Introduction At Xebia we know that having fun is the best way to innovate! To keep our consultants inspired and up-to-date we organize innovation days. At innovation days we experiment, test and tinker with the latest technologies. Last innovation day, Friday 16th November 2018, our cloud consultants, Thijs de Vries, Martijn van de Grift, Kevin Kessels and Dennis Vriend battled it out with a cross cloud version of Battleship, who will win? Read more...

Introduction Sometimes you have to find files and folders on a computer. When you are working on a terminal in a remote system then there is no Apple Spotlight to help you search through your servers. Fortunately both Linux and Mac come with a command-line tool called ‘find’ that helps us find files and directories. It can even operate on files and directories in bulk. Lets learn some ‘find’ today! Read more...

Introduction In my blog AWS Elasticsearch Service with Firehose Delivery Stream and Analyzing API Gateway Access Logs with AWS Elasticsearch Service we saw how easy it is to setup an Elasticsearch cluster, ingesting data data from Firehose and creating dashboards in Kibana. This time we will ingest data from AWS CloudFront CDN. CloudFront stores its data in a S3 bucket. We will simulate CloudFront by uploading a CloudFront log file to the bucket. Read more...

Introduction Amazon Simple Storage Storage (S3) is a service that stores objects by means of a key and a value. The data associated with a key can easily be accessed by means of a web service API. S3 is a core service of AWS and is perfectly suited for storing any kind of data. S3 supports a feature called ‘Event Notifications’ that enables you to create event driven systems. Read more...

Have you ever broken your python installation? Or did your machine crashed right before you need to do something on AWS? Attended a workshop and not able to install all tools you needed? I’ve got you covered! With just a single command. This is how it works! Run this command and you are in a container with all the tools available. Of course you can check out the Dockerfile to find out which packages are installed an how to upgrade them. Read more...

Introduction In my blog AWS Elasticsearch Service with Firehose Delivery Stream we saw how easy it is to setup an Elasticsearch cluster, ingesting data data from Firehose and creating dashboards in Kibana. This time we use the same architecture to ingest access logs from AWS ApiGateway and analyze the data in Kibana. API Gateway Account In every AWS account there is a single API Gateway (APIGW) service. APIGW can hosts multiple RestApi instances. Read more...

Introduction When creating Lambda functions and deploy the functions using CloudFormation, the python code can be inline or packaged in a zip file. When no third party packages are required or tests are created, inline works fine. For very simple use cases this is ok. If you want to be able to test the python function locally, it should be a separate file (and not part of the CloudFormation template). Read more...

Introduction AWS Elasticsearch Service is a total solution for ingesting, processing and visualizing log data. The service has several use cases. For ad hoc analysis the service is ideal because it is easy to setup, is inexpensive, is easy to operate after you are done you can remove the service. The service can also be used as an operational dashboard, where it continuously ingests, aggregates and visualizes the data. Read more...

Introduction Ping-pong is an interesting game. It is a game where two players hit a lightweight ball back and forth across a table using small rackets. The game takes place on a hard table divided by a net. When you look at the game as an observer you see some interesting things. The players act only when the ball is on their side of the table. Only then a player swings the racket and the ball starts to travel the other way. Read more...

Google Storage Buckets is the service from Google to store unstructured data that can be accesses by a key. By default Google will encrypt and decrypt the data to and from disk using a google managed encryption key. In this blog we will show you how to use a customer managed key for encryption. Enabling encryption at rest As with all Google Cloud services, encryption is applied both in transit and at rest. Read more...