A serverless OCR with Polly and Rekognition unveils the power of stack inheritance in CDK

Introduction In the last two weeks, I released a few CDK stacks: I made some experiments around API Gateway and service integration that came out in two serverless forms, the Contact Form and the Upload Form, read to be deployed in your static web page 😎. Actually, with CDK you can do so much more and so much more easily. The last stack I released - a producer-consumer chain presented here - it was a way I used to introduce how you can leverage Typescript inheritance to recycle an old stack and build on top of it. In this last step of this cycle, I will extend this concept once again to build - DRUMROLL - an OCR Serverless solution to be integrated into your application. The use cases are multiple: imagine you want to create podcasts of course lessons on top of your notes, to be able to listen to them during your trip to office or university or whenever you want. Imagine an application to help blind people - like the Be My Eyes app - to read documents without the help of no ones but AWS Services. Well, the use cases are endless so… let’s go! ...

June 13, 2019 Â· 8 min

SQS Extended: a serverless producer/consumer chain

Introduction A few days ago I wrote about a simple stack that leverage API Gateway and Lambda-proxy integration to create a safe upload endpoint to let unknown users push inside a bucket of your choice. The stack I will present today is can be used to build a producer-consumer chain, by implementing the SQS Extended pattern you can find in AWS exams. For the most curious, here you can find the core code. ...

June 4, 2019 Â· 5 min

Build an upload form with 45 lines of Typescript

Introduction The AWS CDK is becoming day by day pretty easy to use. I use Typescript, and today I will talk about a common use case: a simple Upload Endpoint for your API Gateway than like a LEGO can be built with a few instructions and of course…without the need of any server. For the most curious, here you can find the core code. Scenario You want to provide an endpoint to upload object: where? S3, of course. How? With a pre-signed a URL! What is it? A pre-signed URL it’s a URL that gives someone access to the object identified in the URL, provided that the creator of the pre-signed URL has the permissions to access that object. That is, if you receive a pre-signed URL to upload an object, you can upload the object only if the creator of the pre-signed URL has the necessary permissions to upload that object. ...

May 29, 2019 Â· 6 min

How to deploy a serverless contact form with API Gateway, DynamoDB and SNS

Introduction Hi everybody, thanks for the claps, it was a great month - rain rain rain again - now I’m back. The only GOOD THING of this terrible May is that AWS CDK came to simplify our life and I started using it (just a little) bit - still, enough to say, sincerely: it’s awesome. I used the Typescript version, everything is broken 2 release out of 3 but the time you save exploring the interfaces instead of looking for Cloudformation documentation online worths the time spending in troubleshooting the ongoing changes. Today I’m here to write about a common use case, a simple stack, and that’s all I have to say. ...

May 23, 2019 Â· 6 min

From Cloudformation to CDK: the good, the bad and the evil

Prelude As you know might be aware of, AWS has quite recently delivered - but it’s still in beta - the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK). Indeed, you should also know that I more recently migrated my blog to AWS as part of my migration strategy to the clouds - where my head already sits since 1991. Since I was using a Cloudformation stack though together with one of my colleagues, and since I did some manual changes to it - breaking the rules, I know - I decided it was a good moment to give a chance to CDK. I was waiting for Golang implementation to come up, but in the end, Typescript is fair enough: it not only add Types, but the interfaces will let you be so much more effective in reading the docs and find out what is missing / what is wrong in your template. Sorry, in your code 😃. ...

March 25, 2019 Â· 14 min

A serverless blog using CodePipeline, s3 and CloudFront

Goodbye old blog 😭😭 I disapperead for a while because as you should notice, first of all - I have a new domain. HAHA. It’s not the first one I own, but to be honest it’s the first time I use a domain for myself. So as I was saying yes, this post is about a migration. Morever, since this is the very first cross platform cross domain blog post - I want to share with you what I learnt and what is still missing, how I did what I did but mainly how someelse did what I didn’t. ...

February 24, 2019 Â· 8 min

DRY, immutable, opinionated, agnostic

Prelude As far as I know there are many ways to create today in IT. What is becoming more difficult is doing it properly and taking the right decisions but (spoiler)… But… I’m starting feeling that my repository is on the right direction to be self.deployable and agnostic. Above the infrastructure, which is provisioned by terragrunt and terraform, one or more actor(s) is placed (i.e. Jenkins, but whoever it is), the actors will be redeployed, the pipelines restored and they will start redeploy applications (even pieces of infrastructure with dependencies) on their behalf to the various parts of the infrastructure. ...

October 21, 2018 Â· 9 min

HAL: AWS s3-sns based single-slack-command bot to handle your VPC

Introduction I recently build a Slack command to help me handle actions on my VPC. The only thing you need is an AWS account - Free Tier it’s ok. I recently wrote about how to maximize resources, with particular focus on the number of hours you have in Free Tier - using specific CloudWatch Rules. In this article, I want to describe how I extended my architecture to invoke actions - potentially, all the action provided by Amazon Web Services official SDK(s) - with a single Slack command. I decided to call this slack command HAL because I think it’s a really dangerous command 😜 ...

March 24, 2018 Â· 10 min

JarvisButton: how to invoke multiple AWS Lambda with one AWS IoT Button (not Enterprise ed.)

Introduction If you have an AWS account in Free Tier, bla bla bla ok stop: I am a AWS Lambda maniac. I only wrote about them (here, here). In this article, I want to talk about my new purchase that is - of course - related to AWS Lambda: the AWS IoT Button. It first made its appearance on the IoT scene in October of 2015 at AWS re:Invent with the introduction of the AWS IoT service. That year all re:Invent attendees received the AWS IoT Button providing them the opportunity to get hands-on with AWS IoT. So cute. Since that time, AWS IoT button has been made broadly available to anyone interested in the clickable IoT device. Here it is! 😎😎😎 ...

March 18, 2018 Â· 7 min

AWS Free Tier, Docker and Jenkins: smart resources handling with CloudWatch Events and Slack

Introduction If you have an AWS account in Free Tier, you have (updated: March, 13th 2018) 750 hours/month to run EC2 (small ones) in your VPC. You also have a lot of other resources, such as AWS Lambda functions (I wrote about them here and here) and CloudWatch Events. In this article, I talk about smart resources handling and some trick - actually, not so smart XD - I setup to take the best from the services. Attention!!! Picture Spoiler ...

March 11, 2018 Â· 10 min