IntelliJ IDEA 2020.1 was released in April 2020 and represents the first major update of the year. Here are the 5 key new features that every Java developer should know about. 1. Automatic JDK download Fed up of endlessly searching for the right JDK online? This new feature integrates the downloading of JDKs directly into […]
AWS SNS for CloudWatch alarm email notifications
Do you want to learn how to setup email notifications to tell you about important events that happen in CloudWatch? In this article you’ll discover how to setup the AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS) to send you emails whenever a CloudWatch alarm gets triggered. We’ll run through a full working example, setting up the alarm […]
Shipping AWS EC2 logs to CloudWatch with the CloudWatch agent
Want to learn how to monitor EC2 logs automatically without having to manually log into servers? Well, in this article we’ll explore how to setup the CloudWatch agent on an EC2 instance to easily stream your logs to AWS. We’ll also setup a simple alarm for when the logs contain certain text that we want […]
Running Docker in Docker on Windows (Linux containers)
If you need to run Docker within a container, or in other words Docker in Docker, this can sometimes be confusing, especially in Windows where it’s not obvious how Docker is setup. In this article, we’ll be lifting the covers on Docker for Windows and exploring how to run Docker commands in containers. Note that […]
When to use an AWS S3 VPC endpoint
What is an S3 VPC endpoint? To understand what an S3 VPC endpoint is, we first need to know what problem it solves. Imagine we want to get access to S3 from an AWS resource. In the example below, we have an EC2 instance that needs to copy a file from an S3 bucket: This […]
Deploying a Spring Boot application into AWS with Jenkins (part 3 of microservice devops series)
Welcome to the third and final part of this three part series where we’re taking a Spring Boot application from inception to deployment, using Docker and all the current best practices for continuous integration with Jenkins. In this final article, we’ll take the Docker image we pushed to Docker Hub in Part 2 and deploy […]
Building a Spring Boot application in Docker and Jenkins (part 2 of microservice devops series)
Welcome to the second of this three part series where you’ll learn how to take a Spring Boot microservice from inception to deployment, using all the latest continuous integration best practices. In this second article we’ll be updating the Spring Boot service we built in Part 1 and getting it running inside a Docker container. Then we’ll […]
Building a Spring Boot application in Jenkins (part 1 of microservice devops series)
Welcome to the first of this three part series where we’ll be taking a Spring Boot microservice from inception to deployment. In this article, we’ll be creating a simple Spring Boot API application with integration tests, and then building it in a Jenkins pipeline every time a change is pushed to version control. This series […]
What is the Gradle wrapper and why should you use it?
The Gradle wrapper is a script that can be added to your Gradle project and used to execute your build. The advantage of this is that: you don’t need to have Gradle installed on your machine the wrapper guarantees you’ll be using the version of Gradle required by the project you can easily update the […]
5 tips for using Gradle with IntelliJ IDEA 2019
If you’re using Gradle as the build automation tool for your project, then there’s no better IDE of choice than IntelliJ IDEA 2019. This is thanks to it’s tight integration which exposes much of the Gradle functionality via the UI, meaning there’s little reason to revert to the command line. Here are 5 tips for […]