AWS Amplify Custom Domain Management

Matt Bacchi published on 2020-05-24

Recently I moved my personal blog from GitHub Pages to AWS Amplify. While it was fairly easy to setup the Amplify project and CI/CD pieces, the DNS configuration for Custom Domains was less straightforward. The following observations are what I found to be less than ideal while using Amplify for the first time. AWS Amplify DNS instructions One problem that I found with AWS Amplify, which was surprising for someone who is familiar with Route53 and DNS, is that the suggested instructions on the Amplify Domain Management page are somewhat cryptic.

Discourse API Testing

Matt Bacchi published on 2020-04-26

Discourse is used for a number of purposes, but their forum software is quite popular. I’ve been looking at how to us the Discourse API to automate creating posts. This blog post describes how to setup a local Discourse instance and perform API calls against it.

Using AWS Lambda@Edge on Cloudfront

Matt Bacchi published on 2020-01-28

I’ve been attempting to learn more about Lambda@Edge and how to use functions at the AWS edge locations, so I wrote up this demo. It isn’t performing a very realistic operation, but it did allow me to understand the Lambda@Edge and Cloudfront cache relationship (aka “event model”) and how to intercept CDN cache requests and modify responses in a Lambda function.

Running Brave in a Docker Container

Matt Bacchi published on 2019-09-11

Security minded users often run Docker to create an additional sandbox around an untrusted application running on their system. Web Browsers are among the most untrusted applications we run today. Here’s how to setup the Brave Browser to run in Docker.

Setting up an EC2 Instance as an Inlets Exit Node

Matt Bacchi published on 2019-08-21

Inlets is a fairly new project that allows you to setup reverse proxy, websocket tunnels, or other endpoints to the public internet, it is similar to ngrok. The video overview from Alex Ellis shows how simple it makes setting up the environment.

Why Did Official Python Docker Images Disappear for an Afternoon?

Matt Bacchi published on 2019-07-29

We have all become accustomed to services on the internet being reliable and available approximately 100% of the time. Many services obviously have outages, recently GitHub, Cloudflare, Twitter, Facebook have all had widespread service disruptions. Some apps affect downstream processes and services that rely on them. This is a story about how I found the official Python images on Docker Hub were missing for the linux/amd64 architecture for an entire afternoon(potentially longer).

Serverless, DevOps, k8s, AWS, cloud, fishing, cycling.