IoT on AWS

AWS provides several devices and services for enterprise IoT solutions.   Devices and Device Software Snowcone FreeRTOS OS for microcontrollers that makes small, low-power edge devices easy to program, deploy, secure, connect and manage IoT Greengrass Software that allows local compute, messaging, data caching, sync and machine learning inference capabilities on connected devices in a […]

Load Balanced and Auto Scaling containerized app with AWS ECS

Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a container management service that is scalable, secure, reliable and fast. ECS can launch containers in EC2 or serverless in what is called Fargate. For either launch types, ECS will be orchestrating the containers and managing the cluster. Amazon ECS is a regional service that simplifies running application containers in […]

Revisiting Angular

Angular is a platform and framework for building client applications in HTML and TypeScript. The basic building blocks of an Angular application are NgModules, which provide a compilation context for components. NgModules collect related code into functional sets; an Angular app is defined by a set of NgModules. An app always has at least a root module that enables bootstrapping, […]

AWS SAM (Serverless Application Model)

Following excerpt from AWS Developer site: The AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) is an open-source framework that you can use to build serverless applications on AWS. A serverless application is a combination of Lambda functions, event sources, and other resources that work together to perform tasks. Note that a serverless application is more than just a Lambda function—it […]

Facial Recognition using AWS Rokognition

Rekognition Overview This overview section was copied from AWS Rokognition site. Rekognition API service provides identification of objects, people, text, scenes, activities, or inappropriate content. Developers can quickly build a searchable content library to optimize media workflows, enrich recommendation engines by extracting text in images, or integrate secondary authentication into existing applications to enhance end-user […]

Azure Functions

This post is general notes and overview of Azure Functions.   Background Azure Functions is the serverless compute service in Azure. It is a combination of Events and Code where events could be: Time Data Web In contrast to Azure Functions, we could use Azure App Service (Azure Web Applications and Web Jobs) but that […]

AWS DAX Overview and Sample Application using Encryption At Rest

This is an overview with a sample application using AWS DAX – DynamoDB Accelerator. Further below is a sample application that uses DAX, DynamoDB and EC2 – all with encryption at rest. DAX is a fully managed, in-memory cache for DynamoDB. It reduces DynamoDB response times from milliseconds to microseconds. As with other AWS services, […]

.Net Core Services

This is a review of some of the core internals of the .Net Core Framework. Sample code can be found here: https://github.com/johnlee/dotnetcoreservices   Background NET was first announced by Microsoft in 2000 and then evolved from there. The .NET Framework has been the primary .NET implementation produced by Microsoft during that nearly two decade period. […]

Benchmarking AWS Databases

This was a quick app I created to run some basic tests against database services in AWS. It does basic read and writes using ADO.NET-ish frameworks. The dataset used is a 10 column varchar object called Item found in the mocks folder. The program can be run with different dataset sizes. Everything is configured through […]

Building .Net Core apps in Docker with VSCode on Mac or Windows

We can develop applications inside Docker containers and completely decouple our host machine from any SDK or development environments. This means that when using frameworks such as .Net Core, we no longer need to have it installed or running on the host machine. Instead, we get the .Net Core SDK docker image and develop within […]

.Net Core and Docker

These are some more notes about using .Net Core with Docker containers in a microservice architecture. A Docker container is just a process. It has a much smaller footprint than a virtual machine. VM includes the application, libraries, binaries and a full operating system. On the other hand, containers include the application and all libraries/binaries […]

Serverless Application using AWS Lambda, API Gateway and DynamoDB and NodeJS

This is small sample project that demonstrates a Serverless Application. It uses the following AWS Services: API Gateway Lambda DynamoDB The repository of this project can be found on github here: https://github.com/johnlee/habits   The application is used as a personal goal tracker. It stores daily attempts (with timestamps) and an overall score for the day. […]

Serverless App using AWS API, DynamoDB, Lambda, S3 and Visual Studio .Net

This is a sample project using Visual Studio 2017 (.Net 4.5 + Core 2) and the following AWS services: API Gateway DynamoDB Lambda S3 CloudFormation This project will have an Angular web front end hosted on S3, which calls APIs in the API Gateway. Those APIs are defined as Lambda functions and interact with DynamoDB […]

Webpack

Webpack is a packaging tool used to create modular bundles for JavaScript, CSS and HTML. Though this is it’s main feature, there are many other features of webpack as well – such as being a task runner and even acting as a dev server. By the use of a dependency graph, it maps out the […]

Introduction to ASP.NET Core

ASP NET Core Released June 2016 Build on .Net core Cross Platform Not tied to .Net framework Unification of MVC and Web API Dependency Injection is core feature (no third party) Modular HTTP Request pipeline Based on NuGet � everything is package Cloud ready IIS or self-host Open Source Problems with ASP NET MVC Dependency […]

Working with Integration Tests

This is a sample project demonstrating integration tests that include the Data Access Layer (DAL). This is using .Net Entity Framework version 6 and Microsoft’s MSTEST. See other blog posts regarding integration testing and unit testing here: http://solidfish.com/unit-testing-vs-integration-testing/ http://solidfish.com/unit-testing-with-dependency-injection/   This example uses database migrations as part of the tests. It drops and recreates the […]

ASP.NET MVC, WEBAPI, SQL, Unit Test and EF on Azure

This is a sample project that contains the following: ASP.NET MVC (4.6) ASP.NET WEBAPI SQL (SQL SERVER 2014) ENTITY FRAMEWORK (5) UNIT TESTS All is deployed on Azure here: http://samplewidgets.azurewebsites.net/ This is a project I use as kind of a template for other projects that use similar technologies and frameworks. I’ve also used it to […]

Material Design

Material Design is a concept created by Google and published around 2014. It extends the ‘flat design’ concept by creating layers (moving along the Z-axis). This includes methods of shadowing as well as various animations for components that users interact with. Each of the layers represent a ‘material’ that reacts differently to light (thereby giving […]

Encryption and Certificates

Some quick notes on doing encryption. Encryption is a process, by which information can be transformed (encoded) in such a format, that only authorized parties can read (decode) the information, and unauthorized parties cannot. The purpose of encrypting information is to protect the sensitive data from unauthorized use. Symmetric and Asymmetric Encryption In a symmetric […]