This post will detail the steps to get a serverless slack command running on AWS Lambda using the Jets Serverless Ruby framework. We’ll make something fun: a command that takes in a URL, scrapes all the images on the page, filters the images using AWS image recognition, and posts the filtered images to the current slack channel. For example:

In the last post, we provided an introduction to the for in construct. This post provides more examples, shows local assignment, and covers how to set default attribute values. Remember, for is useful for data structure manipulation. Sometimes you may not get the data in the structure that is easy for you to work with, so understanding how to manipulate the data structure in Terraform can be quite useful.

In this post, we’ll cover the Terraform for in loop construct. Though it performs looping, its primary purpose is really for manipulating data structures. You can do a few things to data structures with it:

In this post, we’ll take on nested loops with Terraform. Terraform is declarative, so a nested loop can be tricky. This post hopes to help with that.

In the previous post, we established loop fundamentals. The loops were pretty basic, though. We were only able to assign a single attribute for each resource per iteration. In this post, we’ll learn how to assign multiple attributes per iteration.

In this post, we’ll cover Terraform looping constructs. Terraform is declarative, so it’s looping structure may seem weird to those used to procedural programming loops. There are a few ways to performing looping with Terraform. We’ll cover the looping constructs that specifically work at the resource level. They handle resource creation itself. There are two of them:

In this post, we’ll cover how to perform conditional logic with Terraform. It’ll be a little weird looking for those who are not used to the Terraform declarative syntax. There are only a few ways to do conditional logic with Terraform:

In this post, we’ll review the basic Terraform building blocks from the previous post, Terraform HCL Intro 1: Resources, Variables, Outputs, and compare them to a “function”. This is a contrived analogy, but folks find it helpful. You’ll also learn about Terraform locals.

This is the start of a series of posts to help introduce and learn the Terraform HCL language. It is written for those with an elementary understanding of programming already. This allows us to cover things effectively instead of being stuck in the weeds.

In this video, we’ll go over some CloudWatch Log tips. These tips will be useful for someone new to CloudWatch logs and show you how to use CloudWatch logs effectively. The biggest tip here is to click on the “Search” button immediately after clicking on a Log Group. Don’t bother clicking on individual streams and trying to find the exact AWS Lambda function.

In this video tutorial, we’ll cover CloudWatch Event Rules and how to connect them up to AWS Lambda Functions with Ruby on Jets. We’ll explain what CloudWatch Event Rules are. Then we’ll build a Jets project from scratch with the rule_event declaration. We’ll deploy the application and test the rule event. We’ll show you how simple it is to get started with Ruby on Jets and CloudWatch Event Rules.

In this video tutorial, we’ll cover CloudWatch Log Events and how to connect them up to AWS Lambda Functions with Ruby on Jets. We’ll build a Jets project from scratch with the log_event declaration. We’ll deploy the application and test the CloudWatch Log event. We’ll show you how simple it is to get started with Ruby on Jets and CloudWatch Log Events.

In this video tutorial, we’ll cover DynamoDB Stream Events and how to connect them up to AWS Lambda Functions with Ruby on Jets. We’ll build a Jets project from scratch with the dynamodb_event declaration. We’ll deploy the application and test the DynamoDB event. We’ll show you how simple it is to get started with Ruby on Jets and DynamoDB Stream Events.

In this video tutorial, we’ll cover Kinesis Events and how to connect them up to AWS Lambda Functions with Ruby on Jets. We’ll build a Jets project from scratch with the kinesis_event declaration. We’ll deploy the application and test the Kinesis event. We’ll show you how simple it is to get started with Ruby on Jets and Kinesis Events.

In this video tutorial, we’ll cover SNS Events and how to connect them up to AWS Lambda Functions with Ruby on Jets. We’ll explain what SNS Event are. Then we’ll build a Jets project from scratch with the sns_event declaration. We’ll deploy the application and test the SNS event. We’ll show you how simple it is to get started with Ruby on Jets and SNS Events.

In this video tutorial, we’ll cover SQS Events and how to connect them up to AWS Lambda Functions with Ruby on Jets. We’ll build a Jets project from scratch with the sqs_event declaration. Essentially creating an autoscaling worker processing tier. We’ll deploy the application and test the SQS event. We’ll show you how simple it is to get started with Ruby on Jets and SQS Events.

In this video tutorial, we’ll cover S3 Events and how to connect them up to AWS Lambda Functions with Ruby on Jets. We’ll explain what S3 Events are. We’ll discuss the design approach that Jets took by adding an SNS topic to the flow. Then we’ll build a Jets project from scratch with the s3_event declaration. We’ll deploy the application and test the s3 event. We’ll show you how simple it is to get started with Ruby on Jets and S3 Events.

In this video, we’ll walk through creating an API Gateway REST API from scratch manually. Just getting familiar with the API Gateway console is an excellent way to learn how simple it is for those who are new to API Gateway and trying it out for the first time. We talk a little bit about Jets and how config/routes.rb essentially maps to API Gateway resources, but the focus is really on API Gateway console. This simple exercise will help understand what Jets does for you. This post is a part of an introductory series for people who are new to API Gateway and Serverless.

This video tutorial demos the jets delete command. Since all the infrastructure is codified, deleting a Jets application is a straightforward process. What’s more interesting is that it is also easy to recreate the entire environment. jets delete For more info on the jets delete command, refer to its CLI reference.

In this video, we continue the tutorials on the Jets Ruby Serverless Framework that adds Ruby support to AWS Lambda. We talk about the difference between Jets extra vs different environments. Different environments refer to development, staging, uat, production environments. Extra environments refer to instances of each of those environments. For example, development-1, development-2, development-3, etc.

A quick way to test a Lambda function, is to add a little portion of code at the bottom of the script that tells it to run itself when it is the main script. The if statement means that the script will only run if it is ran directly vs being required as a library.

In this video, we continue the tutorials on the Jets Ruby Serverless Framework that adds Ruby support to AWS Lambda. We talk about a Jets concept called extra environments. With one environment variable JETS_ENV_EXTRA, we can create as many additional instances of environments as we wish. This helps when multiple people are asking to use the development, staging, or uat environment but cannot because it is currently used by someone else or another feature. Usually, you end up having to wait until the environment free. With this Jets concept you can create as many environments as required.

In this video, we continue the tutorials on the Jets Ruby Serverless Framework that adds Ruby support to AWS Lambda. We’ll demonstrate how to customize the properties associated with the Lambda functions that Jets creates. There are 3 ways to set function properties with Jets: at the function level, class level or application level. We’ll also explore the AWS Lambda console and shows how the Lambda function properties connect with Jets.

In this video, we continue the tutorials on the Jets Ruby Serverless Framework that adds Ruby support to AWS Lambda. We’ll demonstrate how to customize the IAM policies and roles associated with Jets Lambda functions. IAM policies are important because they handle securing access to your AWS resources so it’s worth learning them. Jets provides you with fine-grain control over the IAM permissions at the function, class, and application level.

In this video, we continue the tutorials on the Jets Ruby Serverless Framework that adds Ruby support to AWS Lambda. We’ll cover background jobs in this video. Using background jobs is a typical pattern that offloads processing outside of the web request-response cycle. Users will not wait for web pages to load if it takes too long, so background jobs are an excellent technique to keep slower work outside of the request cycle.

In this video, we continue the tutorials on the Jets Ruby Serverless Framework that adds Ruby support to AWS Lambda. We’ll cover something that is pretty important to know as a software developer: debugging. With Jets it’s pretty straightforward to look at the debugging logs both locally and remotely. Locally, the logs show up with the local running server. Remotely, the logs show up in CloudWatch Logs: available both on the AWS CloudWatch Logs console and the AWS Lambda console.

In this video tutorial, we continue how to get to started with the Jets Ruby Serverless Framework that adds Ruby support to AWS Lambda. We’ll explore the AWS Lambda Console and API Gateway to show how the AWS resources map back to Jets application code.

In this video tutorial, we cover how get to started with the Jets Ruby Serverless Framework that adds Ruby support to AWS Lambda. We’ll build the quintessential CRUD application, and more we’ll importantly explore and edit it to understand how it works. Here’s the link to the Live CRUD Demo.

This is an introductory guide to ufo, an ECS deployment tool, with AWS Fargate. Ufo helps you deploy Docker images to AWS ECS. With Fargate, you can run docker containers without having to manage servers, for an interesting “serverless” option.

Docker is kind of like git in a sense that there are only a few commands to learn to for it be useful. This tutorial focuses on the docker commands that I find myself most commonly use. This article assumes that you have a general idea of what docker is and have it installed and set up already. Hopefully, it serves as handy reference or cheatsheet for useful common docker commands.

I’ll provide a basic introduction to the mysterious VPC world. I’ll explain terms using various diagrams. We’ll also build a simple VPC network out manually to help understand VPCs.

ECS is the AWS Docker container service that handles the orchestration and provisioning of Docker containers. This is a beginner level introduction to AWS ECS. I’ve seen some nightmare posts and some glowing reviews about the ECS service, so I knew it was going to interesting to get my hands dirty and see what ECS was all about.

Task Definition — This a blueprint that describes how a docker container should launch. If you are already familiar with AWS, it is like a LaunchConfig except instead it is for a docker container instead of an instance. It contains settings like exposed port, docker image, CPU shares, memory requirement, the command to run and environmental variables. Task — This is a running container with the settings defined in the Task Definition. It can be thought of as an “instance” of a Task Definition. Service — Defines long-running tasks of the same Task Definition. This can be one running container or multiple running containers all using the same Task Definition. Cluster — A logic group of EC2 instances. When an instance launches the ecs-agent software on the server registers the instance to an ECS Cluster. This is easily configurable by setting the ECS_CLUSTER variable in /etc/ecs/ecs.config described here. Container Instance — This is just an EC2 instance that is part of an ECS Cluster and has docker and the ecs-agent running on it.

UPDATE 2022/8/12: Check out the improved CloudFormation Fundamentals Introductory Course. I am a big fan of AWS CloudFormation because it gives you the power to codify the infrastructure and provision it in a repeatable way. One thing that I’ve always wished that CloudFormation had was the ability to see the what changes would be applied ahead of time before hitting that update-stack button. Who wants to hit a big scary red button without knowing what is about to happen? I don’t.

UPDATE 2022/8/12: Check out the improved CloudFormation Fundamentals Introductory Course. In the last 2 stories, we created an EC2 instance and a Route53 record successfully with CloudFormation. We have yet to walk through the useful update-stack command though. In this post, we’ll use the 2 templates created in the first 2 posts to play around with the update-stack command.

UPDATE 2022/8/12: Check out the improved CloudFormation Fundamentals Introductory Course. This is a continuation of A Simple Introduction to AWS CloudFormation. We will build on top of the first simple CloudFormation template from Part 1, which provisions an EC2 instance and Security Group. We will add to it a Route53 record that points to the EC2 instance’s DNS public hostname. This demonstrates CloudFormation’s ability to “orchestrates” the components of the stack. CloudFormation will wait until the EC2 instance’s DNS public hostname is ready and then create the Route53 record pointing to it.

The easiest way to describe what CloudFormation is that it is a tool from AWS that allows you to spin up resources effortlessly. You define all the resources you want AWS to spin up in a blueprint document, click a button, and then AWS magically creates it all. This blueprint is called a template in CloudFormation speak.