Category: General Articles

Unveiling the Cloud: A Recap of AWS Community Day Mumbai 2024

On April 6th, the Mumbai cloud community converged at The Lalit for AWS Community Day 2024. This electrifying one-day event, organized by the AWS User Group Mumbai, brought together enthusiasts from all walks of the cloud journey – from budding developers to seasoned architects.

A Day of Learning and Sharing

The atmosphere crackled with a shared passion for cloud technology. The agenda boasted a variety of sessions catering to diverse interests. Whether you were keen on optimizing multi-region architectures or building personalized GenAI applications, there was a talk designed to expand your knowledge base.

Workshops: Deep Dives into Specific Topics

For those seeking a more hands-on experience, workshops offered an invaluable opportunity to delve deeper into specific topics. Attendees with workshop passes could choose from two exciting options:

  • Lower latency of your multi-region architecture with Kubernetes, Couchbase, and Qovery on AWS: This workshop equipped participants with the know-how to optimize their multi-region deployments for minimal latency.
  • Create a personalised GenAI application with Snowflake, Streamlit and AWS Bedrock to cross-sell products: This session focused on building engaging GenAI applications that leverage the power of Snowflake, Streamlit, and AWS Bedrock to personalize the customer experience.

A Community of Builders

Beyond the technical learning, the true spirit of the event resided in the sense of community. The venue buzzed with conversations as attendees exchanged ideas, shared experiences, and built connections. This collaborative atmosphere fostered a valuable space for peer-to-peer learning and professional growth.

A Noteworthy Collaboration

The event was further enriched by the collaboration with Snowflake. Their insightful workshop on building personalized GenAI applications provided a unique perspective on leveraging cloud technologies for enhanced customer experiences.

A Day Well Spent

AWS Community Day Mumbai 2024 proved to be a resounding success. It offered a platform for attendees to gain valuable knowledge, explore the latest cloud innovations, and connect with a vibrant community. If you’re based in Mumbai and have a passion for cloud computing, attending the next AWS Community Day is a surefire way to elevate your skills and stay ahead of the curve.

Architecting SaaS Applications on AWS

During my career in different organizations, though I had the opportunity to architect multiple SaaS applications and most of them on AWS, I was not aware that I was already following most of the best practices. Only recently when I had a chance to view the Architecting Next Generation SaaS Applications on AWS by Tod Golding in AWS re:Invent 2016, I came to know the reality.

From the SaaS models which Tod had referred to, I had gone through the Silo, Bridge and Pool over several projects and had been bitten by most of the cons when using Silo I had experienced the maximum complication on the Agile deployment. Since I learned everything from my own experiences at that time, automated deployments or what is known as Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment using standard tools was not known to me. And mostly I used to re-invent the wheel, using shell, Perl or PHP scripts. Skewed releases across tenant installations were mostly the nightmares.

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SQL – Always use aggregate functions if you can

One would wonder what the title means. Well it was a thunder bolt for me when I was trying to optimize some headless scripts. Well we at Saturn do heavily use headless scripts written in php. Some use mysql some use xml and some other use memcache, in fact pretty much all would use memcache. But that is not the situation now.

In an attempt to multi thread a cron job part of optimizations done an year back, instead of sequential processing, we had switched it to single row processing. Which required to have a method getNextRow which was passed a parameter, the primary key of the table. The cron starts with a value 0 (zero) and after each is processed, the value is supplied as the last processed one. The getNextRow had


select ID from [table] WHERE ID > [LAST_ID] ORDER BY ID ASC LIMIT 1;

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url shortening script using MariaFramework

Just as a proof of concept, we had tried to port or even rework the whole of asianetindia.com using MariaFramework. The task of migrating the wordpress admin side, being herculian, this was delayed in pushing to production and it is still in poc stage. Now to nail down the fact that MariaFramework is production ready, we need to show off some generic applications. Here comes one, though the commenting in the main application is poor, I hope one can implement this and get running with out much headache.

Download the full script Download

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MariaFramework 0.22 released

The MariaFramework or phpmf has been released with a couple of new enhancements. The MariaFramework portal is updated with some new plugins for phpmf. Will dive into what the details of the plugins are in another post. For the time the enhancements of the all new MariaFramework.
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How I got MySQL 5.5 running on Ubuntu 10.04 Server

After referring to all sort of documents online, for getting the src deb and compiling, which always created one or other method of headaches for me, we approached the Oracle recommended method. Downloaded the binary from official oracle downloads. In the actual process I just deviated here and there to suit my preferences. Untarred the binary to /opt/mysql-5.5.15-linux2.6-x86_64, soft linked to this from /usr/local/mysql.

After creating the /etc/my.cnf to my desired settings, I proceeded with the mysql_install_db, which promptly failed complaining about a libaio. Again a bit of googling, found the answer ‘apt-get install libaio1’. Okay the install db went straight. Now the startup script. Copied the script [mysql-base-dir]/support-files/mysql.server to /etc/init.d/mysql. Issued update-rc.d mysql defaults. All was well, the server started smoothly. But Ubuntu did not have path spec for finding the binaries, so did the easy way ln -s /usr/local/mysql/bin/* /usr/bin/. Since we were using the Ubuntu stock mysql-server and client for a long time, most of our shell scripts also expect the same path.
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The famous spinning cursor in bash

Displaying some sort of activity, the hangover from working continuosly on slow desktops are already deep into developers. Well we cannot complain, the users who are our clients or the clients of our clients always want everything very fast. And if we dont tell them about a process being running in the background, they are sure to kick the button again, and again and again. Hence the need to show activity progress, or even a small activity to remind that the system is busy processing some junk, the progress or throbbers cannot be avoided. A similar progress with message for a long running non interactive bash script was needed for me, since we were depending a lot on build kits written in bash.

The ESC sequence is to hide and display the bash cursor. Since the whole script is self running, and do not need any feedback, the cursor is better not displayed. The function at line 7, showProgress will output a message, and show the spinning cursor with full cycle in a second. stopProgess will make sure the progress display is stopped by removing the file touched by it. Only limitiation is that this can be used only in scripts that will run single instance at a time, even on a multi user system.

I prefer writing really temporary files to /dev/shm/ since that reduces harddisk wear and tear, and is real fast being on ram. While digging for something else at my home, accidentally I completed this bit of snippet. Well thought to share the same. Poor at explaining things so please excuse.
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Using Bash to take incremental backups on MySQL database

The backup plan was to have a full backup of data and structure every Sunday and then difference of the database from last sunday to every other day, rotate the backups every fourth week.

At Saturn in the development labs, we restructured the development mysql by logically splitting out or combining projects and spread it across four instances of mysql running on a dedicated server. Later we felt that the weekly backups of mysql data folder was not sufficient for some of our projects. And for these we decided on having a rotational backup. The backup plan was to have a full backup of data and structure every Sunday and then difference of the database from last sunday to every other day, rotate the backups every fourth week. The structure backup was decided to be taken with mysqldump and the options –routines –triggers –no-data –compact. Whereas the data backup was to be taken as tab-seperated-values, using select into outfile. We had specific reasons to decide these methods as well as to take data and structure seperately.

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Session TimeZones and DateTime fields

I was pondering over how to coax mysql (and mssql) to automagically select local time if a session variable was set with the required timezone

Today I was pondering over how to coax mysql (and mssql) to automagically select local time if a session variable was set with the required timezone. Well we arrived at a conclusion that we could not do that on DateTime fields in MySQL. Alas we were having varchar(19) in the equivalent field in MsSQL, which was the outcome of an import from MySQL using a connection string and a procedure. We were at a dismay, and admitted defeat. Later while having lunch, I got enlightend about using the built in functions to do the methodical conversions.
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