development languages
Posted on General

Learning a New Development Language

Modern developers have to learn more than one or two languages during their career.  Thus, any steps that can improve your ability to ramp to a new language will add value to your resume.  In my time spent learning dozens of languages, I have found a few steps that help.  Everyone learns a little differently.  However, these help add a language as a tool rather than master the syntax. What is The Purpose? Nearly every language has a primary purpose.  For example, HTML and PHP are for building web applications.  Java is for cross-platform development.  There are a few general purpose languages (C, C++, and the like).  However, there tends to be a problem or family of challenges at which... Read more

Codecommit
Posted on AWS Tour

Amazon CodeCommit

As we continue our lengthy tour through Amazon services under the AWS umbrella let’s look at CodeCommit.  This is the code repository service offered by Amazon.  The repository provides version control via git.  It is also an important part of their developer tools group of services. What is git? Git is a distributed version control tool.  That means it allows developers to track changes to code source and do so without having to stay connected to a central repository.  In short, git allows developers to commit changes to a local repository and then publish them to a central server to make them available to other developers.  If you don’t understand version control then move along, there is nothing to see... Read more

compliance reports
Posted on AWS Tour

Amazon Compliance Reports

One of the services Amazon provides that is not really a service is compliance reports.  These documents are important to anyone that uses AWS for commercial purposes.  This particular service is also known as AWS Artifact and can be found at this link.  You can also look at the overview at this page. Who Needs Compliance Reports? A small business may never care about compliance reports.  However, these can be very important if your business deals in financial information, credit cards, or personal data.  The compliance reports provide documentation about your environment and can build trust in customers.  These documents are also important for a company that desires ISO certification or wants to pass a security audit. This documentation does not guarantee... Read more

a glacier
Posted on AWS Tour

Amazon Glacier – Low Cost, Long Term Storage

As we continue our AWS tour, we come to Glacier.  It is Amazon’s solution for long-term storage of large files.  We have discussed their S3 storage solution in a couple of other articles.  However, think of this as the next step in storage. Glacier is Like Offsite Tape Storage If S3 is your hard drive in the cloud, then glacier is your long-term tape archive storage in the cloud.  You can check out what Amazon says about this service here or take our word for it. They provide a couple of tiers of access to Glacier vaults depending on how fast you need to get your data back.  A vault is a location for storing an archive.  The data costs are minimal... Read more

workmail
Posted on AWS Tour

Amazon WorkMail – An Introduction

Nearly everyone has a Google mail account these days.  In case you haven’t paid attention, those are the email addresses that end with Gmail.  This makes sense as it is a free service that provides a lot of functionality.  However, it does not allow you to customize your address, nor can you use a company domain.  There is “Google for Business” that provides these options, but before you try that, let’s take a look at Amazon’s competitor WorkMail. WorkMail is Part of a Suite There is a slowly growing suite of services that Amazon categorizes under business productivity.  This category currently includes WorkMail, WorkDocs, and Chime.  We will look at the other services in future posts.  However, there is some benefit... Read more

AWS Tour Logo
Posted on AWS Tour

Amazon Lightsail – What is it?

We are big fans of the Amazon Web Services army of tools.  Thus, we plan on digging deeper into the various services and will keep you informed of our journey.  In this article, we will look at Amazon Lightsail.  It is a service in their “Compute” group.  It is not free, but instead, has a set monthly cost that is perfect for gauging your development overhead. What Does Lightsail Provide? The Lightsail service, at a high level, is a quick start for EC2 instances.  Lightsail allows the user to set a monthly subscription/cost based on instance size.  The server includes storage and IP allocation.  Our Launch Your Internet Business walks people through this process via the typical steps.  We have found... Read more