Cloud
A global game changer. The Cloud is a framework that delivers on a promise of cost-effective, performant, secure, comprehensive and reliable infrastructures for the years to come. It has become possible to freely innovate without needing to configure software or hardware at each step. Without the need to maintain ever increasing server rooms.
The articles of this section are aimed at unlocking ideas that could help enhancing your experience with your favorite Cloud providers. Do not forget to do your own research though, as this domain moves very fast with new services on a daily to weekly basis.
re:Invent 2021 - Vogels's Keynote
Posted Thursday December 02, 2021
Shouldn’t there be an Infrastructure Keynote blog post between this one and the last? He was sitting there, in the middle of the desert. Hawaiian shirt, jacket, yellow shades and a bob on his head. Suddenly his ride arrived. He packed his soft drinks, jumped on the driver’s seat and started the engine. Las Vegas was his destination, the road to re:Invent was the perfect occasion to play some bangers and remember the good old times. This was the tenth iteration of his keynote. An important anniversary. This one started with contemporary music played by a small orchestra. As he...
re:Invent 2021 - Sivasubramanian's Keynote
Posted Wednesday December 01, 2021
How many AWS re:Invent annual conferences have there been in total? This is the tenth one! What is the most valuable resource in an organization? Is it physical assets, a portfolio of brands, trademarks and patents, actual money, people, teams, culture? While the response may vary wildly depending on how the discussion partner understands the question, there is one that is a cut above the rest for its propensity to be easy to misinvest and very limited in quantity: time. With our tools, frameworks, solutions and platforms, we are building experiences that are ever increasingly complex and value-generating. Despite our...
re:Invent 2021 - Selipsky's Keynote
Posted Tuesday November 30, 2021
Do you remember when the first Amazon Web Services launched? That was in 2006! The least we can say about AWS is that their growth has been phemonenal since day one. Fifteen years ago, in 2006, the Cloud was another fad like Facebook, Youtube or the Nintendo Wii. Yet, if we are here today to tell you about our success stories, it is because the Cloud was no fad after all. The first services were Amazon S3 and then Amazon EC2. They were certainly not as feature complete as they are today nor as integrated with many other services. Nevertheless,...
Deploying a complete infrastructure on the Huawei Cloud - Part 2
Posted Friday February 12, 2021
Words of notice: This is an article has been written by Antoine Cavaillé. Many thanks for their consent to sharing this story here. Before we begin, check out the first part of the series in case you missed it. It presents the backbone, the base layer of our infrastructure. This second part concentrates on the different components needed by our application to run on Huawei Cloud. Part 1: Docker Repository To deploy our application on Kubernetes, we will be using Docker containers. Those containers will need an image to run and we chose to store the images on a Huawei...
Deploying a complete infrastructure on Huawei Cloud
Posted Friday February 05, 2021
Words of notice: This is an article has been written by Antoine Cavaillé. Many thanks for their consent to sharing this story here. Some elements of context As a Cloud Engineer at Gekko Part of Accenture, I am comfortable running complex infrastructure on AWS which provides datacenters all over the world. But in one project, a customer wished to replicate their infrastructure on a different Cloud provider, Huawei Cloud! I was only aware of the existence of Huawei hardware such as smartphones, computers and IT oriented products but not as a Cloud provider so I decided to share my experience...
Block storage in AWS: Dawn of a new generation
Posted Friday December 18, 2020
Words of notice: This is an article I wrote for Gekko. Many thanks for their consent to sharing this story here. Throughout their services, AWS uses a special type of sharding called “Shuffle sharding” to virtually isolate each customer while colocating their resources. The most visible example, the one mentioned in the Amazon Builders’ Library, concerns Route 53 and how each DNS zone gets assigned four of the 2048 virtual shards created by AWS for the service. There are 700B+ possible combinations of those shards and the number of combinations grows exponentially with the number of virtual shards and the...
Amazon S3: Consistency gets Strong
Posted Sunday December 13, 2020
Words of notice: This is an article I wrote for Gekko. Many thanks for their consent to sharing this story here. There are many different storage types in the wild and they each have specifics that make them suitable for defined sets of use cases. Regardless of the scale, storage poses challenging issues. For instance Brewer’s theorem, also known as the CAP theorem, states that designing distributed data stores requires trade-offs. Simply put, in case of a write failure on a storage system due to internal network conditions, would it be preferable to drop the operation or to attempt to...
AWS Proton: A DevOps delight
Posted Wednesday December 02, 2020
Words of notice: This is an article I wrote for Gekko. Many thanks for their consent to sharing this story here. The right architecture for the right need Over the last few years, we have observed a steady growth of compute-layer services that natively integrate cost-efficiency, operational excellence, performance, security and reliability. These services are the same that development teams leverage in order to spend more time on their products and less time tweaking infrastructure and connecting pipes. Among these services are AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate and its companion services AWS ECS and AWS EKS.
macOS on EC2: the Apple ecosystem joins the party
Posted Tuesday December 01, 2020
Words of notice: This is an article I wrote for Gekko. Many thanks for their consent to sharing this story here. A niche market? We live in a hyper-connected world, composed of a large majority of highly portable devices including smartphones, tablets and laptops. New devices open up new opportunities: smartwatches, smartglasses and smart TVs. All these high-tech components of our daily lives are smart because they do more that their main purpose which is to telephone, send messages, tell time or stream your favorite shows; they allow you to program or use their potential through the means of apps....
AWS Competency Program: a focus on excellence
Posted Wednesday December 04, 2019
Words of notice: This is an article I wrote for Gekko. Many thanks for their consent to sharing this story here. Gekko @ re:Invent 2019 – Wednesday, December 4rd of 2019 The program As an organization, possessing an AWS Competency means being able to prove your expertise in a specific field. It means becoming a partner of choice for companies that would like to rely on AWS to meet their expectations. It means showing creativity in solving the most complex problems, those for which there is no answer yet. It means being officially recognized by AWS for these reasons, standing...
Amazon CodeGuru: quality before all else
Posted Tuesday December 03, 2019
Words of notice: This is an article I wrote for Gekko. Many thanks for their consent to sharing this story here. Gekko @ re:Invent 2019 – Tuesday, December 3rd of 2019 An artistic blur of quality The notion of code quality is paradoxically one of the elements that divide development teams, but which nevertheless exposes fundamental notions that have been anchored for decades in the field. At the turn of a conversation between followers of Software Craftsmanship, we can hear about technical debt, dead code elimination or, for the most subtle, cyclomatic complexity. Developing a service requires writing code. Every...
EC2 Image builder: building EC2 AMIs the AWS way
Posted Monday December 02, 2019
Words of notice: This is an article I wrote for Gekko. Many thanks for their consent to sharing this story here. Gekko @ re:Invent 2019 – Monday, December 2nd of 2019 The issue with image building Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 is one of the AWS top services. Its scope in terms of covered needs is immense and grows constantly with the introduction of new variants of operating systems, services and additional hardware. When a service is that ubiquitous, it becomes a standard and naturally forms its ecosystem. Today, this new feature concerns one of the weakest links of...
Self-service FaaS infrastructure with Terraform
Posted Monday October 28, 2019
Words of notice: This is an article I wrote for Gekko. Many thanks for their consent to sharing this story here. On Serverless, FaaS and Infrastructure as Code It has been a few years now that Serverless as a concept changed the shape of our Clouds. What started off as a logical step, a new tool after the advent of container technologies became a subject in and of itself. However, let us define a boundary first: this post will be concentrating on a major domain of Serverless which is the Function as a Service, also known as FaaS. The title...