aws Tag

On a recent project we were asked by a client if it would be possible to host a React app using serverless technologies, but also ensure that traffic never left their VPC and corporate network.

In this post I'm going to talk about how we achieved this outcome, and how it proved to be more of a challenge than we first thought it would be.

This is the story of an investigation that I was recently involved in at a client. It took over a week to resolve, involved networking acronyms that seemed to increase in length each day (MTU...ICMP...PMTUD?!), and wound up with us learning all about the rather scary-sounding phenomenon of black-hole connections.

AppSync integrates seamlessly with a DynamoDB database. And as demonstrated in my previous article, AWS Amplify CLI can create the DynamoDB tables and generate the API CloudFormation infrastructure from an annotated GraphQL schema. However, using a relational data source with AppSync is more complex as...

I had the luck (and I say this considering the number of talented engineers within Shine) of attending AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas recently. For those who don't know, re:Invent is an annual conference held by AWS. It's a chance for customers, vendors and AWS staff...

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is an enterprise web content management system that, like many other enterprise applications, is a complex piece of software to set up and configure. We can't eliminate this complexity completely, but we can reduce it for many use-cases. AEM OpenCloud is an open source project being led by Shine Solutions that automates the setup of a complete ready-to-use AEM environment in the cloud within 15 minutes. However, testing and verifying that an AEM installation is working correctly is laborious and time-consuming. Done manually, testing can certainly take longer than the 15 minutes required to actually build the environment in the first place. Fortunately, automated testing was identified early on in the project as an important part of OpenCloud's modular design, as is made clear by this diagram created by Cliff Subagio, one of the project founders: AEM OpenCloud suite However, it's one thing to say that testing is important, it's another thing to actually do it. In this post I'll talk about why and how we used InSpec to implement automated testing in OpenCloud.
Anyone who has delved into CloudFormation knows its power for describing and managing your cloud infrastructure within AWS. Likewise, if you've spent any time writing CloudFormation templates of any significance you'll know that you'll spend a lot of time duplicating sections of templates. We always aim to reduce repetition in code so this can be a bit grating. In this post, I hope to explore a few technologies that can help with this, primarily a tool called Sceptre from Cloudreach.
A couple of weeks ago was a significant milestone in my 14-year IT career: I actually sat a certification exam. In this case, it was the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate Exam. Despite some trepidation during my preparation for the exam, on the day I found it quite straightforward and came out with a pass mark. In this post I'm going to share some of my thoughts and notes in the hope that it will help others preparing to sit this exam.
Shine’s TEL group was established in 2011 with the aim of publicising the great technical work that Shine does, and to raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader in the community through blogs, local meet up talks, and conference presentations. Every now and then (it started off as being monthly, but that was too much work), we curate all the noteworthy things that Shiners have been up to, and publish a newsletter. Read on for this month's edition.
Shine’s TEL group was established in 2011 with the aim of publicising the great technical work that Shine does, and to raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader in the community through blogs, local meet up talks, and conference presentations. Every now and then (it started off as being monthly, but that was too much work), we curate all the noteworthy things that Shiners have been up to, and publish a newsletter. Read on for this month's edition.