Recent Articles on the tecRacer AWS Blog

Statistical Computing on Your Local Workstation Recently, a costumer told me about his problems to fullfil stastistical computing workloads on his local workstations. At first, you need to know that statistcal computing language like R and Python by default only use one core of your multi core machine. To parallize them, you have a lot of opportunities with regard to CPU-usage, IOPS etc.. Second, even if you parallize your workloads, you got an annoying loud machine in your office.

Automating Athena Queries with Python Introduction Over the last few weeks I’ve been using Amazon Athena quite heavily. For those of you who haven’t encountered it, Athena basically lets you query data stored in various formats on S3 using SQL (under the hood it’s a managed Presto/Hive Cluster). Pricing for Athena is pretty nice as well, you pay only for the amount of data you process and that’s relatively cheap at $5 per TB when you consider the effort to set up EMR Clusters for one-time or very infrequent queries and transformations.

As you probably are aware, Chef is a tool which is meant for automatic provisioning and configuring of systems. So if you have a particular problem falling outside of the regular use cases, both posts on the internet and support enquiries of any kind will probably result in one of two answers: “that is not possible” or “you are doing it wrong”. But - what if you really need this for a rather exotic task or even as an transitory solution?

Vergleich Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Frameworks - tRick Alle Posts Abstraktion und Lines of Code Geschwindigkeit Diversity (polyglott), Tooling, Fazit Benchmark Ausführungsgeschindigkeit Ausführungsgeschwindigkeit Direkt aus dem tRick Repository wird mehrfach (n=10) der Zyklus Build -> Check -> Deploy -> Remove ausgeführt. Damit sollen Cache Effekte statistisch gemittelt werden. Dazu nehme ich das Tool hyperfine zur Hilfe. Es führt Kommandos automatisch mehrfach aus und mittelt die Ergebnisse. Meine Annahme ist es, dass Terraform vorne liegt, da das Programm selber statisch kompiliert in go geschrieben ist. Außerdem geht die Ausführung direkt auf die API.

Vergleich Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Frameworks - tRick Teil 3 Alle Posts Abstraktion und Lines of Code Geschwindigkeit Diversity (polyglott), Tooling, Fazit

Managing multiple environments in Terraform Introduction I recently started learning Terraform. For those who haven’t encountered it: Terraform is in essence a framework to describe Infrastructure as code by Hashicorp. When I began doing that, I was struggling with the staging-concept of Terraform. I did my research and came upon numerous 1 articles and blogs that described ways to manage (multiple) environments or stages in Terraform2. Since I wasn’t really happy with the other solutions and there didn’t seem to be a canonical way to handle multiple environments, I decided to try and figure out my own solution.

The AWS CDK has been presented on reInvent 2018. Its mission is to simplify develop infrastructure as code. There are several other frameworks, as discussed here on the blog in tRick. So there are some competitors… Can you use shiny new CDK also for serverless lambda applications? Big “Yes” from my side, but read for yourself…

Note: An updated version of this post is available here Building Lambda Functions with Terraform Introduction Many of us use Terraform to manage our infrastructure as code. As AWS users, Lambda functions tend to be an important part of our infrastructure and its automation. Deploying - and especially building - Lambda functions with Terraform unfortunately isn’t as straightforward as I’d like. (To be fair: it’s very much debatable whether you should use Terraform for this purpose, but I’d like to do that - and if I didn’t, you wouldn’t get to read this article, so let’s continue)