AWS on Head for the Cloud

Building a CloudFront log parser for Hugo with Kiro CLI.

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When I started creating content for the AWS Community Builder program, like many people I started with WordPress. However, it was too complex, had a lot of functionality I didn’t need, and more importantly would have needed a server running somewhere to host it.

All of that led me to looking at static web site generators fairly quickly - a great advantage of this is that you can host them in GitHub or something similar; or given I’m an AWS Community Builder, build it on AWS. And that’s what I described in my article Hosting a Static Website on AWS; just S3, CloudFront and not a server to be seen. I could even tie in a really simple pipeline that would regenerate the site as I commited my changes to a git repo (more info here).

But how do you know that this approach works - I could access the site and see the pages, but how could I see what others were doing and that it worked for them? I did setup Google Analytics, thanks to a Hugo integration, but it felt over the top, and it’s been niggling away for well over a year, that I wanted a different, more aligned solution.

Amazon’s new European Sovereign Cloud.

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Organisations outside the US considering the use of Cloud services have been faced with a hard choice. All the major providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google, are based in the US and fall under US legal jurisdiction.

Organisations in the EU or EU-adjacent locations (especially the UK) must consider GDPR and other data regulations. Typically, these regulations state that an organisation in one of these locations should limit the use of outside third parties unless those parties can guarantee parity with EU requirements. For simplicity, I’ll refer to EU organisations for the rest of this article.

Is your monitoring testing strategy chaos?

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Nowadays, many Cloud implementations will make use of serverless architectures, such as AWS Lambdas and API Gateways to implement micro-services, or other similar functionality to deliver business logic without the need to manage servers.

This is now a mature pattern, and we have a wealth of tools and approaches to help us ensure that our serverless code is performing as expected. We can develop and test locally, and use pipelines to deploy, all ensuring the risk of deploying non-functioning code is minimised.

Chaos in the Cloud

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first in a series of articles looking at chaos engineering in general, and in particular how we can use Amazon’s Fault Injection Service to test the resilience of our AWS systems.

When I first started developing, we wrote huge, monolithic applications either running locally on our desktops, or in our datacenters. We’d write applications that had tens or even hundreds of thousands of lines of code. However, the applications we wrote usually consisted of a single component, maybe two if we used a database, handling all of the logic and functionality within a single application. Whilst this meant that we usually had complex, hard to navigate, code bases, it did mean that in terms of architecture, our applications were relatively simple.

Fault Injection Service Workshop

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

An update to our DevOps Playground workshop on Amazon’s Fault Injection Service, looking at how we can now test Lambdas.

DevOps Playground

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Another DevOps Playground, this time looking at Amazon’s Fault Injection Service

Presentation: SREDays London

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A shared presentation with Ross Walker, looking at an issue we encountered building an event driven system.

AWS Community Day Belfast

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

My presentation at the AWS Community Day in Belfast - Mystery of the Disappearing S3 Keys

DevOps Playground

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A DevOps Playground looking at how we can host a serverless blogging platform using AWS services, and Hugo - a static site generator.

Can Amazon's FREE Code Assistant write good Terraform?

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Validating Python code with a CodeCatalyst pipeline

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

CodeCatalyst is a unified development environment created by AWS.

It has many features such as blueprints to assist in writing code, integrated Git repositories, dev environments which can be pre-defined and now AI integration. However, for myself, one of the most useful things is being able to define and use pipelines stored in the code repository.

Pipelines are one of the most commonly used tools that many of us working with code and Cloud use, allowing us to automate tasks to be carried out when we make changes to our code, whether that’s checking that our code works, building artefacts and packages, and deploying to our environments.

Generating cloudwatch alarms using 'metric math' via CloudFormation and Terraform.

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I spend a lot of time working as a consultant with GlobalLogic UK&I with different client teams to deploy AWS infrastructure, and not surprisingly, I see differing levels of maturity and experience within these teams.

While we work with teams with a lot of knowledge, often they concentrate on deploying the applications and infrastructure, but they won’t think about how they can understand how well an application is working. This is an important aspect of working within the Cloud, usually termed monitoring or observability.

Use VSCode to write Terraform? AWS AI can now help you write your code!

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As I sit here writing this article, AWS’s annual re:Invent is just starting in Las Vegas. This huge event pulls together cloud enthusiasts from around the world to learn about the largest cloud providers offerings.

Not surprisingly, AWS use this time to announce new and improved services, and we’ll see hundreds of articles over the next week - in fact, there are so many announcements, they have to start drip-feeding them out in advance of the main event.

Handling partial batch failures with the SQS Lambda Poller

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In my previous post, I described how I’d been asked to help a developer who was having some issues. His team was logging all S3 accesses to a central log bucket and then using Athena to analyse the data. They needed to partition this data to allow Athena to process the data more efficiently. However, a small number of the entries they were trying to process seemed to be missing when they used the architecture below:

Now You See Me, Now You Don't - the Mystery of the Vanishing S3 Objects

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

One of the great things about my role as a consultant at GlobalLogic is that sometimes I’ll be asked to help out on what at first glance can be a simple problem, but as I investigate, I get a chance to uncover some unusual or forgotten features.

Recently, I was working on a project and was asked if I could help solve an issue that had been puzzling a developer. They had deployed a system where some objects uploaded to an S3 bucket seemed to disappear and then reappear; it was time to start digging.

Reviewing AWS SSM DHMC - too many acronyms or a useful tool?

Thu, 11 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

AWS Systems Manager (SSM) is an integral component for managing EC2 and other compute fleets, offering capabilities such as patch management, parameter store, and managing changes across a fleet of servers. It also offers a service called Session Manager allowing secure, audited access to EC2 instances without needing to expose the instances on the Internet.

In February 2023, AWS announced a new solution called Default Host Management Configuration or DHMC, to simply the setup of the core SSM capabilities by providing a method of ensuring that SSM was available for all instances in an account.

Using AWS EventBridge to avoid getting Lost in Translation

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Don’t rewrite your code, rewrite your data with EventBridge Input Transformation!

Deploying a Hugo Blog with Amazon CodeCatalyst

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

CI/CD pipelines are an integral part of any developer’s toolset these days. They monitor code and when changes occur, automatically carry out a pre-defined set of actions, typically creating a build environment, and maybe running some tests before deploying the code.

Several tools can host these pipelines, and an important part of the work I do with GlobalLogic UK&I is being able to advise clients on which solutions might be best suited to their needs, and how to implement them.

Hosting a Hugo static website in AWS

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a series about hosting a static website, and I’ll be talking about the infrastructure needed to host the website in AWS, and how to deploy via infrastructure as code (IaC). In this post, we’ll use Terraform to describe the infrastructure we want to deploy

Our infrastructure

I use Hugo to run this blog - it generates static HTML pages based on files written with Markdown which means that I don’t need to worry about running servers. To host this blog, I deploy several resources into an AWS account to host this blog, as shown below:

Creating and validating ACM certificates with Terraform

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a series about hosting a static website, specifically a Hugo-based blog hosted in AWS but this process is useful anytime we need to create a SSL certificate in Amazon Certificate Manager (ACM).

DevOps Playground CodeCatalyst workshop

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In January 2023, I presented at the DevOps Playground held in GlobalLogic’s Edinburgh Office, talking about CodeCatalyst.

Using AWS Rekognition to identify race participants

Sat, 23 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Besides being techy, I dabble in the occasional run at 5k & 10k distances. In many races, photographers capture you, usually in some very un-flattering pose. The problem is that there can be hundreds of photos to check through - sometimes thousands.