Recent Articles on the tecRacer AWS Blog

On-Prem Airflow to MWAA

Transforming large amounts of data into formats that help solve business problems is what data engineers excel at. A combination of Serverless tools such as Athena, StepFunctions, Lambda, or Glue can get the job done in many projects. However, some customers prefer to rely on Open-Source projects and tools to access more talent in the job market and be less reliant on a single cloud provider. Today, we’ll share a story of a modernization project that we did for a customer in the online marketing industry.

Implementing Pessimistic Locking with DynamoDB and Python

I will show you how to implement pessimistic locking using Python with DynamoDB as our backend. Before we start, we’ll review the basics and discuss some of the design criteria we’re looking for. In an earlier post, I outlined to you how to implement optimistic locking using DynamoDB. There, I explained some of the reasons why locking is useful and which issues it can prevent. If you’re unfamiliar with the topic, I suggest you check that one out first.

Hardware TOTP for AWS: Reiner SCT tanJack Deluxe

Even when safely storing your MFA tokens using the Token2 Molto-2 device, some things are not quite optimal. You have to use special Windows-only software to program new accounts, it is not PIN-protected, and things could be better in terms of usability. If you have a bit more of a budget, the Reiner SCT tanJack Deluxe might solve your problems. Let’s have a look at this device.

First Steps with Amazon Braket SDK

In this article, we will install and deploy a circuit with a Bell State using AWS Braket SDK. Some minimal knowledge requirements are expected from the reader, namely concepts such as: Qubit, Superposition, Quantum Logical Gates (and a bit of math by association), Bell State, Python and perhaps AWS CLI.

Hardware TOTP for AWS: Molto-2

Everybody knows you should protect your AWS accounts (and other logins) with MFA against brute-force attacks. Most of the account providers use a standardized algorithm (RFC 6238) to generate the famous six-digit TOTP codes for your login. But where do you store those securely? Today, we will look at the alternatives and a specific device: The Molto-2.

Glue Crawlers: No GetObject, No Problem

This is the story of how we accidentally learned more about the internals of Glue Crawlers than we ever wanted to know. Once upon a time (a few days ago), André and I were debugging a crawler that didn’t do what it was supposed to. Before we dive into that, maybe some background on Crawlers first. Glue Crawlers are used to create tables in the Glue Data Catalog. They crawl, i.

Managing volatile Terraform Deployments with AWS CodeBuild and Step Functions

I was searching for an AWS-native solution that would deploy resources via Terraform, allow them to do some work, and then destroy them properly without leaving any orphaned resources. Also, multiple of those Terraform deployments needed to be live at the same time. The solution I found is a combination of AWS CodeBuild, AWS Step Functions, a Terraform State being managed in S3 and Terraform Workspaces.