Topher's AWS Blog

Mini-Project 1: Private VPC Communication

Quick Highlights: Private EC2 transversing AWS public space via gateway endpoint.

This mini-project allowed me to understand how to enable an EC2 hosted within a private subnet with a SSM agent installed locally to communicate with System Manager. The private subnet was not configured with a route to the IGW and instead was provided three endpoint instances to System Manager keeping it truly private. An S3 bucket was configured with a VPC gateway endpoint to allow the private EC2 to read the S3 bucket without the need to transverse across the AWS public zone and keep the instance truly private.

Mini-Project 2: DynamoDB Stream Trigger

Quick Highlights: Email notification through SNS after triggered lambda function on DynamoDB stream.

This project spurred a lot of similar mini-projects that I have not documented as it provided me a solid foundation for configuring triggered based events. In short, there is a dynamoDB table for this mini-project and when a particular attribute of the DynmanoDB table updates, it triggers a lambdda function via the exports and streams that look at the records sent from DynamnoDB, and if that particular attribute is changed to true, it sends an email notification via SNS. This project was also informative as it allowed me to visually see how creating a global secondary index is beneficial to querying data from the table instead of scanning it which takes up more read capacity units for a DynamnoDB table.

Mini-Project 3: Thumbnail Picture Generation

Quick Highlights: Upload a picture to a source bucket which triggers a lambda function and sends it to a destination bucket.

The ultimate goal of this project was to implement something more public facing and less private through API gateway which I will get around too eventually. However, I thought the process and job was worth documenting. I am more familiar with Python coding and this was my first project in which lambda did not have all the necessary libraries by default, learning how to download the required libraries and package them to install into a zip file was a first for me. I ended up performing this in the cloudshell environment in my AWS console and just sending the zip file to the source S3 bucket so lambda could easily find it. I also had to learn to troubleshoot some lambda error codes as some times the lambda would fail on some timing errors but this was quickly fixed by increasing the timeout to above 3 seconds.

Mini-Project 4: Simple Serverless App

Quick Highlights: Reading DynamoDB data through a secure API gateway endpoint .

This was one of the project I like to view as a cornerstone project to get familiar with some of the more popular AWS services that was understood in theory but not practically. Most of my previous interaction with API gateway was through preconfigured examples through cloudformation templates. This projects allowed me to get under the hood a little for an API REST Gateway. Additionally, playing around data in DynamoDB is rather interesting to me as the NoSQL databases are much easier to learn and jump in with in many serverless projects with hardly any cost and minimal configuration. This is a project that I would like to build on with adding more features in and use this as a template to build off of for future projects.

Mini-Project 5: Patching EC2's with AWS System Manager

Quick Highlights: Managing EC2 instances with Systems Manager.

This project focused on the administrative tasks one might find themselves using when in the role of being an AWS administrator. This particular feature is not heavily referenced within solutions architect curriculum as is likely more featured within the Sysops certification. This project was relatively straight forward but it was good to understand how with the use of systems manager and ssm agent how easily organizations can push out patches or perform other administrative tasks. I specifically picked these two OS's as they come preconfigured with SSM agents installed which made this project easier to run through quickly. My goal is to take a more dedicated lesson or short course into how you can further leverage this service.