It’s hard to escape AWS, seeing how prevalent it is in global internet infrastructure. Chances are, most websites you visit are hosted on AWS. As a software engineer, you probably encounter AWS at certain point in your career, and while getting AWS IAM credentials to work locally during development (via aws-cli) would suffice, sometimes in production land, you might need some adjustments. Having worked with AWS extensively, here are what I found to be useful to keep in mind while working with AWS IAM credentials. ...

Correction 2024-09-21: after using multi-stage build, Node image size dropped from 1.1GB to 130MB. The first programming language I achieved proficiency was Python, so for the longest time I’ve been using it to do most stuff. Last year I picked up Go, and I had a blast with it. This month I picked up Rust for data/ml works, and so far I was very impressed. It got me thinking - it’s been said multiple times is Python is slower than compiled languages, and Node is very easy to use but uses a lot of memory. Since I can code in multiple languages, why not do a simple API benchmark? So here’s the results. ...

Streamlit is well-loved by many people, especially among data folks due to the fact that it does not require prior web programming knowledge to get started. Popular use cases for streamlit can be anything from a quick machine learning application poc or internal dashboards. But what if you want to create a production deployment? Would streamlit still be a viable option? Experiment setup For a production deployment, let’s assume there are 500 concurrent users. For a single-page streamlit with a chat box taking 3 seconds to return a single-paragraph message: ...

These days there are multiple ways to deploy a workload, be it cloud-based or bare-metal. For cloud, depending on whether you are using PaaS or IaaS, backup options can vary. Why do we need to backup? Because your workloads can contain a state, this can be stored as local files, inside a database, or as other assets outside the application itself. Take a database for example, ideally you would need a daily backup so you can revert a database to a state before its corruption without losing as much data. Some workloads might store uploaded images, for simplicity let’s say they are being written to disk. ...

When it comes to IaC (infrastructure as code), most people might have heard of HashiCorp’s Terraform (it uses HCL as DSL. Interestingly enough, Terraform also has its own CDK to translate programming languages into HCL), Pulumi or AWS CDK. The latter two support programming languages as DSL. Mostly there are two camps: People who swear by HCL and think you shouldn’t use programming languages for IaC People who don’t see why you need to pick up a new language in order to use IaC, so they prefer using a programming language they already are familiar with instead Both camps are not wrong, they are both valid. However, I want to share my take on why you should use HCL for IaC. ...