Posted on AWS Tour

Amazon VPC – Your Virtual Private Cloud

As we continue our tour of Amazon services, we come to the VPC service.  This service is not a part of their free tier, but instead one of the enterprise-focused offerings.  This service allows you to build your private cloud within their network. VPC is a Virtual Private Cloud As with all of their services, there is an excellent overview and summary page.  You may ask what a private cloud is.  We have discussed the Cloud in prior posts, but only briefly.  In general, a Cloud service allows resources pooled in a way that the hardware is not necessary.  This pool might be a powerful cloud server on your desktop that lets you spawn virtual machines of a variety of shapes and sizes.  It may... Read more

elasticache
Posted on AWS Tour

Amazon ElastiCache – High-Speed Access to Your Data

We have looked at several resources AWS provides.  These include databases, disk storage, and processing.  Now we turn to a way to access system memory via the ElastiCache service. What is an In Memory DataStore? When you look at the ElastiCache overview page, there is a focus on an in-memory data store.  It may help to start with that.  Computers traditionally have three places to store data.  These generally can be labeled as external, internal, and RAM.  External storage is data on a device outside of the computer such as a CD-ROM, floppy disk (if you remember them) or memory stick/external drive.  Internal storage is an internal hard drive whether that is disk based or solid state.  RAM is memory... Read more

Amazon Rekognition
Posted on AWS Tour

Amazon Rekognition – Easy Facial Recognition

One of the best things about being a developer is the ability to create cool solutions to problems.  Of course, as technology advances the definition of cool does as well.  For example, the latest buzz-worthy solution out there might be facial recognition.  This feature is the ability to scan images and find a match for a person.  It is CSI and similar TV program technology, but Amazon has made it more accessible.  This latest impressive service from Amazon is called Rekognition. A High-End AWS Service Amazon services are all built in a way that allows hobbyists and low budget companies to ease into some otherwise inaccessible solutions.  We have seen this with typical needs like virtual machines, but it does not... Read more

CodeStar
Posted on AWS Tour

Amazon CodeStar – A Complete Development Environment

During our tour of AWS services, we have touched on several developer tools.  We still have several to go, but the recently announced CodeStar is a better way to dive into these services. CodeStar is an Entire Environment The CodeStar service is a wrapper of sorts.  It guides you through some steps to select the type of development desired and then it builds out an environment.  However, this process does not just build out a development environment.  It builds out the tools needed for everything involved in the process.  This includes version control, build management, a project wiki, links to Jira for task tracking and more.  This service provides you an enterprise development environment quickly and easily. Skip the Details One... Read more

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Posted on Become a Better Developer

Creating Use Cases and Gathering Requirements

Starting a Project Right When you look at statistics about how often IT projects fail or come up short it is hard to ignore properly defining the problem.  Two of the most common themes in failed projects are a lack of definition and a lack of usefulness.  In this first step in our video series, we look at finding the “why” for a project.  Then we look at how to build and document use cases. Use Cases Done Right There is no magic to creating use cases.  All that is required is an understanding of how a process should flow.  It is not a technical task or skill, but good use cases do lead to higher success rates in a project.... Read more