Being an AWS CB, what do I get?

Saif. Al-Zobaydee — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 13:17:20 +0000

After my Cloud Evangelist promotion at Webstep, I got a couple of questions about what an AWS Community Builder is. The questions were mainly about the benefits, and I can say if it's only the benefits you are asking for, then maybe you are thinking of it from the other way around, but as many have asked, here is a little drill down.

What is AWS Community Builders?

It is a program organized by AWS, a unique opportunity that offers sessions including technical and non-technical knowledge sharing, networking with other AWS builders, insights into upcoming products, contact with the AWS service/product team, and much more.

Out of my personal experience

Working with different services makes you wonder why a particular feature is similar to another, missing, or placed somewhere. Regardless, it is empowering to ask that question about the said feature and get it answered by that service/product team. It feels like you have access to information that could change the course of designing a solution based on facts you've got from the service developers themselves.

Having that access does it for me! But hey, there is more!
Like this fun thing: seek minute 1:30 for a bit of surprise ;)

And no, I didn't have any paper to read from at the end :)

Anything else?

They are plenty of benefits besides these that are copied directly from the community builder page (linked below):

Access to AWS product teams and information about new services and features via weekly webinars
Learning from AWS subject matter experts on a variety of non-technical topics, including content creation and support for submitting CFPs and securing speaking engagements
AWS Promotional Credits and other helpful resources to support content creation and community-based work
Some surprises!

For instance, that t-shirt you saw me wearing at the beginning of this article, for instance, was sent to me after some meetings with the community, a subscription to cloud tutorials, and yes, you read about the AWS Credits, but how about re:Invent? :)

Having your name listed on AWS, maybe?

Ask me or look into the AWS Community Builders program page for some FAQs & application submissions.

Did this help you?

— Saif;

A software engineer’s favourite command? — live checking the incoming HTTP requests

Saif. Al-Zobaydee — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 07:34:20 +0000

disclaimer: if you are not new to bash the ending of this article might surprise you :)

I had an EC2 instance with the Apache HTTP server installed for a static site hosted in a far-faraway region.

Latency was not an issue for the site, but it sometimes took up to 600ms to load, and this still is not that much, but the client was planning on uploading more photos and videos to attract customers from across the globe.

I wanted to leverage the CloudFront service to cache the content closer to the customer for faster asset delivery but also relieving the database from unnecessary requests, thus shrinking the costs.

Before the CloudFront was in place, the network showed that the content was delivered in about 600ms, after setting up the CloudFront we got down to 150ms. It was a huge difference, and the client was happy. We made a good baseline for their site that when the client and customers would upload the photos and videos. The content would now be accessible without the need to worry about latency. Making this architectural change would also mean that we are not keeping the database busy with “read”-requests. Talk about all the free space for the DB writer to do its work now :)

I believe the CloudFront should be a default service to add in such situations. It is not difficult to set up and it adds a lot of benefits by means of caching for faster access, assets availability, and also for cutting down on trips between the customer and database.

Have you tried setting up CloudFront?
Do you have shell access and want to view the HTTP requests as they come to your site?

SSH to your Amazon Linux 2 and locate the apache logs by running:

$ cd /var/log/httpd/

and then:

$ tail -f access-log

(Tail to output the last part of files and -f to “follow” along as requests “log lines” are written to the access-log file)

This should show every request that you get (live) on your HTTP server :)

Use tail before and after the CloudFront implementation and see how decreased the requests would be to the server :)

How was this article for you? Is there anything I can help out in this regard? Maybe there is something you’d like me to improve och deep dive into for the next article? Please, do let me know :)