Recent Articles on the tecRacer AWS Blog

Amazon Pinpoint - How it works

If you need omni-channel engagement with your customers to run marketing campaigns, send notifications, or tailored (transactional) messages in bulk, then Amazon Pinpoint is the right tool for you. It allows you to manage your audience and templates and reach customers through email, text, voice messages, custom channels and push or in-app notifications. The provided events and analytics make it easy to track and measure the results of your campaigns and gain valuable insights about customer interactions.

Push-Down-Predicates in Parquet and how to use them to reduce IOPS while reading from S3

Working with datasets in pandas will almost inevitably bring you to the point where your dataset doesn’t fit into memory. Especially parquet is notorious for that since it’s so well compressed and tends to explode in size when read into a dataframe. Today we’ll explore ways to limit and filter the data you read using push-down-predicates. Additionally, we’ll see how you can do that efficiently with data stored in S3 and why using pure pyarrow can be several orders of magnitude more I/O-efficient than the plain pandas version.

Version Control your Database on AWS using Flyway

Proper version control is an essential part of a fast-paced, agile development approach and the foundation of CI/CD. Even though databases are an important aspect of nearly every application, database migrations, and schema evolutions are often not versioned and not integrated into the automation process. In this blog post, I would like to show you how you can leverage Flyway on AWS to version control your schema changes and automate your database migrations.

Enhancing Security in Terraform with AWS Secrets Manager

Keeping track of your passwords is already challenging in your personal life. It can be more difficult when you want to build and deploy secure applications in the cloud. Today we’ll show you a few ways of managing secrets in your Terraform deployment. We’ll teach you about common pitfalls like the random_password resource and more appropriate alternatives.

The beating heart of SQS - of Heartbeats and Watchdogs

Using SQS as a queue to buffer tasks is probably the most common use case for the service. Things can get tricky if these tasks have a wide range of processing durations. Today, I will show you how to implement an SQS consumer that utilizes heartbeats to dynamically extend the visibility timeout to accommodate different processing durations.