Recent Articles on the tecRacer AWS Blog

New AWS Config Rules - LambdaLess and rust(y)

AWS Config checks all your resources for compliance. With 260 managed rules, it covers a lot of ground. But if you need additional checks until now, you had to write a complex Lambda function. With the new “Custom Policy” type, it is possible to use declarative Guard rules. Custom Policy rules use less lines of code and are so much easier to read.

Enable Autocomplete for boto3 in VSCode

One of the less pleasant aspects of working with AWS using Python is the fact that most IDEs aren’t able to natively support Autocomplete or IntelliSense for the AWS SDK for Python (boto3) because of the way boto3 is implemented. Today I’m going to show you how easy it has become to enable Autocomplete for boto3 in VSCode. Before we come to the solution, let’s talk about why native Autocomplete doesn’t work with boto3.

Getting a near-real-time view of a DynamoDB stream with Python

DynamoDB streams help you respond to changes in your tables, which is commonly used to create aggregations or trigger other workflows once data is updated. Getting a near-real-time view into these Streams can also be helpful during developing or debugging a Serverless application in AWS. Today, I will share a Python script that I built to hook into DynamoDB streams. Before we begin, I suggest you read my blog post that contains a deep dive into DynamoDB streams and how they’re implemented because we’ll be using these concepts today.

Glue Crawlers don't correctly recognize Ion data - here's how you fix that

Amazon Ion is one of the data serialization formats you can use when exporting data from DynamoDB to S3. Recently, I tried to select data from one of these exports with Athena after using a Glue Crawler to create the schema and table. It didn’t work, and I got a weird error message. In this post, I’ll show you how to fix that problem. If you’re not familiar with Ion yet, check out my recent blog post introducing it for more details.

What is Amazon Ion, and how can I read and write it in Python?

Amazon Ion is a data serialization format that was open-sourced by Amazon in 2016 and is used internally at the company. Over time it has also been introduced into some AWS services and is the data format that services like the Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) use. It has also started to appear in more commonly used services, so I think it’s worth taking a closer look at. This article will explain what Ion is, its benefits, and how you can use it in Python.

Logging Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

Recently, I spent a lot of time using the exciting new member of the FSx family. One detail made working with it a bit unpleasant, though - the lack of log files. This post details how to create a custom integration into CloudWatch Logs and make ONTAP audit logs visible.