AWS re:Invent Day 3

How do you feed 30,000 people?  Hangar 1

Intense day 3!

• 5 breakout sessions.
• Breakfast at 7:30am, first session 10:00, last session ends at 6:00pm.
• Reception in the vendor hall from 6-7pm (lot's of tee shirts and goodies!)

Read on for some session recaps...

AWS re:Invent Day 2

Monday, November 28th is bootcamp day.  Attended an AWS Solutions Architect Associate prep course given by some Amazon employees.  Excellent overview of what to expect in the Associates exam with pointers on how to interpret the questions and what you should be focusing on.

Yeah, but where's the holodeck?

The bootcamp was 4 hours (8am-12pm) at the Wynne Encore.   After taking the bootcamp I feel confident in passing the test, but am reminded of how many services AWS encompasses and how deep the information for each service is.  I'll study some  more.  ;-)

A lot of this is also a moving target as the certification test questions are not keeping up with the announcements being made regarding increasing capacity, capabilities and decreasing prices.

AWS re:Invent Day 1

Here we are at the Amazon annual re:Invent for another year of mind blowing technological advancement in cloud computing.  This is my fourth year attending and so far I can tell this is going to be filled with exciting technology, even more walking than 2015 (argh!) and even more standing patiently in line.

Over 30,000 people are registered so it's grown beyond the ability of the Venetian to hold the event.  This year there are events at the Mirage and the Wynne hotels in additon to the Venetian, making the logistics of schedule making a real challenge for both attendees and the conference coordinators.

Arrived on Sunday and picked up my SWAG...yet another hoody...and a surprise.  An Echo Dot sponsored by Capital One!

I'll be posting some notes about each day...

Bedrock & Regular Expressions

Regular expressions are a powerful tool that every programmer should be familiar with.  Perl programmers are typically well versed in using regular expressions but you can find many tools and languages that support regular expressions.   Even Bedrock!

Creating a yum repository using AWS S3 buckets

Here's a short bash script I use to create a yum repo in an S3 bucket.  The script does five (5) things:

1. creates a local repo in a temporary directory
2. copies an RPM file to the local repo
3. creates the yum repository using createrepo
4. syncs the local directory with the S3 bucket
5. sets public permissions for the bucket (make sure this is what you actually want to do)

Before you get started create the bucket and configure it to host a static website.  No worries if you don't actually have an index.html.

Create the bucket:

$ aws s3 mb s3://openbedrock-repo

Then configure it to host static files:

$ aws s3 website s3://openbedrock-repo --index-document index.html

Here's the bash script to create the repo:

1:  #!/bin/bash  
2:    
3:   # $ sudo $0 path-to-rpm [bucket]  
4:     
5:   # create a temporary repo  
6:   repo=$(mktemp -d)  
7:   mkdir ${repo}/noarch  
8:   if test -n "$2"; then  
9:    BUCKET="$2"  
10:   else  
11:    BUCKET=openbedrock-repo  
12:   fi  
13:     
14:   # create a temporary local repo and sync with AWS S3 repo  
15:   if test -e "$1"; then  
16:     cp "$1" ${repo}/noarch  
17:     createrepo $repo  
18:   # sync local repo with S3 bucket, make it PUBLIC  
19:     PERMISSION="--grants read=uri=http://acs.amazonaws.com/groups/global/AllUsers"  
20:     aws s3 sync --recursive --include="*" ${repo} s3://$BUCKET/ $PERMISSION  
21:     aws s3 ls s3://$BUCKET/  
22:   # cleanup local copy of repo  
23:     rm -rf $repo  
24:   fi  
25:     

Catching Exceptions in Bedrock

When things go wrong, it's a good idea to actually try to handle the mess.  Most higher level programming languages have exception handling built in.  While Bedrock is not a programming language, it is useful for a templating language to have the ability to catch exceptions.  Today's blog describes how Bedrock's <try/catch> blocks can be use with your Application Plugins.

5 Reasons to Love Your Chromebook

I'm still adjusting to my gorgeous CB5-571 - Acer 15.6 Chromebook with 1080p Full HD display after using the

Acer C720 for nearly two years.  I love my itty bitty little C720 and it' still fantastic for traveling and throwing on the couch, but wait until you see the 15.6" Acer Chromebook.  Screen is amazing.  Videos and sound are awesome!  It's big, so if you want to lug a big laptop, this one's for you.  I'm holding off on the full review until I've had a full month with the beast, but it really is an amazing piece of technology for the money.  Gushing on my Chromebook made me list the 5 things I love about my Chromebook the most.