1. AWS Users’ Group November
David “Mac” McDaniel
Sr. Solution & Cloud Architect - Independent Consultant
LinkedIn:
@ServerlessJava
Twitter list:

2. Thanks to our Host, Eplexity!
Please thank them for the food and beverages!
WiFI: WeWork
No password needed.

3. New AWS Users’ Group Items
Slack Channel: me at for an invite.
We now have our own Twitter Please follow and we’ll post updates and surveys there as well!
We are now listed on AWS UG site:
We are sponsored by CloudAcademy! They have a free portal for our members at:

4. Thoughts?
Thinking about creating a workshop day - where participants get to go hands-on!
Our sponsor would enable us to provide AWS usage credit.
Topic ideas include:
Migrating a workload from on-prem to AWS Cloud
Hosting a web application
Building an API application

5. Upcoming Meetups
January 17, Microsoft on AWS By AWS SA Mike Kalberer
February 21, Amazon RDS and SQL Server By Christopher Wolff
March 21, TBD - Ideas?!?

6. Recent AWS Announcements!
10/13: Switch from Dedicated Tenancy to Default
10/16: WAF gets Regex and Geographic filters
10/16: Windows Server for Lightsail
10/24: AWS Directory Service for AD (Standard)
10/24: GA of Aurora for PostgresSQL compatibility
•As of May, PHI data no longer needs to be on dedicated. Now there’s a CLI/SDK way to switch the VPC to ensure all new instances are default instead of Dedicated
•When you solve your problem with Regex, you now have two problems… Geographic match can be whitelist or blacklist
•Lightsail for more than just web hosting. Prices start at $10 (30 GB SSD and 1 TB data txfr)
•Managed AD that is cost-effective and highly available. Integrate with your premise AD? Need to build trusts. Want to use with O365 and SSO? Need to do ADFS

7. More Updates 10/24: Open Preview of Performance Insights
10/31: CloudFront hits 100 points of presence
11/1: AppStream % cost drop for Educational users
11/2: API Gateway Regional API Endpoints
11/8: AWS PrivateLink for AWS Services
•New feature for RDS to help you quickly find DB performance problems and take action. Gives you visibility into SQL query performance with easy to understand dashboard.
•In honor of big round numbers, the 100th point of presence for CloudFront is in Tokyo (the 5th there)
•Qualified educational customers can drop the user fee from 4.19 to $0.44 for an 89% savings
•Now two types of API endpoints you can create with Amazon API Gateway. Regional API endpoint is new type that is accessed from the same AWS region where your REST API is deployed to reduce request latency.
•Privately access AWS services from VPC without using public IPs – and without requirement the traffic to traverse across the Internet.
PrivateLink removes the need of whitelisting public IPs, or managing the Internet connectivity using an Internet Gateway, Network Address Translation (NAT) devices, or firewall proxies to connect to AWS services. AWS services available on PrivateLink also support private connectivity over AWS Direct Connect, so that applications in your own data centers will be able to connect to AWS services via the Amazon private network using the service endpoints.
AWS services currently available on AWS PrivateLink include Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Kinesis Streams, Service Catalog and EC2 Systems Manager, and support for additional AWS services will be added in the coming months

8. Resources AWS Blog: Curated Twitter List: AWS Podcasts:
Curated Twitter List:
AWS Podcasts:

9. Update on Sponsorship
AroundTheCloud is giving away a few promo codes for their app, which is a freemium iOS app specifically practicing for AWS CSA certification exams.
They have 30 sample questions for free, and the promo code will unlock another 7 SETS of questions.
Come see me if you have an iOS device and are getting ready for a CSA exam!
For anybody looking for more info: around.cloud
for more information!

10. Serverless Updates
My “100%” “Serverless” project moving along well. Speed is not an issue, even when using RDS relational database.
Using DynamoDB as a caching layer effectively.
Learned a new thing about Lambdas - not just Java ones - that old versions, while barely visible, exist and take up space.
Each Lambda has multiple limits:

11. Lambda Limits
50 MB Upload size (> 5MB must be uploaded via S3) - 250MB expanded size
6MB body/payload size per synchronous request/128K for async requests
75GB total deployed size per account per region
300 second runtime per execution
1,000 concurrent Lambda executions per account (can be increased)
500MB /tmp disk space per Lambda execution - ephemeral
1,024 FDs, processes and threads per execution

12. Tracing in a Serverless World
Amazon X-Ray Service Map:

13. X-Ray Service Details Shows breakdown between: Status (OK, Error, etc)
Response Time - Distribution

14. Tracing in a Serverless World
Amazon X-Ray Trace:

15. Logging
There are many options, including both free and non-free solutions from AWS and many others. When evaluating any solutions, make sure that they:
Work with Lambdas and/or CloudWatch directly
They don’t just monitor performance or error counts
I tried implementing AWS’ Kinesis solution without much luck.

16. Logging - Searching
Each AWS request returns a request Id in the response header. You can use that in CloudWatch to find the logging info:

17. One Serverless Architecture

18. My New Serverless Architecture Pattern
“Multi-Path, Multi-Datastore, ID-Cache Services”
All Base data resides in “Cache” (NoSQL/DynamoDB)
Search/Query/Reporting on SQL Datastore
Read Cache by ID; Write & Update Cache by ID
Sub-100ms Read, Write, Update
Robust Search/Query/Report capability

19. Example Architecture Diagram
API - Get By ID, Update By ID, Create, Search By Name, Search By Date Range
Search Implementations
Get, Update & Create Implementations
RDS - MySQL
DynamoDB - NoSQL
Replicate on Write & Update
DynamoDB Streams
to Lambda that does
update.

20. Microsoft on AWS Mike Kalberer, AWS SA
Have something to talk about?
Today’s Word: constellate, v.: Form or cause to form into a cluster or group; gather together. “Let’s constellate outside the pub.”
January’s TOPIC:
Microsoft on AWS
Mike Kalberer, AWS SA

21. Questions?