Collin Smith - Xerris Insights

Passing the AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional Certification (SAP-C02) in 2023

AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional The AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional exam is now on it’s 3rd edition which came out on November 15, 2022. This is the top of The 10 Highest-Paying IT Certifications for 2023 according to PCMag. This is a

Passing the AWS Advanced Networking Certification (ANS-C01) in 2023

Sunset taken from Mount Rundle, Alberta I was interested in expanding my knowledge of AWS by taking the AWS Advanced Networking certification. I found this to be a challenging goal indeed. This article will emphasize some elements that I feel are important to pass

Event-Driven Architecture with the Saga Pattern Approach in AWS

Event-Driven Architecture is a key concept when designing modern cloud applications with a microservices approach. The core concept is that when an event is created it will be used to drive change within a solution. Services are not tied together in a monolithic manner.

Single Table Design with AWS DynamoDB and the Inverted Index

Overview Many people love the concept of DynamoDB as a serverless option to storing data. However, often people associate DynamoDB as only a Key Value store. This is where the single table design steps in and can make this happen. The single table design

Santa’s AWS Workshop! (A serverless event driven approach)

Santa's Workshop Santa is a very busy man and even he needs help organizing and coordinating his operation. This article will help illustrate how a serverless event driven approach can help him deliver toys more effectively given the amount of letters he receives from

AWS Java Lambda accessing an AWS RDS MySQL Instance with CDK

In this article, we will see how to enable a Java Lambda access to an AWS RDS MySQL instance. Prerequisites: Set up your AWS RDS MySQL instance (See Creating an AWS RDS MySQL Database with MySQL WorkBench) This article will follow a similar approach

Creating an AWS RDS MySQL Database with MySQL WorkBench

In application development there is little doubt that one of the most useful combinations is combining an object oriented language with a relational database. In this article, we will accomplish this through the following steps: Install the MySQL WorkBench database clientCreate an RDS MySQL

AWS Java Lambda accessing an AWS RDS PostgreSQL Instance with CDK

In this article, we will see how to enable an AWS Java Lambda access to an AWS RDS PostgreSQL instance. Prerequisites: Set up your AWS RDS PostgreSQL instance (See Creating an AWS RDS PostgreSQL Database with pgAdmin ) This article will follow a similar approach

Creating an AWS RDS PostgreSQL Database with pgAdmin

In application development there is little doubt that one of the most useful combinations is combining an object oriented language with a relational database. In this article, we will demonstrate this with the following steps: Install a Postgres pgAdmin database clientCreate an RDS Postgres

Improving your Lambda ColdStart Performance with AWS Lambda SnapStart (13 - 15 times faster!)

AWS Lambda SnapStart is a new feature which helps reduce the startup latency for lambda functions running on Amazon Corretto Java 11 runtime. This helps reduce the cold starts that often come when lambdas are required to download reference data from S3 or initialize

Spring Boot 2 Lambda Microservices

Spring boot is a popular Java framework designed to help facilitate stand-alone, production-grade Spring based applications that can “just run”. Many top companies use Spring Boot to support their backends including Netflix, Udemy, Trivago. Netflix adopted Spring Boot as its core Java framework. Spring

Improving your Sustainability Posture by running Well-Architected Workloads on AWS

According to KPMG’s “KPMG 2021 CEO Outlook”(2021), investor scrutiny of a companies’ ESG is intensifying with 58% of CEOs feeling stakeholder demands(investors, regulators and customers) for increased reporting and transparency on ESG issues. For many companies, the sustainability goals are part

Migration Evaluator to assist Cloud Migrations

When Xerris helps customers migrate to the cloud, we definitely need to build out a business case to prove out the value that the migration effort will create. This is will start with an on-premises inventory discovery. We have installed the Agentless collector to

Benchmarking Java vs. C# in AWS Lambda

Java and C# are both available as runtime languages for AWS Lambda. Both are object oriented, implement garbage collection and are a top choice for serious software developers. This article will be comparing a simple compute workload written in both languages and to see

AWS DotNet Lambda Functions powered by AWS Graviton2 Processors (C#, CDK)

This article will quickly demonstrate how to configure DotNet Lambda Functions to be powered by AWS Graviton2 Processors and review the results found. Graviton2 Lambda Overview AWS Lambda functions powered by AWS Graviton2 processors offer up to 34% better price performance over x86-based Lambda

AWS Lambda Functions powered by AWS Graviton2 Processors (Java, CDK)

This article will present a demonstration illustrating the price performance gains to be had by the newly released AWS Lambda Functions powered by AWS Graviton2. AWS Lambda functions powered by AWS Graviton2 processors offer up to 34% better price performance over x86-based Lambda functions.

Creating an AWS Serverless Java 11 Application with CDK (Lambda, S3, DynamoDb, API Gateway)

You will see how Lambdas can interact with cloud resources such as S3 Buckets and DynamoDB. With API Gateway, you can allow external calls to these services as a web based client would do. At Xerris, we help organizations with their digital transformation efforts

Getting started with AWS, Java 11 (Amazon Corretto), Eclipse and AWS Toolkit

This article will help get a developer set up to develop in Java 11 in their own AWS environment from scratch. Amazon Corretto is a no-cost, multiplatform, production-ready distribution of the Open Java Development Kit(OpenJDK). It is certified as compatible with the Java

AWS Aurora Serverless V2

Aurora Serverless v2 is an on-demand, auto-scaling configuration of Amazon Aurora. This is a very interesting offering by AWS and is for those who need a relational database and want to have a serverless approach at the same time. It scales database workloads to

DynamoDB Introduction Hands On With GSI and LSI

DynamoDB Introduction Hands On With GSI and LSI

DynamoDB We will be illustrating the basics of a Global Secondary Index(GSI) and a Local Secondary Index(LSI). This article is designed to illustrate the creation of 2 DynamoDB

DynamoDB Introduction

DynamoDB Introduction

AWS’s DynamoDB is a NoSQL database. It is also part of Amazon’s serverless offering meaning that you don’t have to carry the administrative burden of operating a

Creating an AWS Serverless C# DotNet Application (S3, DynamoDB, API Gateway, Lambdas(C-Sharp) and CDK)

Often it can be daunting to create your first AWS Serverless application. This article will go through the basics of creating a serverless application with fundamental AWS services such as API Gateway, Lambdas, S3 Buckets, and DynamoDB. These will all be deployed using Cloud

Getting Started with AWS, Visual Studio and AWS Toolkit

AWS has been running Microsoft Workloads on AWS for over 12 years, longer than any other cloud provider. Visual Studio is an excellent tool to develop and test your application code. In this article, we assume you have nothing regarding your current configuration. We