Recent Articles on the tecRacer AWS Blog

Recently I’ve been engaged in my first reinforcement learning project using Ray’s RLlib and Sagemaker. I had dabbled in machine learning before, but one of the nice things about this project is that it allows me to dive deep into something unfamiliar. Naturally, that results in some mistakes being made. Today I want to share a bit about my experience in trying to improve the iteration time for the IMPALA algorithm in Ray’s RLlib.

In part one, we took the journey from a POC monolith to a scaleable two-tier architecture. The focus is on the DevOps KPI deployment time and the testability. With the right tools - AWS SAM and Postman - the dirty work becomes a nice walk in the garden again. See what a KEBEG stack can achieve!

In today’s data-driven world, effective data management is crucial for organizations aiming to make well-informed, data-driven decisions. As the importance of data continues to grow, so does the significance of robust data management practices. This includes the processes of ingesting, storing, organizing, and maintaining the data generated and collected by an organization. Within the realm of data management, schema evolution stands out as one of the most critical aspects. Businesses evolve over time, leading to changes in data and, consequently, changes in corresponding schemas. Even though a schema may be initially defined for your data, evolving business requirements inevitably demand schema modifications. Yet, modifying data structures is no straightforward task, especially when dealing with distributed systems and teams. It’s essential that downstream consumers of the data can seamlessly adapt to new schemas. Coordinating these changes becomes a critical challenge to minimize downtime and prevent production issues. Neglecting robust data management and schema evolution strategies can result in service disruptions, breaking data pipelines, and incurring significant future costs. In the context of Apache Kafka, schema evolution is managed through a schema registry. As producers share data with consumers via Kafka, the schema is stored in this registry. The Schema Registry enhances the reliability, flexibility, and scalability of systems and applications by providing a standardized approach to manage and validate schemas used by both producers and consumers. This blog post will walk you through the steps of utilizing Amazon MSK in combination with AWS Glue Schema Registry and Terraform to build a cross-account streaming pipeline for Kafka, complete with built-in schema evolution. This approach provides a comprehensive solution to address your dynamic and evolving data requirements.

The way from a cool POC (proof of concept), like a walk in monets garden, to a production-ready application for an RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) application with Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Kendra is paved with some work. Let`s get our hands dirty. With streamlit and langchain, you can quickly build a cool POC. This two-part blog is about what comes after that.

Der Amazon OpenSearch Service, der auf dem robusten OpenSearch-Framework basiert, zeichnet sich durch seine bemerkenswerte Geschwindigkeit und Effizienz in Such- und Analysefunktionen aus. Trotz seiner Stärken sind die Standardkonfigurationen des Dienstes möglicherweise nicht vollständig darauf ausgelegt, die spezifischen sprachlichen Herausforderungen bestimmter Sprachen zu bewältigen.

Welcome back to our series on implementing SAML Federation for Amazon OpenSearch Service. In our previous post, we explored setting up SAML Federation using OneLogin. Today, we’ll focus on another popular identity provider - Keycloak. Keycloak is an open-source Identity and Access Management solution, ideal for modern applications and services. We’ll guide you through integrating Keycloak with Amazon OpenSearch Service to implement SAML Federation.

Amazon OpenSearch Service, utilizing the robust OpenSearch framework, excels in search and analytics due to its remarkable speed and efficiency. Despite its strengths, the service’s default configurations might not be fully tailored to address the distinct linguistic challenges encountered in specific languages. Take German, for example, known for its compound words like “Lebensversicherungsgesellschaft” (life insurance company). Standard tokenization in search technologies treats these compounds as single units, leading to less optimal search results. For improved accuracy, it’s important to index the components of these compounds separately – “Leben” (life), “Versicherung” (insurance), and “Gesellschaft” (company). This approach ensures more precise and effective search outcomes, particularly in languages like German with many compound words.

In the process of constructing your Hybrid Hub and Spoke Network within the Cloud, which includes the integration of On-Premises networks and allows internet-based access, the implementation of a network firewall is essential for robust security. This security measure involves thorough traffic analysis and filtering between the entities to safeguard against both internal and external cyber threats and exploits. By actively monitoring and inspecting the flow of traffic, a network firewall plays a crucial role in identifying and blocking vulnerability exploits and unauthorized access attempts. Within the AWS ecosystem, the AWS Network Firewall is a service that is often used for achieving a high level of network security. As a stateful and fully managed network firewall, it includes intrusion detection and prevention capabilities, offering comprehensive protection for VPC-based network traffic. This blog post aims to guide you through the process of integrating the AWS Network Firewall into your hybrid AWS Hub and Spoke network. By doing so, you can effectively analyze, monitor, and filter both incoming and outgoing network traffic among all involved parties, thereby enhancing the overall security of your infrastructure layer.