Pages with tag Amazon Web Services

Amazon employees demand stopping face-recognition contract with federal government Among the Amazon Web Services is Rekognition, a facial recognition system running on Amazon's cloud. Anyone can sign up with the service, to have video analyzed to identify people or objects. Turns out the federal government is using this service for various tasks including deportation and detention programs run by ICE, the Immigration Control force. A group of Amazon employees have written to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos demanding that Amazon not do as IBM did during the 1940's when IBM's systems were used by Nazi Germany to help round up the Jews.

Getting started with AWS Lambda, Amazons Function as a Service platform AWS Lambda lets developers write code, execute the code at any scale in the AWS cloud, without worrying about implementing the scaling algorithm. Lambda focuses on very small modules - the name implies Functions, and that is the preferred granularity level. "Function as a Service" platforms are available from several providers, AWS Lambda having been joined by Microsoft Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, and IBM Cloud Functions. All are focusing on the same idea, Functions as the granularity level, and automatic deployment and scaling, letting developers focus on their code and the cloud provider focuses on the rest. AWS Lambda is the most developed of these, so lets take a look.

Getting started with using Node.js and the Serverless framework on AWS Lambda While Amazon's AWS platform is excellent, there are other similar platforms from Google, IBM, Microsoft and others. Why should our code be written solely to support the AWS infrastructure? The Serverless framework makes it easy to reuse the same application code on any of these functions-as-a-service platforms. Perhaps more importantly, it simplifies coding against these platforms. The AWS platform is incredibly complex, and using the Serverless framework is simplifies developing applications for the AWS platform.

Global and Local Secondary indexes in DynamoDB Years ago, Amazon engineers studying SQL queries learned complex queries with JOINs and whatnot were not widely used, and from that observation developed DynamoDB. DynamoDB is a NoSQL database available in the Amazon cloud service offering. It has some interesting characteristics, one of which is the method to use secondary indexes.

How to correctly log in to AWS Elastic Container Registry on Windows command line The Elastic Container Registry (ECR) is a Docker container registry for use while deploying containers to AWS ECS. It is convenient and relatively easy to use. AWS helpfully supplies command strings to log in to ECR from the command line so you can publish container images with docker push. But the supplied command line for Windows doesn't work right, and needlessly relies on a tool that seems to not be very useful.

How to fix AWS CLI hangs on AWS EC2 instance It seems that setting up an AWS EC2 instance in the default VPC stands a high chance of being unable to use the AWS CLI from inside the instance. That was my experience, anyway, and the solution is extremely non-obvious, non-intuitive, and requires ensuring that the instance can do outbound HTTPS traffic, and uses the correct public DNS servers.

How to get AWS SDK for Node.js to return Promises to use with async/await functions The AWS SDK for JavaScript/Node.js documentation describes receiving results the old way, using a callback function. In the modern era of JavaScript we know what to do -- we wrap such functions in await new Promse, hold our nose, and embed the callback within the Promise. I published an article on the Sourcerer blog describing how to interact with DynamoDB from a Node.js Lambda function, and then a reader asked why it used "await new Promise". A bit of searching revealed that indeed Amazon had updated the SDK to support Promises, but it seems the SDK documentation has not been updated. What follows is a quick example of an AWS Lambda function calling DynamoDB methods using Promise objects in an async/await, and deployed using the Serverless Framework.

Introduction to Node.js with the Serverless framework on AWS Lambda AWS Lambda has excellent support for Node.js code. As of this writing Lambda supports Node.js 8.10, meaning we have excellent async function support and other modern ES2015+ language features.

Introduction to Node.js with the Serverless framework on AWS Lambda AWS Lambda lets programmers focus on their code, with AWS taking care of all the deployment drama issues.

Setting up the AWS Command-Line-Interface (CLI) tool on your laptop The AWS platform is an incredibly diverse and mature cloud hosting platform, and the AWS CLI is your gateway to interacting with AWS from the comfort of your laptop. Instead of going click-click-click on the AWS website, you type commands from the command line, and you can even use those commands in scripts for semi-automated control of AWS resources. In this guide we'll go over how to install the AWS CLI tool on your laptop.

Simple Node.js AWS Lambda function AWS Lambda has excellent support for Node.js code. As of this writing Lambda supports Node.js 8.10, meaning we have excellent async function support and other modern ES2015+ language features.