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  • Using AWS Organizations to standardize security controls across AWS accounts

    AWS Organizations provide a helpful, zero-cost way to centralize management of AWS accounts, with support for consolidating billing, role-based permission sets, service and resource control policies, and AWS service configurations.

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  • Reducing Lambda latency by 76% with AWS Lambda Power Tuning

    Optimizing AWS Lambda memory capacity can decrease customer-facing latencies by up to 2-5 times without significantly increasing hardware costs, but can take some trial and error.

    The AWS Lambda Power Tuning tool can be used to determine the optimal memory capacity for any Lambda function within minutes, and can be set up in a few button clicks.

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  • Serializing and deserializing DynamoDB pagination tokens to support paginated APIs

    When using AWS's Java 2.x SDK, DynamoDB scan and query responses provide pagination tokens in a String to AttributeValue Map object, which represents the primary key of the last processed DynamoDB item. You can then pass this value as the "exclusive start key" for the next query to get the next page of results.

    When your service retrieves all pages of results locally, this isn't a problem. However, when you want to provide a paginated API backed by DynamoDB, you'll need to convert this attribute value map into a format that can be passed over HTTP, AKA "serialize" the object into a string.

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  • Concurrency from single host applications up to massively distributed services

    This post will describe several levels of concurrency, how they're commonly applied, and pros and cons of each approach.

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  • Process for designing distributed systems

    A step-by-step framework for designing distributed systems, from validating the problem and gathering requirements to defining APIs, data flows, architecture, and technology choices that scale with future needs.

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  • Choosing between AWS compute services

    When building a new service in AWS, it can be difficult to decide between all the available compute services. In this post I’ll give a brief overview of the main options and describe how I compare and choose between them for a given project.

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  • AWS caching options

    AWS provides several ways to cache data depending on your use case and infrastructure requirements. In many cases, you don’t need to invent the wheel and can use a fully-managed solution that does not require significant code changes.

    By caching at the appropriate layer, you can optimize latencies while minimizing unnecessary load to your backend services, allowing you to scale at a reasonable cost.

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  • AWS S3 bucket creation dates and S3 master regions

    While working on functionality that depended on AWS S3 bucket ages, I noticed that published bucket CreationDate values didn’t always reflect when the buckets were created.

    For example, when I called the S3 ListBuckets API a few minutes after updating a bucket access policy, the CreationDate value returned for that bucket was the time that I had modified the policy rather than the time that I had created the bucket. This was also reproduced when using the AWS CLI via the aws s3api list-buckets command.

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