increase my mastery with a systematic approach. I decided to prepare for the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam. I’ve taken and passed more than a dozen technology certification exams spanning AWS, Azure, HashiCorp, and more. This exam is unique in several ways. Namely, it’s all hands-on in a lab environment. Azure exams often have a coding, configuration, or CLI command component, but even these are typically multiple-choice questions. The CKAD presents you with a virtual desktop and several Kubernetes clusters, making you tackle 15-20 tasks with a strict two-hour time limit. I put together this repository and post for a few reasons:

About​

This is a tool that I developed and open sourced at AWS. Find the latest in the GitHub repository here. It’s released under MIT-0.

Solution Overview​

As I wrote about previously, AWS users are shifting left on costs using DevOps and automation. While tools like Infracost are powerful for estimating costs for Lambda and other services, they alone do not provide optimization or tuning feedback during the development lifecycle. This is where a tool like AWS Lambda Power Tuning assists:

Overview​

I learn best by doing, so with every release cycle, I take the time to build fully functional examples and digest the blog posts and video content. Below are some of my favorite releases from re:Invent 2022. You can find all source code in this GitHub repository.

Solution Overview​

My current role focuses on every facet of AWS cost optimization. Much of this entails helping to remediate existing infrastructure and usage. Many customers ask how they can shift left on cloud costs, like they do with security. Ultimately, cost consciousness needs to be injected into every aspect of the engineering lifecycle: from the initial architecture design to implementation and upkeep.

The Course and Companion​

Rahul Nath recently released a course called AWS Lambda for the .NET Developer on Udemy and Gumroad. I had a ton of fun going through the exercises and highly recommend purchasing a copy. While working through the material, I implemented the solutions with infrastructure as code using AWS CDK in C# and .NET 6. I also containerized most of the Lambda functions and wrote unit tests for both the functions and infrastructure. You can find all my source code on GitHub.

I previously wrote a blog post about getting started with Terraform for CDK and the benefits. At that time, the latest version was 0.3. Last week, version 0.5 was released. In this version, some new experimental features could make adopting CDK for Terraform exponentially easier.

About AWS SAM Pipelines​

Last week, AWS announced the public preview for SAM Pipelines. This feature expands the SAM CLI allowing users to create multi-account CI/CD pipelines for serverless applications quickly across several providers such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, and Jenkins. Along with CDK Pipelines, the AWS tooling keeps making it easier to standardize with best practices.

Overview​

Both AWS CDK and Terraform aim to solve a similar problem: alleviating some of the infrastructure management challenges with code. CDK supports several general-purpose languages, including C#, Python, and TypeScript, while Terraform uses its configuration language called HCL. While CDK can only create AWS resources, Terraform supports virtually every cloud provider, granting the ability to write code to deploy to multiple public clouds at once. Last year, Terraform and AWS announced a project called Terraform for CDK, aiming to grant the best of both worlds (i.e., support for GPLs, multi-cloud, etc.).

Deciding on Which Technology to Use​

While infrastructure as code (IaC) has existed within the AWS ecosystem since 2011, adoption has exploded recently due to the ability to manage large amounts of infrastructure at scale and standardize design across an organization. There are almost too many options between CloudFormation (CFN), CDK, and Terraform for IaC and Serverless Application Model ( SAM) and Serverless Framework for development. This article from A Cloud Guru quickly sums up the pros and cons of each option. I choose this particular stack for some key reasons: