Introduction Choosing the right database for your application is a critical decision in software development. DynamoDB, Amazon Web Services NoSQL database, is often a top consideration. In this blog post, I’ll discuss the pros and cons of using DynamoDB for your app, covering its history, roots, use cases, alternatives, advantages, and challenges. By the end, you’ll have a clear understanding of whether DynamoDB is the right choice for your project. Read more

In this post, I’m going to explore 5 ways to deploy a Flask application. In all examples I’m going to use a simple app from Flask docs: app.py from flask import Flask app = Flask(__name__) @app.route('/') def hello_world(): return 'Hello, World!' if __name__ == '__main__': app.run() Local machine This option is used when you need to test your application on a local machine. By simply running app. Read more

There is an alternative to run Flask on AWS Elastic Beanstalk that allow numerous customization options - run Flask on ECS Fargate. This serverless (you don’t have to manage a cluster of EC2) solution runs Docker images and can run Flask web server. There is a lot of AWS resources involved to make it work. I’m sharing CloudFormation templates that will create them automatically.Source code Here are the details of these templates: Read more

AWS S3 is perfect to host static websites. Basic setup when you have a CNAME DNS record pointing to the bucket endpoint covers a lot of use cases. Couple of things missing are SSL continuous delivery. For SSL you need CloudFront to serve as a global load balancer and provide SSL offload. To achieve continues delivery connect the GitHub repo storing the source to CodePipeline. CodePipeline is triggered at every push to the master branch and automatically updates the content of the S3 bucket with changes source files. Read more

Continuous integration and continuous delivery are powerful practices that allow release software faster and of a higher quality. This post walks through steps to implement CI/CD pipeline for a small lambda function that calculates square roots by: getting message from SQS that contains the number to calculate sqrt for checks if the calculation was done before by querying DynamoDB if there is not cached answer in DynamoDB - calculate sqrt and saves the result print the result so it’s visible in CloudWatch logs Things I’d like the pipeline to do: Read more

This is a walk through of the process of creating a simple serverless app for finding part-of-speech tag of an input text. 1 Create virtual environment In order to separate system-wide dependencies from this app, create a separate virtual environment with: ~ mkvirtualenv nltk_env 2 Install nltk In the virtual environment use pip to install nltk package: (nltk_env) ~ pip install nltk 3 Download nltk data Pip doesn’t install additional files that are needed to the app, but nltk has a helper functions to download them: Read more