👋 I'm Rehan!

A practical guide to migrating from AWS CDK Pipelines to CDK Express Pipeline. Learn the reasons, benefits, and step-by-step process, with benchmarks and code comparisons.

Learn how to create and manage simple and fast deployment pipelines using the cdk-express-pipeline library, a powerful tool built on top of AWS CDK that enables CDK-native pipeline definitions.

With the Tailscale Lambda Extension and Proxy CDK Constructs, you can simplify secure networking without having to rely on Docker and serverfull infrastructure

Aurora DSQL is a serverless, distributed database with PostgreSQL compatibility. It's an OLTP database that can also handle OLAP workloads.

The Starter Project shows how to do configuration management, design for multiple environments and use GitHub Workflows for CI/CD

We explore the benefits of a Lambda Monolith for the API comparing it to single-purpose Lambda functions per API route.

We explore the available options of desired count and the correlation with respect to time on the circuit breaker that initiates cloudformation rollback

By being a bit creative, we can force local bundling of CDK assets. This eliminates the need to run build scripts before CDK commands.

We explore the available options of desired count and the correlation with respect to time on the circuit breaker that initiates CloudFormation rollback.

We compare AWS SSM and SSH port forwarding to a remote host which includes code snippets

How to generate a logo using OpenAI's DALL-E for less than 1$

In the first installment of the 'How does CloudGlance Series', we look at some code snippets on how to get IAM User, Role and SSO temporary credentials with STS.

Efficiently refresh your Single Page Application by piggybacking off your existing API calls using AWS Cloudfront reverse proxy and Response Header Policy

Make the OpenAPI Spec file the contract between back and frontend by publishing an API SDK as an NPM package. Create visibility with automation by using Slack notifications when the backend pipeline publishes a new SDK.

TypeScript does a great job at compile time type safety, but we still need to do runtime checks just like in JavaScript. We focus on AJV Standalone that outputs compiled JS functions to be used at runtime. Going from TS Types to JSON Schema to JS functions allows us to validate TS Types where the other packages all work with classes and reflection.

A Least Recently Used(LRU) cache stores items in-memory and evicts the oldest(less used) ones as soon as the allocated memory (or item count) has been reached. Storing data in-memory before reaching for an external cache increases speed and decrease the dependency on the external cache. It is also possible to fallback to in-memory caches like an LRU cache in periods that your external cache goes down without seeing a significant impact on performance.

Use the right architecture for the job, consider the non-technical requirements first when deciding to use microservices.

CDK stacks can be deployed in parallel by generating a cloud assembly output and then specifying the order explicitly.

Exploring intermittent “issues” with assets being non-deterministic; uploaded on every deploy, even if the source does not change.

In this post I will explore 4 different methods that can be used to pass configuration values to the AWS CDK. We will first look at using the context variables in the cdk.json file, then move those same variables out to YAML files. The third method will read the exact same config via SDK(API) call from AWS SSM Parameter Store. The fourth and my favourite is a combination of two and three in conjunction with using GULP.js as a build tool.

In this blog we will do a quick recap of CORS and reverse proxies. Then we will show how a reverse proxy can eliminate CORS, specifically in the context of a SPA hosted on CloudFront with an API Gateway backend. The sample code focuses on public, authenticated routes (Authorization header) and IAM signed request all being reverse proxied through CloudFront.

This article documents the thought process and steps involved in refactoring a distributed monolith to microservices. We are going to remove API GW, use Amazon Event Bridge and implement BASE consistency in the system to truly decouple our microservices.

I hardly ever find myself reaching for third party monitoring services these days. I rather use the AWS native observability, monitoring and alerting services.

We create a Lambda layer with AWS CDK for the NodeJS Lambda function to consume; this consists of the Oracle Instant Client Basic Lite v19.x libs + the libaio.so.1 file. Developers will need to manually install these as dev dependencies.

These presentation slides explore the benefits of managed VS self hosted databases, provide use cases and samples for: Amazon RDS, DynamoDB, AWS DocumentDB, ElasticCache, Neptune, Elastic Search, Timestream and QLDB

This blog will demonstrate the high throughput rate that DynamoDB can handle by writing 1 million records in 60 seconds with a single Lambda, that is approximately 17k writes per second. This is all done with less than 250 lines of code and less than 70 lines of CloudFormation.

In this article, we will be looking at three different methods of Autoscaling applications. We’ll also try to leverage AWS manged services as much as possible. We will look at Elastic Beanstalk, ECS Fargate and Lambda.

How to use the technical considerations we checked out in part one to effectively design serverless and Lambda systems.

With great power comes great responsibility. Serverless design requires knowledge of different services and how they interact with each other. Just like any other technology, there are some tricky waters to navigate, but they are far outweighed by the power of what serverless has to offer. To stop this dream from turning into a nightmare, here are a few things to keep in mind when designing with AWS Lambda.

In this post we will explore the implementation difficulties and how a data lake fits into the organization, topics that other articles might tend to oversee.

Whoops, your production server ran out of space. This is just a a quick guide on how to fix it without down time.

Using AWS IoT, DynamoDB, Lambda and Telegram Push Notifications to build a serverless Coffee Monitor notifying my coffee states, ex: Coffee is getting cold.

Using AWS IoT, DynamoDB, Lambda and Telegram Push Notifications to build a serverless Coffee Monitor notifying my coffee states, ex: Coffee is getting cold.

A tutorial on how to setup Xdebug, PHP Storm and AWS Elastic Beanstalk to debug PHP applications

This blog is completely serverless and in this post I will go through the steps, pros and cons to hosting and setting up a serverless blog yourself at a cost of $0 per month.

Keeping up to date with technology, frameworks and trends as a developer is difficult and fatiguing in this fast paced industry.

The work that you will be doing will echo your personality, believes, discipline, ideas and level of complexity long after it has been written. It is there for crucial to follow standards and practices that align with the company policy as the code you write is defining the company itself. This is a guide I wrote to ensure a consistent code base and principals.