I have lately invested a lot of time keeping an eye on StackOverflow because there is a ton to learn in terms of how AWS customers are using our products. I do have all sort of filters setup and I reguarly spend a good chunk of my day there. A couple of days ago I bumped into this question that intrigued me a lot. First, because I did not even know you could trigger API calls to all those services from API Gateway (I do remember and have used the Lambda integration though) and I wanted to learn more. Read more...

Part of my job at AWS is to explore the art of possible. A few weeks ago I came across an open source project called re:Web. What intrigued me about re:Web is that it allows a traditional container image (wrapping a traditional “web service” application) to be repurposed and deployed to AWS Lambda. The idea for this blog was sparked by an issue that Aidan Steele opened on the re:Web project. Read more...

A few weeks ago I have published an AWS Fargate related project in GitHub called Fargatecount. I won’t bore you with the details of what it does (you can read it on the repository). In a nutshell, it runs a container as a scheduled Fargate task that in turn runs a script that queries ECS and EKS to collect the number of total Fargate tasks running in the account in that region and pushes a metric to CloudWatch. Read more...

This article was originally posted on the AWS compute blog. I am re-posting here for the convenience of the readers of my personal blog. Cloud security at AWS is the highest priority and the work that the Containers team is doing is a testament to that. A month ago, the team introduced an integration between AWS Secrets Manager and AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store with AWS Fargate tasks. Now, Fargate customers can easily consume secrets securely and parameters transparently from their own task definitions. Read more...

A few days ago, at Incontro DevOps Italia (IDI) 2019 I did a breakout session about the topic in subject. I decided to use the 30-ish minutes I had available to share a bit of context re the need for deployment automation and then I did a short demo (well, as short as a CI/CD demo could be) that was aimed at showing the individual pieces (namely the build and deploy phases) independently and then how to wrap them up together in a pipeline. Read more...

At Amazon we work backwards from customer needs and this is embodied in everything we do. When we release a new product or service we start from the “press release and FAQ” and work backwards from there to develop what we intend to build for our customers. I am sketching this post in early December (2018) on a train heading to Rome just a few days prior to interviewing for a new role at AWS. Read more...

When I joined AWS last year, I was trying to find a way to explain, in the easiest way possible, all the options the platform offers to our users from a compute perspective. There are of course many ways to peal this onion and I wanted to create a “visual story” that was easy for me to tell. I ended up drafting an animated slide that I have presented at many customers meetings and public events. Read more...

As you may have heard, late last year I joined Amazon Web Services. I have recently turned 6 months at AWS (or 180 x Day1) and that is often a good point to pause and reflect. Also, I have got so many people asking me how I am doing here that I thought a public blog post would scale better than many 1:1 interactions. The TL/DR version of it is: it is exactly as I have envisioned before joining; I didn’t have any major surprise; my due diligence was accurate (i. Read more...

This is my first blog post as an AWS employee. I have spent the last 6+ months learning new things (IAM being one of them) and I figured I could (and should) share some of these learnings with my followers. I hope it can smooth the learning curve when you transition from a data center centric view of the world to a cloud centric view of the world. This blog post doesn’t add new information that can’t be found in the AWS official documentation. Read more...

I have an awesome job, an awesome manager and I work for one of the best companies around. Yet, Friday September 29th 2017 is my last day at VMware. On Monday October 2nd I will join Amazon Web Services as a Principal Solutions Architect. This was not a decision I took lightly. This blog post (in its original draft) was 7 pages long. I intended to explain, at a certain level of details, the thought process I went through to take this decision. Read more...