An AWS Community Builder Christmas - Thank you!

David Sol — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 16:44:21 +0000

The year ends, and we reflect and are thankful for all the great things we got to live in 2022 and prepare to enjoy everything 2023 will bring us.

And that includes the AWS Community Builder's program.

What surprises you most about the community builders program?

The Community in AWS Community Builders. Is not just a group of people bragging about who does the most community reach, but a community in itself. You get to know and interact with great people, motivated and willing to go the extra mile to teach others (and themselves) about tech and the cloud. The experience of experience that energy and gusto for our profession fill you with energy and promise.

What’s your background and your experience with AWS?

I am starting to feel like a veteran with six years of cloud experience, seeing the best and the worst that cloud projects can bring you.

What’s the biggest benefit you see from the program?

The recognition. It works wonders for your self-image to know you have been accepted to a program of this magnitude and are recognized as a valuable partner for aws.
And the swag doesn't hurt, either. To arrive at a meetup in your "AWS Community Builder" hoodie makes an impact.

What’s the next swag item that you would like to get?

A nice pin would be great.

What are you eating for dinner today? Share the recipe!

https://cookpad.com/mx/recetas/99788-tamales-chiapanecos

Is there anything else you would like to say about the community builders program in 2022?

Thank you very much!
Have a great Christmas, a happy new year, and a better 2023!

Finally done: ACloudGuru Elasticache Challenge!

David Sol — Sat, 31 Jul 2021 05:09:28 +0000

For a long time I saw the A Cloud Guru challenges, and hoped to be able to do one of them someday.

A couple of months ago a new one come along:

#CloudGuruChallenge: Improve application performance using Amazon ElastiCache

As part of the AWS Community Builders I try to learn all I can about AWS, and recently I got very interested in Redis (RedisConf 2021 had a lot to do with it), so this challenge was everything I was interested on.

The time had finally come.

It was hard. I am finishing with just a day to spare. I had to make time, and learn a lot to be able to finish it.

It was everything I hoped for! I had fun, a challenge and a chance to learn.

I can't recommend it enough. If you are able, do it. But is not for the faint of heart. You need to put your heart and mind to it to be able to finish it.

Good thing we have the official ACloudGuru Discord server to get in touch and get help. Don't fail to join (it's free) to get help (and help others) in this and other challenges.

What did I learn:

I made my first Terraform 1.0 project.
Used Default Tags for the first time.
Learn a lot about making full VPCs in Terraform, functions, variables, counts.
Experimented with AWS Subnets "best practice" permissions (and how NOT to implement them).
How to create Elasticache with Terraform.
The use of BridgeCrew Checkov to validate the security and best practices of your Terraform IaC.
The use of Redis as Cache.

While the "normal" execution time for 10 requests without cache is over 25 seconds, once we have Elasticache doing the caching the first request takes little over 5 seconds, and the others 0.003 seconds or less each!

Depending on your workload the improvement gain could be enormous! And it is easy to do and maintain, as Elasticache is a managed service!

Of course, I feel there are tons of ways to improve the exercise:

I would love to make the Terraform templates again. I think I can reorganize them and rename the resources to make it clearer and easier to maintain.
I think I could improve the Python code. Make it more "bulletproof".
About it, adding credentials to Redis is important. Ok, the security group and subnet prevents the access to other parties, but credentials sounds like a good idea.
I did the configuration of the web server manually. I was afraid (with reason) I wouldn't finish on time if I used cloud-init (started but didn't finish it). I was right. But I would like to finish that.
Or do it with Ansible.
And do the IaC part with Pulumi (I have just attended a webinar about it and liked it a lot).

I love the Cloud, and I love this age where so much tools and learning opportunities are available.

And we can always make our systems (and our knowledge about how to build them) better!

You can find the code and actual run results HERE. Any questions are welcome.

PS. A big thanks to David Thomas for setting up this great challenge!

DEV Community: David Sol