JijuTM.COM – memories of a passionate technocrat

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.

Unleashing the Power of AWS DynamoDB: Exploring Common Use Cases

Amazon Web Services (AWS) DynamoDB stands tall as a powerful, fully managed NoSQL database service, offering seamless scalability, high availability, and low latency. Its flexibility and performance make it a favorite among developers and businesses across various industries. Let’s delve into some common use cases where DynamoDB shines brightly:

1. Real-Time Analytics: DynamoDB’s ability to handle massive volumes of data with lightning-fast response times makes it ideal for real-time analytics applications. Whether it’s tracking user interactions on a website, monitoring IoT devices, or analyzing streaming data, DynamoDB efficiently stores and retrieves data, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions in real-time.

2. Ad Tech Platforms: Ad tech platforms deal with immense amounts of data generated from ad impressions, clicks, and user interactions. DynamoDB’s ability to handle high throughput and scale automatically makes it an excellent choice for storing and retrieving this data rapidly. Additionally, its integration with other AWS services like Lambda and Kinesis enables seamless data processing and analysis pipelines.

3. Gaming Leaderboards: Gaming applications often require storing and updating leaderboards in real-time to provide players with up-to-date rankings. DynamoDB’s fast read and write capabilities, along with its scalability, make it a perfect fit for maintaining dynamic leaderboards, ensuring a smooth and engaging gaming experience for players worldwide.

4. Content Management Systems (CMS): Content-heavy applications, such as CMS platforms and blogging websites, benefit from DynamoDB’s ability to handle large volumes of structured and unstructured data. Whether it’s storing user-generated content, managing metadata, or tracking user interactions, DynamoDB provides the scalability and performance required to deliver content quickly and reliably to users.

5. E-commerce Applications: DynamoDB plays a crucial role in e-commerce applications by efficiently managing product catalogs, customer profiles, and transaction data. Its seamless scalability ensures that e-commerce platforms can handle sudden spikes in traffic during peak shopping seasons, while its low latency guarantees a smooth shopping experience for customers browsing and purchasing products online.

6. Internet of Things (IoT) Data Management: IoT devices generate vast amounts of data that need to be collected, processed, and analyzed in real-time. DynamoDB’s ability to handle high throughput and store structured and semi-structured data makes it an ideal choice for managing IoT data streams. Whether it’s monitoring sensor data, tracking device status, or analyzing telemetry data, DynamoDB provides the scalability and performance required for IoT applications.

7. User Session Management: Applications that require managing user sessions, such as chat applications and collaborative platforms, can leverage DynamoDB to store session data securely and efficiently. DynamoDB’s fast read and write operations ensure quick access to session data, enabling seamless user experiences across multiple devices and sessions.

8. Financial Services: In the financial services sector, DynamoDB is used for various applications, including fraud detection, risk management, and transaction processing. Its ability to handle high volumes of data with low latency makes it well-suited for real-time financial analytics and compliance reporting, ensuring the security and reliability of financial transactions.

In conclusion, AWS DynamoDB offers a versatile and scalable solution for a wide range of use cases across industries. Whether it’s real-time analytics, gaming leaderboards, e-commerce applications, or IoT data management, DynamoDB empowers businesses to build high-performance, scalable, and reliable applications that deliver exceptional user experiences. As technology continues to evolve, DynamoDB remains at the forefront, driving innovation and enabling businesses to thrive in the digital age.

Unleash Your Productivity: Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE with Bookcase Keyboard

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE is a powerful and versatile tablet that can be your perfect companion for work, entertainment, and creativity. When paired with the Samsung Bookcase Keyboard, it transforms into a productivity powerhouse, allowing you to tackle tasks on the go with ease.

**Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE: Built for Performance**

Large and Vivid Display: Immerse yourself in a stunning 12.4-inch LTPS TFT LCD display with a resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels. Whether you’re browsing the web, watching videos, or working on documents, the Tab S7 FE delivers a crisp and vibrant viewing experience.
Powerful Processor: The Qualcomm Snapdragon 750G processor ensures smooth performance for all your daily tasks, from multitasking to gaming.
Long-lasting Battery: Stay productive all day long with a massive 10,400mAh battery.
S Pen Support: Unleash your creativity with the included S Pen (on most models). Take notes, draw, and edit photos with unmatched precision and control.
Expandable Storage: With a microSD card slot, you can expand the storage capacity of your Tab S7 FE to keep all your files and media close at hand.

**Samsung Bookcase Keyboard: Transform Your Tablet**

Seamless Integration: The Bookcase Keyboard attaches magnetically to your Tab S7 FE for a secure and convenient connection.
Laptop-like Typing Experience: The keyboard features well-spaced keys with good travel, making typing comfortable and efficient.
Multiple Viewing Angles: Prop your tablet up at a comfortable viewing angle for work, watching videos, or gaming.
Integrated S Pen Holder: Keep your S Pen always within reach, conveniently stored in the dedicated holder on the keyboard.
Built-in Trackpad (Optional): Some versions of the Bookcase Keyboard come with a built-in trackpad, offering greater control over your tablet

Together, a Perfect Match

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE and Bookcase Keyboard are a perfect combination for users who demand both portability and productivity. The tablet’s powerful performance and stunning display are ideal for work and entertainment, while the keyboard enhances your typing experience and transforms your Tab S7 FE into a laptop alternative.

Additional Considerations

Price: Be sure to research current pricing for both the Tab S7 FE and Bookcase Keyboard before making your purchase.
Alternatives: Consider third-party keyboard options that might offer different features or price points.
Software: The Tab S7 FE works with Samsung DeX, which provides a more desktop-like experience when connected to a monitor.

FfMpeg:- Video editing which does everything without the frills and folleys on the go. Yes it is a bit clumsy but with some help from google and other channels and keeping a command reference in Samsung Notes fast and precise editing and voiceover can be done on videos taken on other mobiles.
With Samsung quick share transfer files in and out wirelessly between Samsung devices and even text copy on one device and paste in the other device when connected to the same wifi and both are using the same gmail login.
Canva in subscription mode will facilitate more powerful video and image editing with templates for almost all social media and other printable materials too.
Amazon Code Catalyst is an IDE with DevOps integrated as well as a linux console and all sort of features like collaborative editing in code view and can integrate code whisperer.

The last combination above will facilitate developers to break free from concrete jungles and enjoy fresh air while still doing their tasks on time. As I have been doing here.

With its impressive features and sleek design, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE with Bookcase Keyboard is a great option for anyone who wants a versatile and powerful tablet that can keep up with their busy lifestyle.

Agree or Disagree? Let me know what you think in the comments below! Or send a tweet tag me too @ jijutm

If you are gonna purchase it use my affiliate link

Attempt to create animated representation of AWS DevOps pipeline

Though the title says something technical this is just a self-promotion and cheap boasting

Continuing with the boosting as I have been doing this for the past couple of days. No, I am not insane, but wanted to do this by hand and use some shell commands. Initially the scenes were identified as 10 and folders created with a base flowchart made using Libre Office Draw copied into each of the folders.

Finally the full image sequence was copied into “full” with renaming in sequence with the following command.

Before that, the same command was previewed using echo instead of cp as seen below.

And finally all images were in the “full” folder as below.

It was time to invoke ffmpeg as shown below.

ffmpeg -i dop%04d.png -c:v libx264 -an -r 30 ../dop-anim.mp4 -hide_banner

What could have been achieved with paid tools like Canva or many others, with some effort and free tools available with Ubuntu Linux achieved with minimal expense, without considering my work time earnings that should be a concern.

When I went to SJCCD 2024

This is not a technical document but rather a place to show off some pictures which I took. A few of them were posted on Twitter ( now the platform is X) while the event was running. Pictures that I am there have been salvaged from other sources and I wholeheartedly thank those who took those. I don’t want to hurt the feelings of anyone or to poach these. If I knew the person directly I would have asked the permission. Still, if any copyright owners want to take these off, please DM me on LinkedIn as those photos were taken from a LinkedIn post.

The event at St. Joseph’s Group of Institutions, Chennai was stupendous and a grand function. Take this opportunity to thank the staff and management as well as congratulate all those who took the extra effort to make it such a great one.

About 15 new security controls added to AWS Security Hub

AWS Security Hub announced the addition of 15 new security controls through their post yesterday. This should increase the number of controls available to 307. AWS services such as Amazon FSx and AWS Private Certificate Authority (AWS Private CA) are some of the newly added controls that were in demand also. More and enhanced controls of previously supported services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) are also added with this release. For the full list of recently released controls and the AWS Regions in which they are available, suggested to review the Security Hub user guide from time to time.

To use the new controls, turn on the standard they belong to. Security Hub will then start evaluating your security posture and monitoring your resources for the relevant security controls. You can use central configuration to do so across all your organization accounts and linked Regions with a single action. If you are already using the relevant standards and have Security Hub configured to automatically enable new controls, these new controls will run without taking any additional action.

The original announcement on their site is here.

Reference Architecture

Reference architecture for a generic interface for Cloud Search on AWS with a broker in any lambda-supported runtime. For the particular implementation, I chose and used Node.js. Hence any client request is authorized from an API key and hits the aws api gateway which in turn invokes the lambda function. In this function internally the code will do necessary normalization and pass it on to aws Cloud Search and if any response the same is reformatted for adapting as aws api gateway response. Along with this functionality, the lambda broker will write a human-readable version of the request as analyzed from the request with request method as verb keywords and sort direction with a prefix of JSON property names, etc into AWS cloud watch with simple console.log methods. Tried to make it as generic as possible.

An event bridge scheduler will trigger another lambda which will analyze these human readable messages and try to detect any missing indexes which will be auto-created into the Cloud Search and updated into a config file on aws S3. Lots of production testing and fine tuning is pending along with necessary documentation as well as the AWS sam template to deploy the same. As of now, this is just a blueprint and the components are lying in different locations and need orchestration there are no plans to open this on any public repository. But anyone who wants to adopt the design is free to pick this and do it on his own without any commitment to me. By creating this with the self-learning capabilities this system can be used literally by many applications even those that already depend on some kind of custom clumsy backend.

A few real-time use cases could be community member databases, hospital patient records, pet shops and many more. Generally, the request methods should work like POST create a new record, PUT updates a record, DELETE deletes ( or trash ) a referenced record, and GET fetch according with proper documentation the feature can be defined as the client software is designed and developed.

The reference architecture drawing is attached here and that is just my thoughts. Please share if you think this is good enough.

Cloud Migration – A Thought Process

Everybody is running after this and gets stuck at one stage or the other unless their product or application is still in black and white on some notebooks or just in the wireframe and has to be built from the ground up. Now if you are going to build a new application, it can be designed to take full advantage of the cloud by combining multiple microservices, leaving out more time and resources to do the application into a perfectly usable solution. Whereas we are considering migration of existing applications into the cloud. The development language, database as well as design approach of the whole application should be considered when thinking about migration. It means that migration to the cloud should be considered on a case-to-case basis and there is no storyboard which fits all use cases.

Architecture in a Serverless Mindset

Consider designing a simple serverless system to process orders within an e-commerce workflow. This is an architecture for a REST micro-service that is simple to implement.

How an order will be processed by this e-commerce workflow is as follows.

Amazon API Gateway handles requests and responses to those API calls.
Lambda contains the business logic to process the calls.
Amazon DynamoDB provides persistent JSON document storage.

Though this is simple to implement, this can cause bottlenecks and failures resulting in frustrated clients at the web front end. Analyze the flow and see the possible failure points. Amazon API Gateway integrates with AWS Lambda with a synchronous invocation method and expects AWS Lambda to respond within 30 seconds. As long as this happens, all is well and good. But what if a promo gets shared over social media and very large users pile up with orders, Scaling is built into the AWS Services, but can reach the throttling limits.

The configuration of Amazon DynamoDB, where capacity specifications do play a lot. AWS Lambda throttling as well as concurrency can also create failures. Large dynamic library linking which requires initializing time also affects the cold start time and eventually the latency of AWS Lambda which could get lost with the http request timeout of Amazon API Gateway. Getting deep into the system, the business logic could have some complications and in case one request cannot be processed due to the custom code written in AWS Lambda could fail without any trace of the request saved into any persistent storage. Considering all these factors as well as suggestions by veterans in this walk of life this architecture could be further expanded to something like the below.

What is the revision and what do the additional components provide as advantage? Let’s discuss it now.

Order information comes in through an API call over HTTP into Amazon API Gateway
AWS Lambda validates and populates the request into Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
SQS integrates with AWS Lambda asynchronously and automatic retries for failed requests as well as Dead Letter Queues (left out in illustration) could help out
Business logic Processed requests could be stored to DynamoDB
DynamoDB Streams could trigger another AWS Lambda to intimate through SNS about the order to Customer Support

Digging more into the illustrations and explanations there are more to be done to make this a full production-ready blueprint let’s leave those thoughts to upcoming Serverless enthusiasts.

Conclusion

I strongly believe that I have been loyal to the core thoughts of being in a Serverless Mindset. Further thoughts of cost optimizing and scaling can be considered with savings plans, AWS Lambda Concurrent provisioning, Amazon DynamoDB on-demand capacity setting and making sure to optimize business logic and reduce latency.