While working on delivering some features for an application in my daily work me and my team were facing a challenge when trying to automate the deployment of an AWS Lambda function through Gitlab CI.

By definition, the AWS Lambda functions should be a simple and small application serving one purpose and one purpose only.

This was also the case for us but the challenge was that our Lambda function had also a database that we had agreed upon during our planning. We had to store different information, and it was a lot. We couldn’t use configuration files since that would have increased the size of the application.

As some of you might know, AWS Lambda functions have some restrictions when it comes to the size of the codebase. If the extracted size of the zipped codebase is more than 128Mb the deployment will fail. This is obviously configurable but we wanted to keep the default configuration when it came to size.

It´s worth investing a little time to understand continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), mainly in the development software world in which exists are builds and controls version repositories.

CI — Continuos Integration

CI is a process that allows us to make changes quickly and easily without being painful.
Newman, Sam. Building Microservices . O’Reilly Media. Kindle Edition.

The main goal of CI is to keep the team in sync with the existing code from the repository. Basically, a good CI detects that the code has been committed, and runs some verifications such as if the code is compiling and if the tests are passed.

This process brings us many benefits, such as fast feedback about the application. This process allows us in each modification to have faster feedback about the last changes made, if any flow was broken, for example, we can do this over and over again, gaining more confidence when we need to update a feature, o refactor any piece of the code.

Using Python with boto3 to clean up your EC2 instances!

For this project I built a “set” of Python scripts that allow a user to create an number of EC2 instances with tags, then delete all instances with a certain tag (and excluding my Cloud9 instance). It’s a great little “end of the day” script to clean up extra instances and keep costs down.

As we all know by now, applications evolve a lot during their lifetime and so does the team that works on those applications. There are always people that leave a team to transition to another team or leave the company as there are also new joiners to a team.

It’s a continuous struggle to keep up with the same approach, paradigms, or coding styles in any programming language and application with so many changes in the team or application itself.

Thankfully we have the so-called, coding standard tools, at our disposal as developers to help us mitigate these issues and make sure that everyone is on the same page and adheres to the defined rules when writing new code to extend the application and reading old code when something has to be changed.

Today we will learn how to install Hashi Corp Vault in local Kubernetes cluster and how to manage secrets in Vault and also how to inject these secrets via side car to .Net Core container.

In this section, we will discuss Portainer which manages containers.

This would be a short story of a case, that happened to me. One of many development teams had reported synchronization failures in ArgoCD, after checking it we discovered that ArgoCD’s repo-server Pod was restarting a few times. Reason? OOMKilled, pretty popular case.

In this blog, we will discuss about one of the data structure i.e. Graphs