Future you always hates it when you don't use Cloud Formation.

I'm spending the day making up time on my AWS certification. One challenge of an architect is having a mental model of how to build a...

Fun fact: Rhode Island was once in a continent of Avalonia, along with the UK and Ireland. Image Source: Malaga Bay

https://registry.opendata.aws/ It cost me $0.77 to query this data with Athena to find out the highest levels of Ozone in the US for a...

Create some fake data to entertain your friends and family. https://faker.readthedocs.io/en/master/ Actually, no one cares, but create...

I've spent too long thinking of these terms interchangeably. Runbooks Tactical Formula to Address a Situation Describe a situation that...

I've decided to get AWS Architect Certified during this slow season of COVID isolation. I have a filled-out shell of a decent AWS stack...

I've become a master of the AWS SAM model which specifies the relationships declaratively. Now AWS CDK has come out and it could make...

To everything there a season, and a time to every purpose, and let's keep track of those changes with a slowly changing dimension. What...

What happens when a clever hack meets a difficult problem? Sometimes you might get clever solutions, but most times, you get...

Before DevOps and the associated glamor, DevOps was done by a Systems Administrator. https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/know.your.sysadmin.en....

Data Governance is an oft-cited, oft-abused goal. Essentially, it is the process of governing a strategy for the acquisition and...

Successful data initiatives use a simple architecture that will scale. Most big data projects fail. Why do data initiatives fail? Build...

Event-driven data pipelines naturally scale much better, but there are many choices. AWS offers SQS as a message queuing system and both...

Some good reasons to use Step Functions in AWS * Dynamic Parallelism (AWS Article) * Event-Driven Architecture (Starting with CloudWatch...

The Pandas library has many nice features: built-in algorithms, plotting functions, data manipulations. You can use it in many cases to...

People see patterns where none exists.

Van Halen had a famous policy to test whether a venue paid attention to details. In the snacks section of their contract, they had...

Sometimes the obvious is obvious. Don't do development in production, even if you haven't deployed yet. Some shops will do their initial...

The Step Function feature in AWS makes expensive integration platforms obsolete. I'll be looking at the price carefully, but if you find...