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2023

  • 7 min read

Unraveling Recursive Loops in AWS Lambda

lambda-loop

Boardgame

The Next Station board game series begins with a London edition, and the latest addition features Tokyo. This game tasks players with redesigning the city's underground subway system. The goal is to optimize connections, serve as many attractions as possible, and make efficient use of the tunnels under the city. One of the fundamental rule of the game is that players cannot circle back to the starting station – in other words, loop is not permitted. For more information, visit: boardgamegeek

Last year, I awoke to a startling email from AWS billing service. My personal AWS account had amassed charges amounting to $4,000. Initially, I dismissed it as a bizarre dream, a shepherd's nightmare, if you will. But reality struck—it was a genuine email. The AWS billing page echoed the same staggering figure.

My AWS account is typically a sandbox for experimentation, with monthly expenses hovering around $100. So, what triggered this financial avalanche?

  • 7 min read

Yo-Yo attacks on cloud auto-scaling

Camel Up

Boardgame

Camel Up is a popular board game designed by Steffen Bogen. It is a family-friendly, light-hearted, and entertaining game that revolves around a crazy camel racing event. What makes Camel Up particularly unique and enjoyable is the unpredictability of the race. The camels stack on top of each other when they land on the same space, creating a camel stack. The camels at the top of the stack move faster, while the ones at the bottom move slower. This adds an element of surprise and excitement, making it challenging to predict the winner until the very end.

Camel Up board game and auto-scaling in the cloud may appear as two completely distinct area. However, the camels' movement—going up and down—in the game reminds me of the process of scaling resources in cloud auto-scaling.

Cloud auto-scaling is a very powerful tool, but it can also be a double-edged sword. Without the proper scaling configuration and testing it can cost cloud users a lot. So, auto-scaling is a trade of performance and cost.

  • 7 min read

Unlocking the Power of Effective Documentation

Rulebook

Boardgame

Root is a strategy board game that took the tabletop world by storm upon its release in 2018. Developed by Cole Wehrle and published by Leder Games, Root is a game of woodland might and right that pits players against each other in a battle for control over a richly detailed and immersive woodland kingdom. With its unique asymmetric gameplay, gorgeous artwork, and rich thematic setting, Root offers endless hours of fun and strategic challenge for players of all skill levels. Whether you're a seasoned tabletop enthusiast or a newcomer to the world of board games, Root is sure to captivate your imagination and test your strategic abilities to their limits. Although Root is a complex game with a rating of 3.78/5, a well-designed rulebook makes it easier to learn and start playing. For more information, please visit: BoardGameGeek

Introduction

Good documentation for a product is like a well-written rulebook in a boardgame - it makes the game easy to understand, enjoyable to play, and accessible to all.

While a board game may be well-designed and not overly complex, it can be difficult to understand and enjoy without a good rulebook. Developers often focus on writing efficient, high-quality code that meets the requirements of the project. However, the importance of good documentation is sometimes overlooked. Good documentation is an essential component of any product, as it provides a roadmap for users to effectively understand and use it.

  • 8 min read

Moving HashiCorp Terraform state file

Terraforming Mars

Boardgame

This isn't a blog about board games, but HashiCorp Terraform makes me think of the Terraforming Mars board game!

Terraforming Mars is a board game designed by Jacob Fryxelius and published by FryxGames in 2016. The game is set in the future, where players take on the role of corporations that work together to terraform Mars and make it habitable for human life. You can check more here: BoardGameGeek

Terraform state file

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) enables us to use code to manage infrastructure resources. This approach makes it easier to manage complex infrastructures, reduce manual errors, and increase efficiency.

These days HashiCorp Terraform is one of the popular IaC tools. It supports a wide range of Cloud providers and services including AWS, Azure, GCP, K8S, and many others. This enables infrastructure engineers to manage their infrastructure resources in a consistent way, regardless of the cloud provider they are using.

Terraform provides a state management mechanism to track the state of the infrastructure resources. This allows us to understand the current state of the infrastructure, identify changes that have been made, and easily make updates. Terraform stores the current state of the infrastructure in a file called tfstate. This state is used by Terraform to map real world resources to the configuration, keep track of metadata, and to improve performance for large infrastructures.