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Getting Started with AWS RDS

Greetings I was once tasked with setting up an earlier version of a database system for a demo. It took me a whole day to complete that task due to versioning issues in the required libraries. It was nothing but just pain. I lost valuable time as a developer that I can use for something more useful than struggling with setting up a database system. This is why cloud-based solutions are much better. AWS RDS provides us with many benefits over using traditional on-premises systems. OS upgrades and patching Automatic backups Replication High availability Security Multiple database options Hardware and networking So what is RDS? AWS RDS Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud. We can choose from seven popular engines. MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, Aurora MySQL, and Aurora PostgreSQL. We can even deploy on-premises with RDS

Implementing email sending functionality with AWS SES

Greetings Emailing is a ubiquitous feature in modern applications that requires a reliable service to meet our email needs. Luckily, AWS Simple Email Service (SES) offers a cost-effective and secure solution. AWS Simple Email Service AWS SES is an email solution that relieves us of all operational responsibilities. It is an email platform that offers a convenient and affordable method for sending and receiving emails using your own email addresses and domains. Can I do "that"? When considering the use of such a service, we typically contemplate these functionalities. Personally, I experienced these aspects when incorporating AWS SES into our recent email feature. Sending simple emails Sending fancy HTML emails Send emails in bulk Send dynamic emails Store template somewhere Use list Use conditions Send attachments Send to multiple recipients Absolutely! SES indeed supports all of these features. Moreover, it can also be utilized for automatic

Effective Strategies for Handling External Services

Greetings In various software development scenarios, we inevitably encounter external dependencies, whether they are our own services or entirely third-party entities. Especially when it comes to microservices this is very common. Systems can fail or crash if we don’t plan and handle these scenarios properly. Having personally encountered such situations, I became increasingly curious to delve deeper into this. Note that there are no “exact” answers when comes to these kinds of situations. The best is to let the business decide which option to use as it will save a lot of time, engineering effort and of course money by not over-engineering. What can go wrong? Let's first categorize the scenarios that can happen when using external systems. Service Unavailable Service is not able to handle high load Service had implemented rate limits Service is slow All these will impact our businesses hence we need to carefully design our systems. However, we cannot say there is a perfect solution

Design a serverless web scrapper

Greetings In a previous article , I explained how we synced the WordPress website into our microservices architecture. We use AWS EKS for our deployments and managing microservices. But what if we use a serverless architecture? Here is my attempt at the serverless solution on my serverless journey. Note that this is about converting your own website into a serverless architecture. Always check ethicality in use. Note: This is about the architecture, not about actual coding. Requirement Convert existing website into a serverless microservice. Technologies By sticking into Nodejs and AWS I would go with the below stack. AWS Lambda AWS S3 AWS Eventbridge AWS RDS AWS API gateway AWS Cognito AWS CloudFront AWS Amplify AWS SES Nodejs JavaScript Axios Cheerio React I would consider AWS Step functions in the future as one lambda is doing too many things (save in database, store images in S3, send emails). However, my AWS Step functions knowledge is not as great as today. Architecture Let's

Redis Cache with Nodejs, AWS

Greetings Modern applications are highly data-driven, and distributed and performance is a top priority. Redis has become one of those critical components in most applications. In this article, we will briefly look into Redis and how we can use it in a NodeJS application. "Power real-time applications with sub-millisecond latency" Redis Fast, open source in-memory, a key-value data store for use as a database, cache, message broker, and queue (from the doc). It stands for Remote Dictionary Server. We usually think of Redis as a cache because it is the most used use case. But Redis is more than a cache. As an example, Redis is an ideal option to store user sessions in web applications. Here are a few use cases but for more details better to read the documentation. Caching Session store Messaging Queue Gaming leader boards Geospatial Caching is a must in Microservices architecture to improve performance. We utilize Redis for this purpose in our e-commerce ap