DEV Community: Roman

Passed AWS Certified Developer - Associate - DVA-C01

Roman — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 15:12:08 +0000

Passed exam on 9 October 2022

Background

Basic knowledge of EC2, S3, and Load balancer - which I use for side projects.

Developer Associate or Solution Architect

Quick overview:

Developer Associate:

focus on best practices for developing on AWS
how to build using AWS

Solution Architect:

the exam will test your ability to design architectures
I am a developer, so my focus here was initially on development.

Preparation

Labs, lectures - Cloud Academy
Question quizz

I planned to prepare as efficiently as possible for the exam in 1 month. The first day of preparation was September 08, 2022. I immediately set the exam date for October 9, 2022.
The goal was not so much to pass the exam but to understand the concept. So I emphasized practical exercises. I went through the theory for about 5 minutes and immediately proceeded to do laboratory work at Cloud Academy.

This is not an advertisement. The company where I work provides free access to this service.

I wrote more about my study and training plan website.

In total, I explored 35 Amazon services. Each day I devoted about 1-2 hours to it.

Somewhere in the "middle of the road" I tried to take a test exam at Cloud Academy. I had 45% correct answers, which was not enough to pass the exam.

About a week before the exam, I went through all the lab work and became more confident in the services. The confidence that I was ready to take the exam was not coming.

So I set about answering questions and parsing individual cases. On the first night I realized that if you sit for 2 hours every day, solving questions, and then find out the result only after the whole test, there is no energy left to analyze mistakes.

I solved this problem in the following way (in my opinion this was the key to success in preparing for the exam): there are many different services with thematic variants of questions for the exam on the Internet that are publicly available. Note: _I didn't look for dumps or anything like that, only questions and discussions that anyone can freely and legally find. _

I parsed some questions and comments, saved them to JSON, and randomly started solving them as if I were using cards. I posted the first version of the idea and variants of the questions with commentary on the website.

Impostor Syndrome

There was no confidence that I was ready for the exam. And a small change in the learning process allowed me to solve the problem. I wrote an app that counted my correct answers.
This is what my progress looked like the day before:

Benefits

In preparation, I have discovered some useful services that I can use for my personal projects, as well as to keep up to date with new products.

Below are free or nearly free services that you can use for your projects:

Amazon CodeWhisperer - free. Current status: preview. Use for free after registration. Copilot analog from Github. Helps you when writing code.
AWS Amplify - frontend free or $1-2 per project.
AWS Lambda - Free Tier or minimum for small projects. One million requests each month for free.
Amazon DynamoDB - 25Gb free.
Amazon Cognito - 50,000 users free. Authorization, Authentication.
AWS CodeCommit - 5 users + 50Gb free. Private repositories.
AWS Data Exchange - free datasets, tables, APIs. For example, Covid-19 data.
Amazon Chime - free zoom counterpart on the basic rate.

Instead of Conclusion

I prepared an app that I used to prepare for the exam. There are over 500 questions in it now. It is free to use. The app is in progress, I would be happy to get any comments on how to improve it.

And this is what my badge looks like AWS Certified Developer - Associate

Amazon Simple Queue Service Cheat Sheet

Roman — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 05:29:11 +0000

Alternatives

Apache Kafka
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
RabbitMQ
IBM MQ
TIBCO Enterprise Message Service
AWS IoT Core
Amazon CloudWatch
Azure Service Bus

Digest

Long polling: Long polling will reduce the overhead of the CPU and not require excessive dolls.
Visibility timeout: a period of time during which Amazon SOS prevents other consumers from receiving and processing the message. The default visibility timeout for a message is 30 seconds. The minimum is O seconds. The maximum is 12 hours
Delay queue: Delay queues let you postpone the delivery of new messages to a queue for a number of seconds. If you create a delay queue, any messages that you send to the queue remain invisible to consumers for the duration of the delay period Know FIFO vs Standard Queue
SQS is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale micro-services, distributed systems, and Serverless applications
SNS: To receive subset of messages, subscriber can apply filter policy to topic subscription.
If use case has subscribed to email notification, go with SNS as opposed to SQS.
By default only the queue owner is allowed to use the queue. Configure SQS Queue Access Policy to provide access to other AWS accounts

Question

Which endpoint is considered to be best practice when analyzing data within a Configuration Stream of AWS Config?

SNS
E-Mail
SQS
Kinesis

Amazon EventBridge Cheat Sheet

Roman — Sun, 25 Sep 2022 05:15:53 +0000

About

EventBridge is a serverless event bus that makes it easy to connect applications together using data from apps, integrated SaaS apps, & AWS services.

EventBridge is a low-cost alternative to building a new backend infrastructure for every new app. With Serverless EventBridge, you can connect your existing apps with a few lines of code. You don’t have to build a new backend for every new app you want to connect to.

You can use existing infrastructure as a provider of event data, and connect your apps using Serverless EventBridge.

Alternatives

Azure Service Bus
TIBCO Cloud Integration (including BusinessWorks and Scribe)
IBM App Connect
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Apache Camel
Peregrine Connect
Software AG webMethods
IBM Cloud Pak for Integration

Use Cases

Type: Application integration

Same type services: SNS, SQS, AppSync, EventBridge

Re-architect for speed
Extend functionality via SaaS integrations
Monitoring and Auditing
Customize SaaS with AI/ML

Question

A food delivery company is building a feature that requests reviews from customers after their orders are delivered. The solution should be a short-running process that can message customers simultaneously at various contact points including email, text, and mobile push notifications.

Which approach best meets these requirements?

Use EventBridge with Kinesis Data Streams to send messages.
Use a Step Function to send SQS messages.
Use a Lambda function to send SNS messages.
Use AWS Batch and SNS to send messages.

AWS Fargate Cheat Sheet

Roman — Sat, 24 Sep 2022 05:35:11 +0000

Serverless compute for containers.

AWS Fargate is a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine that lets you focus on building applications without managing servers.

Deploy and manage your applications, not infrastructure. Fargate removes the operational overhead of scaling, patching, securing, and managing servers.

Compatible with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

Alternatives

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Rancher
Azure Container Instances
Cloud Foundry
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Container Engine for Kubernetes

Q

How AWS Fargate different from AWS ECS?

In AWS ECS, you manage the infrastructure - you need to provision and configure the EC2 instances.
While in AWS Fargate, you don't provision or manage the infrastructure, you simply focus on launching Docker containers. You can think of it as the serverless version of AWS ECS.

AWS ECS vs EKS

Roman — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 04:10:11 +0000

Amazon provides the Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) which can be used to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications using Kubernetes on AWS.

Amazon ECS	Amazon EKS
Managed, highly available, highly scalable container platform	Managed, highly available, highly scalable container platform
AWS-specific platform that supports Docker Containers	Compatible with upstream Kubernetes, so it’s easy to lift and shift from other Kubernetes deployments
Considered simpler and easier to use	Considered more feature-rich and complex with a steep learning curve
Leverages AWS services like Route 53, ALB, and CloudWatch	A hosted Kubernetes platform that handles many things internally
“Tasks” are instances of containers that are run on underlying compute but more of less isolated	“Pods” are containers collocated with one another and can have shared access to each other
Limited extensibility	Extensible via a wide variety of third-party and community add-ons.

AWS Fargate Cheat Sheet

Roman — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 04:06:13 +0000

Serverless compute for containers.

AWS Fargate is a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine that lets you focus on building applications without managing servers.

Deploy and manage your applications, not infrastructure. Fargate removes the operational overhead of scaling, patching, securing, and managing servers.

Compatible with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

Alternatives

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Rancher
Azure Container Instances
Cloud Foundry
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Container Engine for Kubernetes

Q

How AWS Fargate different from AWS ECS?

AWS Elastic Container Service Cheat Sheet

Roman — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 17:44:52 +0000

Microservices are built in multiple programming languages
Containers simplify deployment of microservices:
- Step 1 : Create a self contained Docker image
- Application Runtime (JDK or Python), Application code and Dependencies
- Step 2 : Run it as a container any where Local machine OR Corporate data center OR Cloud
Use On-Demand instances or Spot instances
Launch type: EC2 or Fargate
Data volumes attached to containers
Deployment type:
- Rolling update
- Blue/green deployment (powered by AWS CodeDeploy)
Task Placement Strategies:
- binpack - Leave least amount of unused CPU or memory. Minimizes number of container instances in use
- random - Random task placement
- spread - Based on specified values:
- Host (instanceId)
- (OR) Availability Zone(attribute:ecs.availability-zone)
- (Alowed) Combine strategies and prioritize
How do you manage 100s of containers?
ECS - Fully managed service for container orchestration
- Step 1 : Create a Cluster (Group of one or more EC2 instances)
- Step 2: Deploy your microservice containers
AWS Fargate: Serverless ECS. DON'T worry about EC2 instances.
Cloud Neutral: Kubernetes
- AWS - AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
Load balancing:
- Performed using Application Load Balancers
- Dynamic host port mapping: Multiple tasks from the same service are allowed per EC2 (container) instance
- Path-based routing: Multiple services can use the same listener port on same ALB and be routed based on path (www.myapp.com/microservice-a and www.myapp.com/microservice-b)

AWS Elastic Container Registry Cheat Sheet

Roman — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 03:38:52 +0000

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) - Fully managed container registry offering high-performance hosting, so you can reliably deploy application images and artifacts anywhere

Alternatives

Docker Hub
JFrog Artifactory
Azure Container Registry
Harbor
Google Container Registry
Red Hat Quay
JFrog Container Registry

Quick start

Login
- get-login-password:aws ecr get-login-password --region region | docker login --username AWS --password-stdin aws_account_id.dkr.ecr.region.amazonaws.com

Create a repository:

aws ecr create-repository \
    --repository-name hello-repository \
    --image-scanning-configuration scanOnPush=true \
    --region region

Tag image
- docker tag hello-world:latest aws_account_id.dkr.ecr.region.amazonaws.com/hello-repository
Push
- docker push aws_account_id.dkr.ecr.region.amazonaws.com/hello-repository
Pull
- docker pull aws_account_id.dkr.ecr.region.amazonaws.com/hello-repository:latest

Delete an image

aws ecr batch-delete-image \
    --repository-name hello-repository \
    --image-ids imageTag=latest \
    --region region

Delete a repository

aws ecr delete-repository \
  --repository-name hello-repository \
  --force \
  --region region

AWS X-Ray Cheat Sheet

Roman — Mon, 19 Sep 2022 02:10:02 +0000

Alternatives

Google Stackdriver
Azure Monitor
Elastic Observability
Datadog
Splunk

Digest

Trace request across microservices/AWS services
- Analyze, Troubleshoot errors, Solve performance issues
- Gather tracing information
- From applications/components/AWS Services
- Tools to view, filter and gain insights (Ex: Service Map)
How does Tracing work?
- Unique trace ID assigned to every client request
- X-Amzn-Trace-Id:Root=1-5759e988-bd862e3fe
- Each service in request chain sends traces to X-Ray with trace ID
- X-Ray gathers all the information and provides visualization
- How do you reduce performance impact due to tracing?
- Sampling - Only a sub set of requests are sampled (Configurable)
- How can AWS Services and your applications send tracing info?
- Step 1 : Update Application Code Using X-Ray SDK
- Step 2: Use X-Ray agents (EASY to use in some services! Ex: AWS Lambda)

Segments and Sub-segments can include an annotations object containing one or more fields that X-Ray indexes for use with Filter Expressions. It is indexed. Use up to 50 annotations per trace.
Total sampled request per second = Reservoir size + ((incoming requests per second - reservoir size) * fixed rate)
Default sampling X-ray SDK first request each second and 5% of any additional requests
Tracing header can be added in http request header
Annotations vs Segments vs Subsegments vs metadata
X-ray daemon listens for traffic on UDP port 2000
X-ray SDK provides interceptors to add your code to trace incoming HTTP requests.
X-ray in EC2: You need the X-Ray daemon to be running on your EC2 instances in order to send data to X-Ray. User data script could be used to install the X-Ray daemon in EC2 instance.
X-ray in ECS: In Amazon ECS, create a Docker image that runs the X-Ray daemon, upload it to a Docker image repository, and then deploy it to your Amazon ECS cluster.
X-ray in elastic beanstalk: Enable the X-Ray daemon by including the xray-daemon.config configuration file in the .ebextensions directory of your source code
AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a micro-service architecture.
A segment can break down the data about the work done into subsegments. Subsegments provide more granular timing information and details about - downstream calls that your application made to fulfill the original request.
Add annotations to subsegment document if you want to trace downstream calls.
Segments and subsegment can include a metadata object containing one or more fields with values of any type, including objects and arrays.
Tracing header is added in the HTTP request header. A tracing header (X-Amzn-Trace-ld) can originate from the X-Ray SDK, an AWS service, or the - client request.
Use the GetTraceSummaries API to get the list of trace IDs of the application and then retrieve the list of traces using BatchGetTraces API in - order to develop the custom debug tool

AWS CodeArtifact Cheat Sheet

Roman — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 04:02:08 +0000

About

AWS CodeArtifact is a fully managed artifact repository service that makes it easy for organizations of any size to securely store, publish, and share software packages used in their software development process.

CodeArtifact is a secure storage, publishing, and sharing of software code packages used in a development process organisation's software development. CodeArtifact makes it easy for small organisations to store, publish, and share software packages.

CodeArtifact can be configured to automatically fetch software packages and dependencies from public artifact repositories.

CodeArtifact works with commonly used package managers and build tools like Maven, Gradle, npm, yarn, twine, pip, and NuGet making it easy to integrate into existing development workflows.

Price

Pay only for what you use – the size of the artifacts stored, the number of requests made, and the amount of data transferred out of an AWS Region. CodeArtifact includes a monthly free tier for storage and requests

Current price

Use Cases

Type: Developer Tools

Alternatives

JFrog Artifactory
Docker hub
Sonatype Nexus Platform
Helm
Azure DevOps Services
Github

Usage

$ aws codeartifact list-domains --region us-east-1

Practice

Getting started using the console

AWS CodeStar overview

Roman — Sat, 17 Sep 2022 03:36:08 +0000

About

AWS CodeStar enables you to quickly develop, build, and deploy applications on AWS. AWS CodeStar provides a unified user interface, enabling you to easily manage your software development activities in one place.

CodeStar enables to quickly develop, build, & deploy applications on AWS.

With AWS CodeStar, you can create, manage, and scale automated code reviews with a single click. You can also monitor the performance and scalability of your code review process with the built-in metrics dashboard.

Each AWS CodeStar project comes with a project management dashboard, including an integrated issue tracking capability powered by Atlassian JIRA Software.

Alternatives

Alternatives to AWS CodeStar:

Jenkins.
Azure DevOps Projects.
GitHub.
GitLab.
CircleCI.
CloudBees CI.
Plesk.
Copado CI/CD.

AWS CodeDeploy Cheat Sheet

Roman — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 04:20:51 +0000

About

CodeDeploy is a fully managed deployment service that automates software deployments to a variety of compute services such as EC2, Fargate, Lambda, & on-premises servers

CodeDeploy can also deploy a serverless Lambda function.

CodeDeploy can be connected to CodePipeline and use artifacts from there.

Platforms

Need to choose the compute platform:

EC2/On-premises.
AWS Lambda.
Amazon ECS.

AppSpec File

The application specification file (AppSpec file) is a YAML-formatted, or JSON-formatted file used by CodeDeploy to manage a deployment.

The AppSpec file defines the deployment actions you want AWS CodeDeploy to execute.

Deployment types

In-place deployment (EC2 only)
Blue/green deployments:
- AWS Lambda: Traffic is shifted from one version of a Lambda function to a new version of the same Lambda function.
- Amazon ECS: Traffic is shifted from a task set in your Amazon ECS service to an updated, replacement task set in the same Amazon ECS service.
- EC2/On-Premises: Traffic is shifted from one set of instances in the original environment to a replacement set of instances.

Price

Current price

Use Cases

Type: Developer Tools

Practice

Continuous Integration and Deployment with AWS Code Services

Questions

Q1

What will happen if you delete an unused custom deployment configuration in AWS CodeDeploy?

You will no longer be able to associate the deleted deployment configuration with new deployments and new deployment groups.
Nothing will happen, as the custom deployment configuration was unused.
All deployment groups associated with the custom deployment configuration will also be deleted.
All deployments associated with the custom deployment configuration will be terminated.

Q2

What happens when you delete a deployment group with the AWS CLI in AWS CodeDeploy?

All details associated with that deployment group will be moved from AWS CodeDeploy to AWS OpsWorks.
The instances used in the deployment group will change.
All details associated with that deployment group will also be deleted from AWS CodeDeploy.
The instances that were participating in the deployment group will run once again.