TL;DR: Adding IAM Auth requires increasing the RDS server at least 4x the cost for a server with password auth, and likely much more for production. This makes it non-viable for our immediate use-case with a relatively low-stress app. Goal: no database passwords in code/configs We’re running a Wagtail CMS site (built on Django) and…
This is a demo of how you can use the “callback” pattern to restart a Step Functions state machine from within a Lambda function. It took me a while to dig through the AWS docs, sample code, and examples to unlock the mysteries, so I hope it saves you some time. It is inspired by…
This summer we were awarded a small research grant from NASA’s Technology Data and Innovation Division to investigate extracting structured information from scans of engineering documents, and we recently demoed our proof-of-concept app for the project to NASA’s Office of the CIO. Our previous work for the NASA Extra Vehicular Activities (EVA) Office used serverless…
This is a followup to a previous post on how we use Lambdas to generate presigned URLs so that a user’s browser can directly upload to S3. We now want to have our S3 bucket enforce server-side encryption for all uploaded files. Getting all the pieces to work together was a bit hairy: bucket policies,…
We’ve been diggin’ the serverless ecosystem around AWS Lambda, API Gateway and the rest, especially using the Serverless Framework which makes it easy to define interesting applications. We frequently have a need to upload files from a user’s desktop to AWS S3 storage, and prefer to have the browser upload directly, rather than passing the…
Motivation We’ve been using AWS load balancers with autoscaling instances for years now and it’s great at handling load, but it’s quite a bit of infrastructure to manage (even with Troposphere + CloudFormation). We also have to manage all the data flow, queue processing and such ourselves: multiple SQS queues, EC2 polling, recording state in databases… More…
V! Message initial trade inquiry form for Trade To Travel The Client’s Need: Communication One of our clients, Trade To Travel, had an urgent need to allow their members to communicate directly with each other: their staff were overloaded having to act as intermediaries, shuttling queries and clarifications between guests and hosts who were trying…
We’ve been coming up to speed with Docker, planning to use it for deployments on AWS and GCE. I’ve tried it before and gotten a bit frustrated with the disconnect between my daily driver — a MacBook laptop — and the docker server; the cool kids running Linux laptops have no such issues. While boot2docker…
From Python to Go We dove into Python years ago and now are wading into the Go language. Our team’s been using Python for a hells age, building applications in Plone, Django, Flask and Pyramid. It’s been very good to us and the communities are full of bright folks who are willing to share what…
What are we working on? Our team is working on a contract to migrate a number of public and internal NASA web sites and application to the public cloud, Amazon Web Services in this case. Some of these we’re migrating almost verbatim, some we’re migrating from one application platform to another, and a few we’re…