On my current project, we are using AWS Amplify to manage cloud infrastructure. One of the reasons we’re using Amplify is to send targeted emails to our users through AWS’s analytics tool, Pinpoint. Setting up an email channel through Amplify turned out to require extra work since, at the time of writing this blog post, the Amplify SDK doesn’t support the creation of email endpoints. In this post, I’m going to walk through how to create email endpoints on a project utilizing Amplify. Read more on Creating Amplify Email Campaigns in JavaScript…
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Creating Custom CloudWatch Alarms for AWS Lambdas
AWS allows you to setup CloudWatch alarms on many performance-related metrics. Doing this for metrics like CPU load or storage use is trivial. However, setting up custom alarms based on events or errors in a log isn’t as straightforward. By the end of this post, you should know how to set up alarms based on errors and events within a Lambda on AWS. Read more on Creating Custom CloudWatch Alarms for AWS Lambdas…
What’s the AWS IoT Suite Like? – A Dozen Lego Kits Mixed Together
Recently, I’ve been hearing more and more chatter about Amazon’s AWS IoT tool suite, so I decided to do a bit of research to see what they have to offer. As with most Amazon development tools, there is a ton of documentation on these tools. But of course, the useful information is spread out across countless web pages and carefully hidden amongst a sea of marketing mumbo-jumbo. Nevertheless, I was eventually able to glean some useful information. Read more on What’s the AWS IoT Suite Like? – A Dozen Lego Kits Mixed Together…
Setting Up Amazon’s Dash Replenishment Services and Login with Amazon on Android
On my current project, we’re integrating Amazon’s Dash Replenishment Services (DRS) into an Android app. DRS allows “smart” devices to automatically reorder supplies from Amazon if users of the device (and accompanying apps) opt in. For example, a washing machine might order more detergent, or an electronic device might order more batteries. The order is triggered once that refillable item gets down to a certain point.
Read more on Setting Up Amazon’s Dash Replenishment Services and Login with Amazon on Android…
Amazon Lambda Auto-Deployment For Your Alexa Skill Using AWS CLI
My latest project includes integration with Amazon’s Alexa voice service. My coworker Jordan already wrote an excellent post on how to get started writing your own Alexa Custom Skill. Amazon’s API makes it relatively easy to develop a new Skill, and with a number of languages to choose from (Python, Node.js, Java, C#, etc), developers can create a simple Skill in a weekend.
Read more on Amazon Lambda Auto-Deployment For Your Alexa Skill Using AWS CLI…
Ansible Communication with AWS EC2 Instances on a VPC
I’ve recently started using Ansible to manage Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) hosts on Amazon Web Services (AWS). While it is possible to have public IP addresses for EC2 instances on an AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), I opted to place the EC2 instances on a private VPC subnet which does not allow direct access from the Internet. This makes communicating with the EC2 instances a little more complicated.
While I could create a VPN connection to the VPC, this is rather cumbersome without a compatible hardware router. Instead, I opted to create a bastion host which allows me to connect to the VPC, and communicate securely with EC2 instances over SSH. Read more on Ansible Communication with AWS EC2 Instances on a VPC…
Managing AWS Route 53 Hosted Zones with AWS Lambda
On AWS, I use a Route 53 private hosted zone for Amazon VPC to allow me to conveniently address EC2 instances and other resources. While all EC2 instances are automatically assigned a private DNS entry, it is usually something fairly unintelligable such as “ip-172-31-51-229.us-west-2.compute.internal.” An entry like “website-production.atomic.aws” is much more helpful, especially when trying to configure communication between various EC2 instances that comprise a larger system.
I constructed an AWS Lambda function to automatically update the DNS records in my Route 53 private hosted zone whenever new instances are created. This ensures that the private hosted zone is up-to-date and can be relied upon for communication between EC2 instances. Read more on Managing AWS Route 53 Hosted Zones with AWS Lambda…
Managing AWS CloudFront Security Group with AWS Lambda
One of our security groups on Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows access to an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) from one of our Amazon CloudFront distributions. Traffic from CloudFront can originate from a number of a different source IP addresess that Amazon publishes. However, there is no pre-built security group to allow inbound traffic from CloudFront.
Read more on Managing AWS CloudFront Security Group with AWS Lambda…