Building an e-learning platform on AWS

Prelude In the past year, I worked on a project to build an e-learning platform (actually, it’s so much more!). I started using AWS Amplify, and I end up testing so many different services around it. I’ll cover the following topics: Choosing the right AWS services; Designing the application architecture; Developing the backend; Developing the frontend; Deploying the application; I hope this article will be helpful for anyone who is considering building an e-learning platform or something similar. Spoiler is: the platform is not ready yet, but I hope I will have the chance to conclude it by the end of this year 🙏 my time is super limited unfortunately :/ ...

April 17, 2023 · 6 min

?(DRY(KIS(afe)S)) => CF(ALB+TLS+SM);

Intro If you work with AWS, you might be involved in building infrastructure to enable some of your customers (both internal and external) to use a particular service, or just to try one of the hundreds open-source application available on Github. Furthermore, most of the ML/AI tools are shipped in docker containers and the philosophy -> if it runs on docker, it runs everywhere has been spread up to the highest level of management (nice, but… sometimes dangerous 😅 ed. ) And it’s pretty much true, buuuuut… ...

February 1, 2022 · 11 min

How to: create a fleet of container-based-go-lambda with one command

Introduction As you might know, at the re:Invent AWS recently announced the capabilities of running Lambda by getting the code directly from a docker image you provide, as illustrated here. Moreover, they also announced the Amazon ECR Public and Amazon ECR Public Gallery that you can reach at https://gallery.ecr.aws/. And this was pretty much my reaction: What you might need to know before begin First of all: keep calm, because there’s already a Github Repo to build an entire fleet of microservices - with their respective ECR-based repository - with only one command from the shell. Hopefully, you can get up and running by simply opening a shell, cloning my repo, change the AWS_PROFILE_NAME at the top of the Makefile to point to your profile, and run: ...

December 12, 2020 · 6 min

I hacked my blog to let AWS Polly create podcast over it

Prelude Hi guys, after a series of back-to-the-future-I-didn’t-have-time-to-write-new-things… I’m back. What happened in the last months… ok, covid19 put the whole world in trouble, I bought an apartment, I opened a company and I resign my contract. Really. Nothing. Special. But TODAY - I wanna talk about a project I have since a while, and I worked on a boring Sunday afternoon: I hacked my blog to let Polly read it for you! 😎 😎 😎 ...

November 26, 2020 · 13 min

My team run VSC in the browser and they are just fine - Part II

Introduction This is a repost of an old article :) In the first part of this series - I run VSC in the browser and I was just fine - I wrote many stupid things around the possibility of having a VSC server instance running inside AWS over a simple, immutable, ec2 instance. The template {that can be easily deployed by a Lambda function [that can be easily deployed behind a route53 record (that can be easily placed as the endpoint of a custom Slack action)]} let you start your IDE and code from wherever you would like to. In this second part, I wanna talk about how to extend the same idea to serve a Team of developers. Yes, like the one below. ...

October 22, 2020 · 15 min

I run VSC in the browser and I am just fine - Part I

Introduction This is a repost of an old article - that actually also inspired my talk of the last year at FullStackConf2019 :) Serverless and managed things are the best choices if you don’t want to deal with infrastructure (3 2 1: fight) buuuuut…even immutable things are not so bad for this purpose - at least, if they are immutable for real 🤣 Today I wanna talk about a useful way to run an instance(s) of VSC server in AWS and code from everywhere (yes, even your iPad): let’s start! ...

September 21, 2020 · 10 min

?(DRY(KIS(afe)S)) => CF(ALB+TLS+SM);

Intro If you work with AWS, you might be involved in building infrastructure to enable some of your customers (both internal and external) to use a particular service, or just to try one of the hundreds open-source application available on Github. Furthermore, most of the ML/AI tools are shipped in docker containers and the philosophy -> if it runs on docker, it runs everywhere has been spread up to the highest level of management (nice, but… sometimes dangerous 😅 ed. ) And it’s pretty much true, buuuuut… ...

February 1, 2020 · 11 min

From Jekyll to Hugo, from Travis to Gitlab: a time for changes

Intro In the last 50 days I had to work a lot for many… many different reasons. The main ones: I was accepted as a Speaker at FullStackConf19 in Turin, talking about coding in mobility. You can find the slide of my speech here and the material I prepared the talk in this Github repo. By the way, I was truly inspired by some of the talks during the conference, and I started brainstorming around the next post; I moved back to Italy and trust me -> it was a pretty complex goal to achieve, with particular regards to my car; I joined Enerbrain and I’m really having fun with theme building smart-energy solution as a Devops Engineer; I joined a softball team - yes, it’s mixed, but it’s officially played also by men hahe. Let me say that it’s not the usual kind of team, it’s more a sort of “group of old friends playing drinking and…” overall having fun together; What else… oh yes, I migrated my blog to Hugo and I also migrated my release pipeline to Gitlab. ...

September 20, 2019 · 6 min

My team run VSC in the browser and they are just fine - Part II

Introduction In the first part of this series - I run VSC in the browser and I was just fine - I wrote many stupid things around the possibility of having a VSC server instance running inside AWS over a simple, immutable, ec2 instance. The template {that can be easily deployed by a Lambda function [that can be easily deployed behind a route53 record (that can be easily placed as the endpoint of a custom Slack action)]} let you start your IDE and code from wherever you would like to. In this second part, I wanna talk about how to extend the same idea to serve a Team of developers. Yes, like the one below. ...

July 3, 2019 · 15 min

I run VSC in the browser and I am just fine - Part I

Introduction Serverless and managed things are the best choices if you don’t want to deal with infrastructure (3 2 1: fight) buuuuut…even immutable things are not so bad for this purpose - at least, if they are immutable for real 🤣 Today I wanna talk about a useful way to run an instance(s) of VSC server in AWS and code from everywhere (yes, even your iPad): let’s start! This time I will go native: so no CDK, I’m sorry, but pure Cloudformation instead. If you are not interested in all the astonishing things I have to say, you can find the template here. ...

June 25, 2019 · 10 min