Recent Articles on the tecRacer AWS Blog

Handling Errors and Retries in StepFunctions

“Everything fails all the time” has been preached to us by Werner Vogels for a few years now. Every engineer working on building and maintaining systems knows this to be true. Distributed systems come with their own kind of challenges, and one of the AWS services that help deal with those is AWS Step Functions. AWS Step Functions allow you to describe workflows as JSON and will execute those workflows for you. In this blog, we’ll explore what happens when things inevitably go wrong and the options the service offers to perform error handling and retries using an example application.

Assigning EKS Namespaces to Node Groups

In AWS EKS clusters, there are a couple of use cases for which all pods of a namespace should be automatically scheduled to specific nodes in Kubernetes, including: Clear allocation of data plane infrastructure (and costs) to teams in large organizations, Running critical workloads on on-demand nodes and not on spot nodes, or Using specific hardware, such as GPU, only by workloads that actually require it. In this post, we will explore how to facilitate that in EKS.

Hybrid DNS resolution using Route 53 Endpoints

When implementing a hybrid cloud solution and connecting your AWS VPCs with corporate data centers, setting up proper DNS resolution across the whole network is an important step to ensure full integration and functionality. In order to accomplish this task, Route53 Inbound and Outbound endpoints can be used. In combination with forwarding rules, they allow you to forward DNS traffic between your AWS VPC and on-premises data centers. In this blog post, I would like to show you how you can leverage Route53 endpoints in combination with Terraform to establish seamless DNS query resolution across your entire hybrid network.

SBOMs on AWS - what?

Like most IT professionals, you might have read the title and googled “SBOM”. Now that you know it stands for “Software Bill of Materials”, read on to see why this will be very important in the next years. And what AWS can do to help you with this concept.

Calculating AWS DocumentDB Storage I/Os

Amazon DocumentDB is a fully managed native JSON document database that is mostly compatible with MongoDB. Why mostly? Because it it has a few functional differences from MongoDB and some MongoDB features are not supported. Despite from these limitation, customers benefit from a managed database service that has built-in security, backup integration, scalability and fault-tolerance. This rids customers from many operational burdens. AWS DMS (Database Migration Service) supports the migration from MongoDB to DocumentDB. Apart from the functional evaluation, pricing should of course be taken into consideration before migrating to DocumentDB as well.

EKS Backup with Velero

Velero is a tool to backup the kubernetes cluster state and its persistent volumes. It can be used for disaster recovery or cluster migration. Please refer to the official documentation for a more comprehensive description of use cases. This article describes the baseline setup for the backup to ease the start of backing up your EKS clusters.