Amazon AWS

Registry of Open Data on AWS

AWS News Blog covers the Registry of Open Data on AWS:

Almost a decade ago, my colleague Deepak Singh introduced the AWS Public Datasets in his post Paging Researchers, Analysts, and Developers. I’m happy to report that Deepak is still an important part of the AWS team and that the Public Datasets program is still going strong!

Today we are announcing a new take on open and public data, the Registry of Open Data on AWS, or RODA. This registry includes existing Public Datasets and allows anyone to add their own datasets so that they can be accessed and analyzed on AWS.

Currently, there are 53 data sets in the registry. Each provides a tonne of data. Subjects vary from satellite imagery and weather monitoring to political and financial information.

Hopefully, this will grow and expand with time.

Get Started with Blockchain Using the new AWS Blockchain Templates

One of the greatest things about the Amazon AWS services is that they save a tonne of time on the reinventing the wheel. There are numerous technologies out there and nobody has the time to dive deep, learn, and try all of them. Amazon AWS often provides ready-made templates and configurations for people who just want to try a technology or a tool, without investing too much time (and money) into figuring out all the options and tweaks.

“Get Started with Blockchain Using the new AWS Blockchain Templates” is one example of such predefined and pre-configured setup, for those who want to play around with Blockchain. Just think of how much time it would have taken somebody who just wants to spin up their own Etherium network with some basic tools and services just to check the technology out. With the predefined templates you can be up and running in minutes, and, once you are comfortable, you can spend more time rebuilding the whole thing, configuring and tweaking everything.

Using CloudFoundation to Build, Manage, and Deploy CloudFormation Templates

J Cole Morrison has this rather lengthy blog post on how to use CloudFoundation to simplify and automate the management of your Amazon AWS cloud infrastructure. AWS CloudFormation is a great tool, but it gets complex real fast with larger setups, so CloudFoundation comes to the rescue.

Immutable Deployment @ Quorum

“Immutable Deployment @ Quorum” describes yet another approach to automated, and this case – immutable, deployments. This particular setup is slightly more on the SysAdmin/DevOps side rather than on the development side, utilizing tools like Ansible, Amazon EC2, and Amazon AMI.

If you are building very few projects, or projects with little variations, and use a whole instance for the project, than you should definitely check it out. For those people who work with a zoo of technologies and share the server between several projects, this approach probably won’t work so well. Unless it is adjusted to use containers instead of instances, but even then, it’ll probably won’t be optimal.

Handling Amazon SNS messages with PHP, Lumen and CloudWatch

Gonzalo Ayuso throws a few snippets of code in the blog posts title “Handling Amazon SNS messages with PHP, Lumen and CloudWatch“, which shows how to work with Amazon SNS (Simple Notifications Service) and Amazon CloudWatch (cloud and network monitoring solution) from PHP. The examples are based on the Lumen micro-framework, which is basically a stripped down Laravel.