Posts Tagged aws

Provisioned Concurrency: Avoiding Cold Starts in AWS Lambda

Thursday, Dec 19, 2019

AWS Lambda cold starts (the time it takes for AWS to assign a worker to a request) are a major frustration point of many serverless programmers. In this article, we will take a look at the problem of latency-critical serverless applications, and how Provisioned Concurrency impacts the status-quo.

Concurrency Model of AWS Lambda

Despite being serverless, AWS Lambda uses lightweight containers to process incoming requests. Every container, or worker, can process only a single request at any given time.

AWS EKS - How to Scale Your Cluster

Thursday, Dec 5, 2019

AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) provides a range of performance and control for dynamically scaling your Kubernetes clusters, including Managed Node Groups, Fargate, and Manually-Managed Node Groups in EC2. In this post, we’ll see how to use each of these compute options, and when to prefer one over the other in order to maximize productivity, flexibility, and control, based on your needs.

Running AWS IAM Access Analyzer at Deployment Time

Tuesday, Dec 3, 2019

Yesterday AWS announced an exciting new feature — the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer — a service powered by automated reasoning that detects potentially-insecure access to your AWS resources, including S3 Buckets, SQS Queues, Lambdas, and more. At the same time, Pulumi announced a new policy as code solution, CrossGuard, that validates policies at deployment time. The question is: Can IAM Access Analyzer and Pulumi CrossGuard be combined to get the best of both solutions? The answer is Yes!

Inside Crosswalk for Kubernetes

Thursday, Nov 21, 2019

This post describes an early version of Crosswalk for Kubernetes. Some of the links, examples, and implementation details may have changed. For the most up-to-date information, see the Pulumi Kubernetes documentation.

Running Kubernetes in production can be challenging. This past year, Pulumi has collected common patterns of usage informed by best practices for provisioning Kubernetes infrastructure and running containerized applications. We call this Pulumi Crosswalk for Kubernetes: a collection of playbooks and libraries to help you to successfully configure, deploy, and manage Kubernetes in a way that works for teams in production.

Architect AWS Application Infrastructure

Thursday, Oct 17, 2019

In this post, we will talk about the best way to architect your Pulumi applications. We are going to build out the following infrastructure in AWS:

AWS Fargate service that does not serve traffic directly
AWS ALB as the entry point to the Fargate Service
AWS RDS Instance that is stored in a separate network from the Application and does not service traffic directly from the internet

To do this, we are going to split the infrastructure into two AWS VPCs. One VPC will be used for the application based resources (e.g Fargate Service, ALB) and the other VPC will be for the database resources. The VPCs will be peered to allow communication between them so that the application can communicate with the database securely.

Run Your Own RSS Server on AWS with Pulumi

Monday, Sep 16, 2019

Some of the code in this post is out of date. See the AWS guides for an updated overview and examples.

It’s been a few years since Google shut down Google Reader, and while a number of nice commercial alternatives have sprung in its wake, none of them has ever been quite the right fit for me personally.

So a while back, after far too much time spent wandering the blogsphere manually, typing URLs into address bars by hand, I decided to go looking to see whether the universe had produced an open-source solution to this problem — and to my surprise and delight, it had! Miniflux is an excellent little open-source RSS server and reader, written in Go and backed by PostgreSQL, that also happens to be packaged as a Docker container. So in this post, I’ll show how easy it is to deploy a Miniflux server of your own on AWS, using only Pulumi and a few lines of TypeScript.

Multicloud Kubernetes: Running Apps Across EKS, AKS, and GKE

Wednesday, Aug 14, 2019

Kubernetes clusters from the managed platforms of AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and GCP Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) all vary in configuration, management, and resource properties. This variance creates unnecessary complexity in cluster provisioning and application deployments, as well as for CI/CD and testing.

Additionally, if you wanted to deploy the same app across multiple clusters for specific use cases or test scenarios across providers, subtleties such as LoadBalancer outputs and cluster connection settings can be a nuisance to manage.

In this post, we’ll see how to use Pulumi to deploy the kuard app across EKS, AKS, GKE and a local Kubernetes cluster, such as Docker Desktop or a self-managed cluster. We’ll spin up the clusters in each provider, launch the app, and manage both cluster and app using the TypeScript programming language.

Persisting Kubernetes workloads with Amazon EFS CSI volumes

Monday, Jul 15, 2019

Some parts of this blog post are out-of-date. As an alternative, please refer to the EFS CSI Helm Chart and Pulumi’s support for deploying helm charts

The Amazon Elastic File System Container Storage Interface (CSI) Driver implements the CSI specification for container orchestrators to manage the lifecycle of Amazon EFS filesystems. The CSI specification defines an interface along with the minimum operational and packaging recommendations for a storage provider to implement a CSI compatible plugin. The interface declares the RPCs that a plugin must expose. The CSI drivers are the right mechanism to work with, when using a cloud storage component with Kubernetes workloads. Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides parallel shared access through a standard file system interface to Amazon EC2 instances and Linux-based workloads without disrupting your applications. EFS is a regional service storing data across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) for high availability and durability.

ECS vs Fargate vs EKS: The Lowdown on Containers in AWS

Thursday, Jun 20, 2019

Some of the code in this post is out of date. See the AWS guides for an updated overview and examples.

An updated breakdown of when to prefer Fargate and when EC2 can be found in Fargate vs EC2

Amazon offers multiple solutions for running containers in AWS, through its managed Elastic Container Service (ECS). This includes three major approaches: ECS managed automatically with Fargate, ECS backed by EC2 instances, and Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), delivering the full power of Kubernetes. It's not always easy to choose between these, so in this article we provide some basic guidance on the tradeoffs you'll encounter when choosing.

AWS CloudWatch made easy with Pulumi Infrastructure-as-Code

Friday, Jun 14, 2019

Pulumi Crosswalk for AWS modules can be used to get first class insights and visualizations directly inside your Pulumi application.

As cloud applications tend to be long-lived, we think it’s vital that it be possible to get regular insights on the performance of the application at all times. Using Crosswalk for AWS Pulumi applications allow you to easily define and visualize the appropriate metrics that show the health of your services, create alarms to let you know when something is wrong, and easily create dashboards to get live visualization of what is happening in the cloud. Because this is vital to the health of the application, we think this should be something built in from the start, and not something added after the fact as an out of band artifact.