Tag: amazon web services - Page 2 of 2

Going Serverless

Posted in Serverless on April 5, 2016

Design patterns and server architecture change over time as technology changes. Advancements in cloud computing has created unprecedented opportunities for organizations large and small to leverage shared resources to create faster, more reliable application stacks. This allows organizations to better serve their customers with highly-available services tailored to the needs of narrower customer segments. With this new level of flexibility and power, organizations must choose how best to utilize these resources to maximize their efforts and provide the iteration capacity to adapt quickly in rapidly changing markets.

An Introduction to Serverless Architecture

Posted in Serverless on January 22, 2016

I’ve been building web applications for nearly 20 years, and the most difficult problem has always been scaling the architecture to support heavy load. With the advent of cloud computing with services like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, the cost of scaling has been dramatically reduced, but the same underlying problems of scaling still exist. When dealing with data, you still need to build complex methods of efficiently accessing records. These are challenges fit for cloud engineers, but not for your average group of developers. Several months ago Amazon Web Services released two new services. These services create a new paradigm that not only make it easier to create scalable applications in the cloud, but essentially eliminates any server maintenance. It has been coined, Serverless Architecture, and it could be the future of cloud computing.

How To: Install phpMyAdmin on Amazon Linux

Posted in How To on May 17, 2015
Last Updated: April 28, 2017

I’ve been managing a few small MySQL databases lately that often need record updates but certainly don’t warrant building a separate management interface. The easiest way to accomplish this (assuming you don’t have complicated joins and relationships) is to install phpMyAdmin, a robust, web-based admin utility for MySQL that is built in php. In my case, I’m running these mostly on Amazon Linux instances, so after a little poking around, it turns out the installation is just 3 simple steps.

How To: Install wkhtmltopdf on Amazon Linux

Posted in How To on May 2, 2015
Last Updated: August 12, 2015

The other day I was optimizing a reporting engine and needed a quick and easy way to generate PDFs from HTML templates. There are several options out there, but after some research, I decided to use wkhtmltopdf (http://wkhtmltopdf.org). It then took me a few hours of scouring the Internet to find the appropriate steps to install it on Amazon Linux. I kept running into a series of problems with the version, required libraries, and font kerning. Some trial and error, and help from some others, finally got me up and running. Here’s what worked for me.