AWS Lambda & Perl - The Journey Begins

Perl has been the odd man out as more modern programming languages take hold and gain the support of the software development community.  There is no doubt that Perl 5 has been left in the dust with regard to support from vendors of all kinds.  It is rare to see an API written for Perl for any of the cloud services.  It seems to be left up to the Perl community itself to provide support for many of these APIs.

A few weeks ago I released version 0.0.1 of a framework for creating AWS Lambdas in Perl.   It is a challenge to continue to develop in Perl and becomes more and more challenging as other languages continue to gain support, however I don't think the Perl community is giving up.  While I'm quite willing to learn Python and embrace new methods, I also see the need for supporting legacy environments with a large investment in Perl code.  I also enjoy a challenge. :-)

AWS Lambda Gotchas - libcrypt.so.10 Hell and Back

This is part of continuing series of blog posts regarding AWS Lambda and Perl.

As I continue my deep dive into making Perl work effectively as a Lambda runtime, I hit the libcrypto wall that so many other people on the wire have encountered...even Pythonistas!

CodeBuild 2019 or "How I built perl for less than 3 cents"

This is my second (or third) dalliance with AWS CodeBuild.  I think I'm starting to like it now though.  I recently wrote a bash script to compile a version of perl to create Lambdas as part of my Perl Lambda project.  My so-called `make-a-perl` script will instantiate an EC2, download the perl source code, compile it, zip it up and copy it to an S3 bucket.

I suspected I could use AWS CodeBuild to do all of the aforementioned operations, but did not want to descend down the CodeBuild rabbit hole once more.  But alas, the temptation was just too much!

RPM Virtual Packages and Ordering

I recently decided to use an RPM virtual package (one that offers no files but merely Requires others) in order to lock down the version of packages that were being installed when an EC2 was provisioned.  Much to my chagrin it failed miserably when yum loaded packages in an unexpected order.  So, can you tell yum what order to load your RPMs?

Binding parameters for Oracle INTERVAL Literals

If you've ever tried to use the Perl DBI to execute a SQL statement like this:

select sysdate + interval '1' month from dual

...and wanted to make the interval a parameter, you may have tried various permutations, gotten frustrated and just injected a string into the query.  There is a solution...

AWS CodeBuild - HowTo

Amazon Web Services' CodeBuild is a managed service that allows developers to build projects from source.

Typically CodeBuild is used as part of your CI/CD pipeline, perhaps along with other AWS tools like CodeCommit, CodePipeline and CodeDeploy.

This blog will explore the use of CodeBuild to build the Bedrock project and update a yum repository.  Along the way I'll detail some of the things I've learned and the path I took to automating the Bedrock build.

AWS CodeBuild and why I have no hair left

I'll blog soon about AWS CodeBuild and CodePipeline when I get around to documenting all of my frustrations but for now,  to save some poor souls from losing their hair, here are some quick tips:

1. CodeBuild is not very helpful regarding malformed YAML in your buildspec.yml file.  If things don't work, check to make sure your buildspec.yml file is well formed.
2. As if that were not bad enough, even if it is well formed, if you include elements it does not recognize it might just skip them silently.  I inadvertently used pre-build instead of pre_build and lost some hair on that one.
3. As verified in this blog post, CodeBuild will not upload artifacts to the root of a bucket - it really wants a folder name.  Odd really, since S3 objects have key names and folders do not really exist.  I was trying to create a yum repository in a bucket that is hosting a website and wanted my files to in the root of the bucket.  No can do pal.
4. If you want to sync some files to said website bucket and are making the site publicly available by setting permissions as I was using the CLI, you'll need to make sure that your CodeBuild policy that is attached to the role you use to run CodeBuilder has the proper permissions to your S3 bucket.  In this case you'll need ListObject, PutObject, GetObject, and PutObjectAcl.   Here's what the policy might look like:

{

    "Version": "2012-10-17",

    "Statement": [

        {

            "Effect": "Allow",

            "Resource": [

                "arn:aws:logs:us-east-1:*********:log-group:/aws/codebuild/bedrock-build",

                "arn:aws:logs:us-east-1:*********:log-group:/aws/codebuild/bedrock-build:*"

            ],

            "Action": [

                "logs:CreateLogGroup",

                "logs:CreateLogStream",

                "logs:PutLogEvents"

            ]

        },

        {

            "Effect": "Allow",

            "Resource": [

                "arn:aws:s3:::codepipeline-us-east-1-*"

            ],

            "Action": [

                "s3:PutObject",

                "s3:GetObject",

                "s3:GetObjectVersion"

            ]

        },

        {

            "Effect": "Allow",

            "Resource": [

                "arn:aws:s3:::openbedrock",

                "arn:aws:s3:::openbedrock/*",

                "arn:aws:s3:::repo.openbedrock.net",

                "arn:aws:s3:::repo.openbedrock.net/*"

            ],

            "Action": [

                "s3:Put*",

                "s3:Get*",

                "s3:List*"

            ]

        }

    ]

}

More about my adventures with CodeBuild and CodePipeline later...