Head for the Cloud

Keeping the Cloud simple!

Handling partial batch failures with the SQS Lambda Poller

2023-10-02 7 min read AWS Walkthroughs

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:

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

2023-10-02 9 min read AWS Analysis

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.

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

2023-05-11 8 min read AWS Walkthroughs

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.

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Deploying a Hugo Blog with Amazon CodeCatalyst

2023-03-09 12 min read AWS Walkthroughs

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.

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Hosting a Hugo static website in AWS

2023-03-07 8 min read AWS Walkthroughs

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:

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