Posts
Coordinating distributed systems with the Saga Pattern on AWS
24 February, 2025
This post dives into the Saga pattern, a crucial design pattern for data consistency in microservices. I compare choreography (EventBridge) and orchestration (Step Functions) approaches, detailing their pros, cons, and suitable use cases for each on AWS.
Understanding Envelope Encryption with AWS KMS
28 January, 2025
Learn how to use AWS KMS for secure data encryption, including how to generate and manage cryptographic keys, implement envelope encryption, and choose between KMS and Secrets Manager for your specific security needs.
Rate Limiting Multi-Tenant Environments with the Token Bucket Algorithm on AWS
12 January, 2025
In a multi-tenant SaaS environment, it is often necessary to rate limit certain actions to prevent any single tenant from overwhelming shared resources. In this post I discuss how the token bucket algorithm works and present architectures for implementing it using AWS services.
Streamlining AI Experimentation with Open WebUI, LiteLLM, and Amazon Bedrock
23 July, 2024
Unlock the power of AI experimentation with a streamlined setup. Learn how to combine Open WebUI, LiteLLM, and Amazon Bedrock for seamless access to cutting-edge language models, including Claude 3. Discover a flexible, cost-effective solution for both local and cloud-based AI development.
Getting to the meat and potatoes of serverless recipe parsing with Amazon Bedrock
14 May, 2024
If you're like me you've probably visited a few recipe websites in your time and had the unfortunate experience of having to scroll through the author's life story before getting to the actual recipe. I recently stumbled across an interesting website which is able to take a URL and extract just the recipe without all the surrounding fluff. This got me thinking... could I build something similar on AWS with serverless technologies and generative AI?
Product thinking and platform engineering
2 May, 2024
Explore the importance of platform engineering teams adopting a product mindset to effectively serve their internal customers – the development teams they support. Understand user needs, deliver value incrementally, and foster a culture of continuous improvement to build self-service capabilities that empower developers and drive innovation across the organization.
Dark launches with AWS AppConfig
2 August, 2023
A dark launch, also known as a "canary launch" or "silent launch," is a deployment strategy used in software development and web services to introduce new features or updates to a product without making them immediately visible to all users. Instead of releasing the changes to the entire user base, the new code is released in a controlled environment where only a subset of users or specific internal teams can access and test it.
Cost optimisation with AWS App Runner
22 June, 2023
A neat feature of AWS App Runner is that a service can be paused. When paused, a service is no longer available to handle requests and is effectively offline. When a service is paused you no longer accrue any charges. This is great for development environments where you can tolerate not having a service running 24/7. A good use-case is to pause services in development environments outside of business hours, such as overnight and on weekends, as services often receive no traffic during such times.
Exploring Multi-Tenant SaaS Architecture on AWS
14 December, 2022
AWS offers a wide range of services and tools that are specifically designed for building and running a multi-tenant software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. This includes services for compute, storage, database, analytics, security, and more, which can help speed up development and reduce the time and effort required to build and manage a SaaS application.
Planning account migrations between AWS organisations
8 September, 2022
As more companies move to the cloud with AWS, many are finding success in adopting multi-account architecture to house their various workloads. AWS Organisations is a feature of AWS which facilitates the grouping of accounts into various organisation units (OU), each with their own security boundaries. It also offers consolidating billing for all child accounts.
Cloud Lego with the AWS CDK
27 September, 2021
While the humble lego brick is innocuous on its own, when combined together magic happens. It's this bringing together of smaller parts to build something complex which is not unlike building cloud infrastructure with the AWS Cloud Development Kit... and just as much fun!
From distributed monolith to microservices on AWS
17 June, 2021
Recently I've undertaken a major refactoring of a project which involved breaking up an application into microservices on AWS
3 tips on becoming a better software engineer
11 June, 2020
Success in software engineering means different things to different people. With technologies and methodologies changing at such rapid pace it becomes almost a given that to succeed you need to be constantly improving.
Command-line image editing with ImageMagick
12 January, 2020
ImageMagick, created in 1987 by John Cristy, is a powerful suite of tools for manipulating images entirely via the command-line
Photo mosaics with Rust
10 August, 2019
When I was a kid I remember seeing a poster of Yoda from Star Wars which was made up from various screenshots from the movie. I remember being facinated how several tiny images could be arranged to create a larger image and that how the colour of each small image contributed to the larger image.
Creating a remote BitTorrent box with Terraform, Transmission and Docker on AWS
10 July, 2019
My head has very much been in the DevOps space lately as I've been more and more hands on with AWS. I got thinking about an idea I had some time ago... What would be involved in running an ephemeral BitTorrent client on AWS with downloads automatically saved to S3?
Automatically uploading new files to S3 with Golang
16 June, 2019
go-watch-s3 is a Go program which recursively watches a directory for new files and automatically uploads them to S3.
