A Jenkins agent/slave must be able to communicate back to its master, which is simple to setup when everything’s in the same AWS VPC. But how will it work if we deploy the agent to a different VPC? In this article you’ll discover how to use VPC endpoints to enable a Jenkins agent in one […]
3 options for cross-account VPC access in AWS
Using separate AWS accounts provides strong separation of resources, which is great until the point you need cross-account access from a VPC in one account to another. In this article you’ll learn 3 ways to setup a secure connection across accounts, with full working examples you can try out yourself. Why do we need cross-account […]
gradle vs. gradlew – what’s the difference?
One of the most common questions for anyone using Gradle is what’s the difference between gradle vs. gradlew. Each is a Gradle command with a particular use case in mind. Here you’ll learn what each command does, and when to use one over the other. Quick summaryIf you’re working in a project that has a […]
How and when to use a Prometheus gauge
A Prometheus gauge is a specific type of metric used for measurements. That means your service always returns to Prometheus the current value of whatever it is you’re measuring. Prometheus is regularly scraping your service for metrics though, and when your gauge’s current value is returned Prometheus stores this against the current time. You’ll then […]
Integrating AWS CodeBuild into Jenkins pipelines
With Jenkins being so well adopted as the continuous integration service of choice, why would we consider other tools like AWS CodeBuild? Whilst Jenkins is the feature rich old-timer of the CI world with over 1,500 plugins, some tasks are just better suited to other tools. In this article you’ll discover why you’d want to […]
5 reasons for developers to get an AWS certification
AWS is the leading cloud provider with 32% of the market share. It offers highly available and cost effective services, so it’s no surprise companies are migrating from on-premises to AWS in droves. As developers, we’re often caught in the middle of this, being asked to re-architect software to new models such as containers or […]
AWS ECS deployments step-by-step
The default ECS deployment type is called rolling update. With this simple approach, running ECS tasks are replaced with new ECS tasks. You control this process with the deployment configuration, where you define the minimum and maximum number of tasks allowed during a deployment. Through this mechanism you can ensure enough tasks are running to […]
S3 bucket access from the same and another AWS account
Creating an S3 bucket is easy enough, but to apply the principle of least privilege properly we need to understand how to create the right permissions for specific IAM identities. This might be straightforward if it weren’t for the multiple ways to configure permissions in S3, each having its own rules and edge cases. This […]
How I grew a programming blog to 25,000 monthly visitors in 12 months
If you’re a developer then you’ll know that when searching for answers to programming issues online, blogs often provide the answers you’re looking for. These blogs, written by coders like you and I, approach problems and explain things in ways that official documentation doesn’t and can’t. I didn’t realise this until I started writing my […]
Jenkins vs. AWS CodeBuild for building Docker applications
If you’re deploying your application as a container in AWS, then your continuous integration (CI) process will need to build a Docker image. Jenkins, a popular build tool used by many companies, can be extended to build Docker images. Before doing that though, why not consider AWS CodeBuild? It is after all the CI tool […]