Tag Archives: node.js

Deploy and publish to an Amazon MQ broker using AWS serverless

Post Syndicated from Moheeb Zara original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/deploy-and-publish-to-an-amazon-mq-broker-using-aws-serverless/

If you’re managing a broker on premises or in the cloud with a dependent existing infrastructure, Amazon MQ can provide easily deployed, managed ActiveMQ brokers. These support a variety of messaging protocols that can offload operational overhead. That can be useful when deploying a serverless application that communicates with one or more external applications that also communicate with each other.

This post walks through deploying a serverless backend and an Amazon MQ broker in one step using the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM). It shows you how to publish to a topic using AWS Lambda and then how to create a client application to consume messages from the topic, using a supported protocol. As a result, the AWS services and features supported by AWS Lambda can now be delivered to an external application connected to an Amazon MQ broker using STOMP, AMQP, MQTT, OpenWire, or WSS.

Although many protocols are supported by Amazon MQ, this walkthrough focuses on one. MQTT is a lightweight publish–subscribe messaging protocol. It is built to work in a small code footprint and is one of the most well-supported messaging protocols across programming languages. The protocol also introduced quality of service (QoS) to ensure message delivery when a device goes offline. Using QoS features, you can limit failure states in an interdependent network of applications.

To simplify this configuration, I’ve provided an AWS Serverless Application Repository application that deploys AWS resources using AWS CloudFormation. Two resources are deployed, a single instance Amazon MQ broker and a Lambda function. The Lambda function uses Node.js and an MQTT library to act as a producer and publish to a message topic on the Amazon MQ broker. A provided sample Node.js client app can act as an MQTT client and subscribe to the topic to receive messages.

Prerequisites

The following resources are required to complete the walkthrough:

Required steps

To complete the walkthrough, follow these steps:

  • Clone the Aws-sar-lambda-publish-amazonmq GitHub repository.
  • Deploy the AWS Serverless Application Repository application.
  • Run a Node.js MQTT client application.
  • Send a test message from an AWS Lambda function.
  • Use composite destinations.

Clone the GitHub repository

Before beginning, clone or download the project repository from GitHub. It contains the sample Node.js client application used later in this walkthrough.

Deploy the AWS Serverless Application Repository application

  1. Navigate to the page for the lambda-publish-amazonmq AWS Serverless Application Repository application.
  2. In Application settings, fill the following fields:

    – AdminUsername
    – AdminPassword
    – ClientUsername
    – ClientPassword

    These are the credentials for the Amazon MQ broker. The admin credentials are assigned to environment variables used by the Lambda function to publish messages to the Amazon MQ broker. The client credentials are used in the Node.js client application.

  3. Choose Deploy.

Creation can take up to 10 minutes. When completed, proceed to the next section.

Run a Node.js MQTT client application

The Amazon MQ broker supports OpenWire, AMQP, STOMP, MQTT, and WSS connections. This allows any supported programming language to publish and consume messages from an Amazon MQ queue or topic.

To demonstrate this, you can deploy the sample Node.js MQTT client application included in the GitHub project for the AWS Serverless Application Repository app. The client credentials created in the previous section are used here.

  1. Open a terminal application and change to the client-app directory in the GitHub project folder by running the following command:
    cd ~/some-project-path/aws-sar-lambda-publish-amazonmq/client-app
  2. Install the Node.js dependencies for the client application:
    npm install
  3. The app requires a WSS endpoint to create an Amazon MQ broker MQTT WebSocket connection. This can be found on the broker page in the Amazon MQ console, under Connections.
  4. The node app takes four arguments separated by spaces. Provide the user name and password of the client created on deployment, followed by the WSS endpoint and a topic, some/topic.
    node app.js "username" "password" "wss://endpoint:port" "some/topic"
  5. After connected prints in the terminal, leave this app running, and proceed to the next section.

There are three important components run by this code to subscribe and receive messages:

  • Connecting to the MQTT broker.
  • Subscribing to the topic on a successful connection.
  • Creating a handler for any message events.

The following code example shows connecting to the MQTT broker.

const args = process.argv.slice(2)

let options = {
  username: args[0],
  password: args[1],
  clientId: 'mqttLambda_' + uuidv1()
}

let mqEndpoint = args[2]
let topic = args[3]

let client = mqtt.connect( mqEndpoint, options)

The following code example shows subscribing to the topic on a successful connection.

// When connected, subscribe to the topic

client.on('connect', function() {
  console.log("connected")

  client.subscribe(topic, function (err) {
    if(err) console.log(err)
  })
})

The following code example shows creating a handler for any message events.

// Log messages

client.on('message', function (topic, message) {
  console.log(`message received on ${topic}: ${message.toString()}`)
})

Send a test message from an AWS Lambda function

Now that the Amazon MQ broker, PublishMessage Lambda function, and the Node.js client application are running, you can test consuming messages from a serverless application.

  1. In the Lambda console, select the newly created PublishMessage Lambda function. Its name begins with the name given to the AWS Serverless Application Repository application on deployment.
  2. Choose Test.
  3. Give the new test event a name, and optionally modify the message. Choose Create.
  4. Choose Test to invoke the Lambda function with the test event.
  5. If the execution is successful, the message appears in the terminal where the Node.js client-app is running.

Using composite destinations

The Amazon MQ broker uses an XML configuration to enable and configure ActiveMQ features. One of these features, composite destinations, makes one-to-many relationships on a single destination possible. This means that a queue or topic can be configured to forward to another queue, topic, or combination.

This is useful when fanning out to a number of clients, some of whom are consuming queues while others are consuming topics. The following steps demonstrate how you can easily modify the broker configuration and define multiple destinations for a topic.

  1. On the Amazon MQ Configurations page, select the matching configuration from the list. It has the same stack name prefix as your broker.
  2. Choose Edit configuration.
  3. After the broker tag, add the following code example. It creates a new virtual composite destination where messages published to “some/topic” publishes to a queue “A.queue” and a topic “foo.”
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<broker schedulePeriodForDestinationPurge="10000" xmlns="http://activemq.apache.org/schema/core">
  
  <destinationInterceptors>
    <virtualDestinationInterceptor>
      <virtualDestinations>
        <compositeTopic name="some.topic">
          <forwardTo>
            <queue physicalName="A.Queue"/>
            <topic physicalName="foo" />
          </forwardTo>
        </compositeTopic>
      </virtualDestinations>
    </virtualDestinationInterceptor>
  </destinationInterceptors>
  <destinationPolicy>
  4. Choose Save, add a description for this revision, and then choose Save.
  5. In the left navigation pane, choose Brokers, and select the broker with the stack name prefix.
  6. Under Details, choose Edit.
  7. Under Configuration, select the latest configuration revision that you just created.
  8. Choose Schedule modifications, Immediately, Apply.

After the reboot is complete, run another test of the Lambda function. Then, open and log in to the ActiveMQ broker web console, which can be found under Connections on the broker page. To log in, use the admin credentials created on deployment.

On the Queues page, a new queue “A.Queue” was generated because you published to some/topic, which has a composite destination configured.

Conclusion

It can be difficult to tackle architecting a solution with multiple client destinations and networked applications. Although there are many ways to go about solving this problem, this post showed you how to deploy a robust solution using ActiveMQ with a serverless workflow. The workflow publishes messages to a client application using MQTT, a well-supported and lightweight messaging protocol.

To accomplish this, you deployed a serverless application and an Amazon MQ broker in one step using the AWS Serverless Application Repository. You also ran a Node.js MQTT client application authenticated as a registered user in the Amazon MQ broker. You then used Lambda to test publishing a message to a topic on the Amazon MQ broker. Finally, you extended functionality by modifying the broker configuration to support a virtual composite destination, allowing delivery to multiple topic and queue destinations.

With the completion of this project, you can take things further by integrating other AWS services and third-party or custom client applications. Amazon MQ provides multiple protocol endpoints that are widely used across the software and platform landscape. Using serverless as an in-between, you can deliver features from services like Amazon EventBridge to your external applications, wherever they might be. You can also explore how to invoke an Lambda function from Amazon MQ.

 

Node.js 12.x runtime now available in AWS Lambda

Post Syndicated from Eric Johnson original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/node-js-12-x-runtime-now-available-in-aws-lambda/

We are excited to announce that you can now develop AWS Lambda functions using the Node.js 12.x runtime, which is the current Long Term Support (LTS) version of Node.js. Start using this new version today by specifying a runtime parameter value of nodejs12.x when creating or updating functions.

Language Updates

Here is a quick primer that highlights just some of the new or improved features that come with Node.js 12:

  • Updated V8 engine
  • Public class fields
  • Private class fields
  • TLS improvements

Updated V8 engine

Node.js 12.x is powered by V8 7.4, which is a significant upgrade from V8 6.8 powering the previous Node.js 10.x. This upgrade brings with it performance improvements for faster JavaScript execution, better memory management, and broader support for ECMAScript.

Public class fields

With the upgraded V8 version comes support for public class fields. This enhancement allows for public fields to be defined at the class level, providing cleaner code.

Before:

class User {
	constructor(user){
		this.firstName = user.firstName
		this.lastName = user.lastName
		this.id = idGenerator()
	}
}

After:

{	
	id = idGenerator()
	
	constructor(user){
		this.firstName = user.firstName
		this.lastName = user.lastName
	}
}

Private class fields

In addition to public class fields, Node.js also supports the use of private fields in a class. These fields are not accessible outside of the class and will throw a SyntaxError if an attempt is made. To mark a field as private in a class simply start the name of the field with a ‘#’.

class User {
	#loginAttempt = 0;
	
	increment() {
		this.#loginAttempt++;
	}
	
	get loginAttemptCount() {
		return this.#loginAttempt;
	}
}

const user = new User()
console.log(user.loginAttemptCount) // returns 0
user.increment()				
console.log(user.loginAttemptCount)	// returns 1
console.log(user.#loginAttempt)		// returns SyntaxError: Private field '#loginAttempt'
									// must be declared in an enclosing class

TLS improvements

As a security improvement, Node.js 12 has also added support for TLS 1.3. This increases the security of TLS connections by removing hard to configure and often vulnerable features like SHA-1, RC4, DES, and AES-CBC. Performance is also increased because TLS 1.3 only requires a single round trip for a TLS handshake compared to earlier versions requiring at least two.

For more information, see the AWS Lambda Developer Guide.

Runtime Updates

Multi-line log events in Node.js 12 will work the same way they did in Node.js 8.10 and before. Node.js 12 will also support exception stack traces in AWS X-Ray helping you to debug and optimize your application. Additionally, to help keep Lambda functions secure, AWS will update Node.js 12 with all minor updates released by the Node.js community.

Deprecation schedule

AWS will be deprecating Node.js 8.10 according to the end of life schedule provided by the community. Node.js 8.10 will reach end of life on December 31, 2019. After January 6, 2020, you can no longer create a Node.js 8.10 Lambda function and the ability to update will be disabled after February 3, 2020. More information on can be found here.

Existing Node.js 8.10 functions can be migrated to the new runtime by making any necessary changes to code for compatibility with Node.js 12, and changing the function’s runtime configuration to “nodejs12.x”. Lambda functions running on Node.js 12 will have 2 full years of support.

Amazon Linux 2

Node.js 12, like Node.js 10, Java 11, and Python 3.8, is based on an Amazon Linux 2 execution environment. Amazon Linux 2 provides a secure, stable, and high-performance execution environment to develop and run cloud and enterprise applications.

Next steps

Get started building with Nodejs 12 today by specifying a runtime parameter value of nodejs12.x when creating or updating your Lambda functions.

Happy coding with Nodejs 12!

How to enable encryption in a browser with the AWS Encryption SDK for JavaScript and Node.js

Post Syndicated from Spencer Janyk original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-enable-encryption-browser-aws-encryption-sdk-javascript-node-js/

In this post, we’ll show you how to use the AWS Encryption SDK (“ESDK”) for JavaScript to handle an in-browser encryption workload for a hypothetical application. First, we’ll review some of the security and privacy properties of encryption, including the names AWS uses for the different components of a typical application. Then, we’ll discuss some of the reasons you might want to encrypt each of those components, with a focus on in-browser encryption, and we’ll describe how to perform that encryption using the ESDK. Lastly, we’ll talk about some of the security properties to be mindful of when designing an application, and where to find additional resources.

An overview of the security and privacy properties of encryption

Encryption is a technique that can restrict access to sensitive data by making it unreadable without a key. An encryption process takes data that is plainly readable or processable (“plaintext”) and uses principles of mathematics to obscure the contents so that it can’t be read without the use of a secret key. To preserve user privacy and prevent unauthorized disclosure of sensitive business data, developers need ways to protect sensitive data during the entire data lifecycle. Data needs to be protected from risks associated with unintentional disclosure as data flows between collection, storage, processing, and sharing components of an application. In this context, encryption is typically divided into two separate techniques: encryption at rest for storing data; and encryption in transit for moving data between entities or systems.

Many applications use encryption in transit to secure connections between their users and the services they provide, and then encrypt the data before it’s stored. However, as applications become more complex and data must be moved between more nodes and stored in more diverse places, there are more opportunities for data to be accidentally leaked or unintentionally disclosed. When a user enters their data in a browser, Transport Layer Security (TLS) can protect that data in transit between the user’s browser and a service endpoint. But in a distributed system, intermediary services between that endpoint and the service that processes that sensitive data might log or cache the data before transporting it. Encrypting sensitive data at the point of collection in the browser is a form of encryption at rest that minimizes the risk of unauthorized access and protects the data if it’s lost, stolen, or accidentally exposed. Encrypting data in the browser means that even if it’s completely exposed elsewhere, it’s unreadable and worthless to anyone without access to the key.

A typical web application

A typical web application will accept some data as input, process it, and then store it. When the user needs to access stored data, the data often follows the same path used when it was input. In our example there are three primary components to the path:

Figure 1: A hypothetical web application where the application is composed of an end-user interacting with a browser front-end, a third party which processes data received from the browser, processing is performed in Amazon EC2, and storage happens in Amazon S3

Figure 1: A hypothetical web application where the application is composed of an end-user interacting with a browser front-end, a third party which processes data received from the browser, processing is performed in Amazon EC2, and storage happens in Amazon S3

  1. An end-user interacts with the application using an interface in the browser.
  2. As data is sent to Amazon EC2, it passes through the infrastructure of a third party which could be an Internet Service Provider, an appliance in the user’s environment, or an application running in the cloud.
  3. The application on Amazon EC2 processes the data once it has been received.
  4. Once the application is done processing data, it is stored in Amazon S3 until it is needed again.

As data moves between components, TLS is used to prevent inadvertent disclosure. But what if one or more of these components is a third-party service that doesn’t need access to sensitive data? That’s where encryption at rest comes in.

Encryption at rest is available as a server-side, client-side, and client-side in-browser protection. Server-side encryption (SSE) is the most commonly used form of encryption with AWS customers, and for good reason: it’s easy to use because it’s natively supported by many services, such as Amazon S3. When SSE is used, the service that’s storing data will encrypt each piece of data with a key (a “data key”) when it’s received, and then decrypt it transparently when it’s requested by an authorized user. This has the benefit of being seamless for application developers because they only need to check a box in Amazon S3 to enable encryption, and it also adds an additional level of access control by having separate permissions to download an object and perform a decryption operation. However, there is a security/convenience tradeoff to consider, because the service will allow any role with the appropriate permissions to perform a decryption. For additional control, many AWS services—including S3—support the use of customer-managed AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) customer master keys (CMKs) that allow you to specify key policies or use grants or AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to control which roles or users have access to decryption, and when. Configuring permission to decrypt using customer-managed CMKs is often sufficient to satisfy compliance regimes that require “application-level encryption.”

Some threat models or compliance regimes may require client-side encryption (CSE), which can add a powerful additional level of access control at the expense of additional complexity. As noted above, services perform server-side encryption on data after it has left the boundary of your application. TLS is used to secure the data in transit to the service, but some customers might want to only manage encrypt/decrypt operations within their application on EC2 or in the browser. Applications can use the AWS Encryption SDK to encrypt data within the application trust boundary before it’s sent to a storage service.

But what about a use case where customers don’t even want plaintext data to leave the browser? Or what if end-users input data that is passed through or logged by intermediate systems that belong to a third-party? It’s possible to create a separate application that only manages encryption to ensure that your environment is segregated, but using the AWS Encryption SDK for JavaScript allows you to encrypt data in an end-user browser before it’s ever sent to your application, so only your end-user will be able to view their plaintext data. As you can see in Figure 2 below, in-browser encryption can allow data to be safely handled by untrusted intermediate systems while ensuring its confidentiality and integrity.

Figure 2: A hypothetical web application with encryption where the application is composed of an end-user interacting with a browser front-end, a third party which processes data received from the browser, processing is performed in Amazon EC2, and storage happens in Amazon S3

Figure 2: A hypothetical web application with encryption where the application is composed of an end-user interacting with a browser front-end, a third party which processes data received from the browser, processing is performed in Amazon EC2, and storage happens in Amazon S3

  1. The application in the browser requests a data key to encrypt sensitive data entered by the user before it is passed to a third party.
  2. Because the sensitive data has been encrypted, the third party cannot read it. The third party may be an Internet Service Provider, an appliance in the user’s environment, an application running in the cloud, or a variety of other actors.
  3. The application on Amazon EC2 can make a request to KMS to decrypt the data key so the data can be decrypted, processed, and re-encrypted.
  4. The encrypted object is stored in S3 where a second encryption request is made so the object can be encrypted when it is stored server side.

How to encrypt in the browser

The first step of in-browser encryption is including a copy of the AWS Encryption SDK for JavaScript with the scripts you’re already sending to the user when they access your application. Once it’s present in the end-user environment, it’s available for your application to make calls. To perform the encryption, the ESDK will request a data key from the cryptographic materials provider that is used to encrypt, and an encrypted copy of the data key that will be stored with the object being encrypted. After a piece of data is encrypted within the browser, the ciphertext can be uploaded to your application backend for processing or storage. When a user needs to retrieve the plaintext, the ESDK can read the metadata attached to the ciphertext to determine the appropriate method to decrypt the data key, and if they have access to the CMK decrypt the data key and then use it to decrypt the data.

Important considerations

One common issue with browser-based applications is inconsistent feature support across different browser vendors and versions. For example, how will the application respond to browsers that lack native support for the strongest recommended cryptographic algorithm suites? Or, will there be a message or alternative mode if a user accesses the application using a browser that has JavaScript disabled? The ESDK for JavaScript natively supports a fallback mode, but it may not be appropriate for all use cases. Be sure to understand what kind of browser environments you will need to support to determine whether in-browser encryption is appropriate, and include support for graceful degradation if you expect limited browser support. Developers should also consider the ways that unauthorized users might monitor user actions via a browser extension, make unauthorized browser requests without user knowledge, or request a “downgraded” (less mathematically intensive) cryptographic operation.

It’s always a good idea to have your application designs reviewed by security professionals. If you have an AWS Account Manager or Technical Account Manager, you can ask them to connect you with a Solutions Architect to review your design. If you’re an AWS customer but don’t have an account manager, consider visiting an AWS Loft to participate in our “Ask an Expert” plan.

Where to learn more

If you have questions about this post, let us know in the Comments section below, or consult the AWS Encryption SDK Developer Forum. Because the Encryption SDK is open-source, you can always contribute, open an issue, or ask questions in Github.

The AWS Encryption SDK for JavaScript is available at: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-encryption-sdk-javascript
Documentation is available at: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/encryption-sdk/latest/developer-guide/javascript.html

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Janyk author photo

Spencer Janyk

Spencer is a Senior Product Manager at Amazon Web Services working on data encryption and privacy. He has previously worked on vulnerability management and monitoring for enterprises and applying machine learning to challenges in ad tech, social media, diversity in recruiting, and talent management. Spencer holds a Master of Arts in Performance Studies from New York University and a Bachelor of Arts in Gender Studies from Whitman College.

Gray author photo

Amanda Gray

Amanda is a Senior Security Engineer at Amazon Web Services on the Crypto Tools team. Previously, Amanda worked on application security and privacy by design, and she continues to promote these goals every day. Amanda holds Bachelors’ degrees in Physics and Computer Science from the University of Washington and Smith College respectively, and a Master’s degree in Physical Oceanography from the University of Washington.

New – AWS Toolkits for PyCharm, IntelliJ (Preview), and Visual Studio Code (Preview)

Post Syndicated from Danilo Poccia original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-toolkits-for-pycharm-intellij-preview-and-visual-studio-code-preview/

Software developers have their own preferred tools. Some use powerful editors, others Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) that are tailored for specific languages and platforms. In 2014 I created my first AWS Lambda function using the editor in the Lambda console. Now, you can choose from a rich set of tools to build and deploy serverless applications. For example, the editor in the Lambda console has been greatly enhanced last year when AWS Cloud9 was released. For .NET applications, you can use the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio and AWS Tools for Visual Studio Team Services.

AWS Toolkits for PyCharm, IntelliJ, and Visual Studio Code

Today, we are announcing the general availability of the AWS Toolkit for PyCharm. We are also announcing the developer preview of the AWS Toolkits for IntelliJ and Visual Studio Code, which are under active development in GitHub. These open source toolkits will enable you to easily develop serverless applications, including a full create, step-through debug, and deploy experience in the IDE and language of your choice, be it Python, Java, Node.js, or .NET.

For example, using the AWS Toolkit for PyCharm you can:

These toolkits are distributed under the open source Apache License, Version 2.0.

Installation

Some features use the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) CLI. You can find installation instructions for your system here.

The AWS Toolkit for PyCharm is available via the IDEA Plugin Repository. To install it, in the Settings/Preferences dialog, click Plugins, search for “AWS Toolkit”, use the checkbox to enable it, and click the Install button. You will need to restart your IDE for the changes to take effect.

The AWS Toolkit for IntelliJ and Visual Studio Code are currently in developer preview and under active development. You are welcome to build and install these from the GitHub repositories:

Building a Serverless application with PyCharm

After installing AWS SAM CLI and AWS Toolkit, I create a new project in PyCharm and choose SAM on the left to create a serverless application using the AWS Serverless Application Model. I call my project hello-world in the Location field. Expanding More Settings, I choose which SAM template to use as the starting point for my project. For this walkthrough, I select the “AWS SAM Hello World”.

In PyCharm you can use credentials and profiles from your AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) configuration. You can change AWS region quickly if you have multiple environments.
The AWS Explorer shows Lambda functions and AWS CloudFormation stacks in the selected AWS region. Starting from a CloudFormation stack, you can see which Lambda functions are part of it.

The function handler is in the app.py file. After I open the file, I click on the Lambda icon on the left of the function declaration to have the option to run the function locally or start a local step-by-step debugging session.

First, I run the function locally. I can configure the payload of the event that is provided in input for the local invocation, starting from the event templates provided for most services, such as the Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), and so on. You can use a file for the payload, or select the share checkbox to make it available to other team members. The function is executed locally, but here you can choose the credentials and the region to be used if the function is calling other AWS services, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) or Amazon DynamoDB.

A local container is used to emulate the Lambda execution environment. This function is implementing a basic web API, and I can check that the result is in the format expected by the API Gateway.

After that, I want to get more information on what my code is doing. I set a breakpoint and start a local debugging session. I use the same input event as before. Again, you can choose the credentials and region for the AWS services used by the function.

I step over the HTTP request in the code to inspect the response in the Variables tab. Here you have access to all local variables, including the event and the context provided in input to the function.

After that, I resume the program to reach the end of the debugging session.

Now I am confident enough to deploy the serverless application right-clicking on the project (or the SAM template file). I can create a new CloudFormation stack, or update an existing one. For now, I create a new stack called hello-world-prod. For example, you can have a stack for production, and one for testing. I select an S3 bucket in the region to store the package used for the deployment. If your template has parameters, here you can set up the values used by this deployment.

After a few minutes, the stack creation is complete and I can run the function in the cloud with a right-click in the AWS Explorer. Here there is also the option to jump to the source code of the function.

As expected, the result of the remote invocation is the same as the local execution. My serverless application is in production!

Using these toolkits, developers can test locally to find problems before deployment, change the code of their application or the resources they need in the SAM template, and update an existing stack, quickly iterating until they reach their goal. For example, they can add an S3 bucket to store images or documents, or a DynamoDB table to store your users, or change the permissions used by their functions.

I am really excited by how much faster and easier it is to build your ideas on AWS. Now you can use your preferred environment to accelerate even further. I look forward to seeing what you will do with these new tools!

Integrating JFrog Artifactory with AWS CodePipeline

Post Syndicated from Erin McGill original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/integrating-jfrog-artifactory-with-aws-codepipeline/

When I talk with customers and partners, I find that they are in different stages in the adoption of DevOps methodologies. They are automating the creation of application artifacts and the deployment of their applications to different infrastructure environments. In many cases, they are creating and supporting multiple applications using a variety of coding languages and artifacts.

The management of these processes and artifacts can be challenging, but using the right tools and methodologies can simplify the process.

In this post, I will show you how you can automate the creation and storage of application artifacts through the implementation of a pipeline and custom deploy action in AWS CodePipeline. The example includes a Node.js code base stored in an AWS CodeCommit repository. A Node Package Manager (npm) artifact is built from the code base, and the build artifact is published to a JFrog Artifactory npm repository.

I frequently recommend AWS CodePipeline, the AWS continuous integration and continuous delivery tool. You can use it to quickly innovate through integration and deployment of new features and bug fixes by building a workflow that automates the build, test, and deployment of new versions of your application. And, because AWS CodePipeline is extensible, it allows you to create a custom action that performs customized, automated actions on your behalf.

JFrog’s Artifactory is a universal binary repository manager where you can manage multiple applications, their dependencies, and versions in one place. Artifactory also enables you to standardize the way you manage your package types across all applications developed in your company, no matter the code base or artifact type.

If you already have a Node.js CodeCommit repository, a JFrog Artifactory host, and would like to automate the creation of the pipeline, including the custom action and CodeBuild project, you can use this AWS CloudFormation template to create your AWS CloudFormation stack.

The project code can be found in this GitHub repository: https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-codepipeline-custom-job-worker-for-jfrog-artifactory.

 

The AWS CodePipeline workflow

This figure shows the path defined in the pipeline for this project. It starts with a change to Node.js source code committed to a private code repository in AWS CodeCommit. With this change, CodePipeline triggers AWS CodeBuild to create the npm package from the node.js source code. After the build, CodePipeline triggers the custom action job worker to commit the build artifact to the designated artifact repository in Artifactory.

 

This blog post assumes you have already:

·      Created a CodeCommit repository that contains a Node.js project.

·      Configured a two-stage pipeline in AWS CodePipeline.

The Source stage of the pipeline is configured to poll the Node.js CodeCommit repository. The Build stage is configured to use a CodeBuild project to build the npm package using a buildspec.yml file located in the code repository.

If you do not have a Node.js repository, you can create a CodeCommit repository that contains this simple ‘Hello World’ project. This project also includes a buildspec.yml file that is used when you define your CodeBuild project. It defines the steps to be taken by CodeBuild to create the npm artifact.

If you do not already have a pipeline set up in CodePipeline, you can use this template to create a pipeline with a CodeCommit source action and a CodeBuild build action through the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). If you do not want to install the AWS CLI on your local machine, you can use AWS Cloud9, our managed integrated development environment (IDE), to interact with AWS APIs.

In your development environment, open your favorite editor and fill out the template with values appropriate to your project. For information, see the readme in the GitHub repository.

Use this CLI command to create the pipeline from the template:

aws codepipeline create-pipeline --cli-input-json file://source-build-actions-codepipeline.json --region 'us-west-2'

It creates a pipeline that has a CodeCommit source action and a CodeBuild build action.

Integrating JFrog Artifactory

JFrog Artifactory provides default repositories for your project needs. For my NPM package repository, I am using the default virtual npm repository (named npm) that is available in Artifactory Pro. You might want to consider creating a repository per project but for the example used in this post, using the default lets me get started without having to configure a new repository.

I can use the steps in the Set Me Up -> npm section on the landing page to configure my worker to interact with the default NPM repository.

 

 

 

Custom actions in AWS CodePipeline

A custom action in AWS CodePipeline contains:

·      custom action definition

Describes the required values to run the custom action. I will define my custom action in the ‘Deploy’ category, identify the provider as ‘Artifactory’, of version ‘1’, and specify a variety of configurationProperties whose values will be defined when this stage is added to my pipeline.

·      custom action job worker

Polls CodePipeline for a job, scanning for its action-definition properties. In this blog post, after a job has been found, the job worker does the work required to publish the npm artifact to the Artifactory repository.

 

My custom action definition in JSON:

{
    "category": "Deploy",
    "configurationProperties": [{
        "name": "TypeOfArtifact",
        "required": true,
        "key": true,
        "secret": false,
        "description": "Package type, ex. npm for node packages",
        "type": "String"
    },
    {   "name": "RepoKey",
        "required": true,
        "key": true,
	"secret": false,
	"type": "String",
	"description": "Name of the repository in which this artifact should be stored"
    },
    {   "name": "UserName",
        "required": true,
        "key": true,
	"secret": false,
	"type": "String",
	"description": "Username for authenticating with the repository"
    },
    {   "name": "Password",
        "required": true,
        "key": true,
	"secret": true,
	"type": "String",
	"description": "Password for authenticating with the repository"
    },
    {   "name": "EmailAddress",
        "required": true,
        "key": true,
	"secret": false,
	"type": "String",
	"description": "Email address used to authenticate with the repository"
    },
    {   "name": "ArtifactoryHost",
        "required": true,
        "key": true,
	"secret": false,
	"type": "String",
	"description": "Public address of Artifactory host, ex: https://myexamplehost.com or http://myexamplehost.com:8080"
    }],
    "provider": "Artifactory",
    "version": "1",
    "settings": {
        "entityUrlTemplate": "{Config:ArtifactoryHost}/artifactory/webapp/#/artifacts/browse/tree/General/{Config:RepoKey}"
    },
    "inputArtifactDetails": {
        "maximumCount": 5,
        "minimumCount": 1
    },
    "outputArtifactDetails": {
        "maximumCount": 5,
        "minimumCount": 0
    }
}

There are seven sections to the custom action definition:

  • category: This is the stage in which you will be creating this action. It can be Source, Build, Deploy, Test, Invoke, Approval. Except for source actions, the category section simply allows us to organize our actions. I am setting the category for my action as ‘Deploy’ because I’m using it to publish my node artifact to my Artifactory instance.
  • configurationProperties: These are the parameters or variables required for your project to authenticate and commit your artifact. In the case of my custom worker, I need:
    • TypeOfArtifact: In this case, npm, because it’s for the Node Package Manager.
    • RepoKey: The name of the repository. In this case, it’s the default npm.
    • UserName and Password for the user to authenticate with the Artifactory repository.
    • EmailAddress used to authenticate with the repository.
    • Artifactory host name or IP address.
  • provider: The name you define for your custom action stage. I have named the provider Artifactory.
  • version: Version number for the custom action. Because this is the first version, I set the version number to 1.
  • entityUrlTemplate: This URL is presented to your users for the deploy stage along with the title you define in your provider. The link takes the user to their artifact repository page in the Artifactory host.
  • inputArtifactDetails: The number of artifacts to expect from the previous stage in the pipeline.
  • outputArtifactDetails: The number of artifacts that should be the result from the custom action stage. Later in this blog post, I define 0 for my output artifacts because I am publishing the artifact to the Artifactory repository as the final action.

After I define the custom action in a JSON file, I use the AWS CLI to create the custom action type in CodePipeline:

aws codepipeline create-custom-action-type --cli-input-json file://artifactory_custom_action_deploy_npm.json --region='us-west-2'

After I create the custom action type in the same region as my pipeline, I edit the pipeline to add a Deploy stage and configure it to use the custom action I created for Artifactory:

 

 

 

 

I have created a custom worker for the actions required to commit the npm artifact to the Artifactory repository. The worker is in Python and it runs in a loop on an Amazon EC2 instance. My custom worker polls for a deploy job and publishes the NPM artifact to the Artifactory repository.

 

The EC2 instance is running Amazon Linux and has an IAM instance role attached that gives the worker permission to access CodePipeline. The worker process is as follows:

  1. Take the configuration properties from the custom worker and poll CodePipeline for a custom action job.
  2. After there is a job in the job queue with the appropriate category, provider, and version, acknowledge the job.
  3. Download the zipped artifact created in the previous Build stage from the provided S3 buckets with the provided temporary credentials.
  4. Unzip the artifact into a temporary directory.
  5. A user-defined Artifactory user name and password is used to receive a temporary API key from Artifactory.
  6. To avoid having to write the password to a file, use that temporary API key and user name to authenticate with the NPM repository.
  7. Publish the Node.js package to the specified repository.

Because I am running my custom worker on an Amazon Linux EC2 instance, I installed npm with the following command:

sudo yum install nodejs npm --enablerepo=epel

For my custom worker, I used pip to install the required Python libraries:

pip install boto3 requests

For a full Python package list, see requirements.txt in the GitHub repository.

Let’s take a look at some of the code snippets from the worker.

First, the worker polls for jobs:

def action_type():
    ActionType = {
        'category': 'Deploy',
        'owner': 'Custom',
        'provider': 'Artifactory',
        'version': '1' }
    return(ActionType)

def poll_for_jobs():
    try:
        artifactory_action_type = action_type()
        print(artifactory_action_type)
        jobs = codepipeline.poll_for_jobs(actionTypeId=artifactory_action_type)
        while not jobs['jobs']:
            time.sleep(10)
            jobs = codepipeline.poll_for_jobs(actionTypeId=artifactory_action_type)
            if jobs['jobs']:
                print('Job found')
        return jobs['jobs'][0]
    except ClientError as e:
        print("Received an error: %s" % str(e))
        raise

 

When there is a job in the queue, the poller returns a number of values from the queue such as jobId, the input and output S3 buckets for artifacts, temporary credentials to access the S3 buckets, and other configuration details from the stage in the pipeline.

 

Here is an example of the return response:

{
	'jobs': [
		{
			'nonce': '3',
			'data': {
				'inputArtifacts': [
					{
						'name': 'Output',
						'location': {
							'type': 'S3',
							's3Location': {
								'objectKey': 'ArtifactoryNPMwithCo/Output/Key,
							'bucketName': '123456789012-codepipelineartifact-us-west-2'
							}
						}
					}
				],
				'pipelineContext': {
						'action': {
							'name': 'Deploy'
						},
						'pipelineName': 'ArtifactoryNPMwithCodeDeploy',
						'stage': {
							'name': 'Deploy'
						}
				},
				'actionTypeId': {
					'category': 'Deploy',
					'owner': 'Custom',
					'version': '1',
					'provider': 'Artifactory'
				},
				'outputArtifacts': [
					{
						'name': 'ArtifactoryOut',
						'location': {
							'type': 'S3',
							's3Location': {
								'objectKey': 'ArtifactoryNPMwithCo/Artifactor/Key,
								'bucketName': '123456789012-codepipelineartifact-us-west-2'
							}
						}
					}
				],
				'actionConfiguration': {
					'configuration': {
						'UserName': 'admin',
						'ArtifactoryHost': 'https://artifactory.myexamplehost.com',
						'Password': 'xxx',
						'EmailAddress': '[email protected]',
						'TypeOfArtifact': 'npm',
						'RepoKey': 'npm'
					}
				},
				'artifactCredentials': {
					'secretAccessKey': 'SECRET',
			               'sessionToken':‘FQoDYXdz...XdndMF',
					'accessKeyId': 'ACCESSKEY'
					}
				},
				'id': 'a0eb',
				'accountId': '123456789012
			}
		],
		'ResponseMetadata': {
			'RetryAttempts': 0,
			'HTTPStatusCode': 200,
			'RequestId': a88b-cdbd5d08b9de',
			'HTTPHeaders': {
				'x-amzn-requestid': '77343c2d-eff4’,
				'content-length': '2461',
				'content-type': 'application/x-amz-json-1.1'
			}
		}
}

 

After successfully receiving the job details, the worker sends an acknowledgement to CodePipeline to ensure that the work on the job is not duplicated by other workers watching for the same job:

def job_acknowledge(jobId, nonce):
    try:
        print('Acknowledging job')
        result = codepipeline.acknowledge_job(jobId=jobId, nonce=nonce)
        return result
    except Exception as e:
        print("Received an error when trying to acknowledge the job: %s" % str(e))
        raise

With the job now acknowledged, the worker publishes the source code artifact into the desired repository. The worker gets the value of the artifact S3 bucket and objectKey from the inputArtifacts in the response from the poll_for_jobs API request. Next, the worker creates a new directory in /tmp and downloads the S3 object into this directory:

def get_bucket_location(bucketName, init_client):
    region = init_client.get_bucket_location(Bucket=bucketName)['LocationConstraint']
    if not region:
        region = 'us-east-1'
    return region


def get_s3_artifact(bucketName, objectKey, ak, sk, st):
    init_s3 = boto3.client('s3')
    region = get_bucket_location(bucketName, init_s3)
    session = Session(aws_access_key_id=ak,
                      aws_secret_access_key=sk,
                      aws_session_token=st)

    s3 = session.resource('s3',
                          region_name=region,
                          config=botocore.client.Config(signature_version='s3v4'))
    try:
        tempdirname = tempfile.mkdtemp()
    except OSError as e:
        print('Could not write temp directory %s' % tempdirname)
        raise
    bucket = s3.Bucket(bucketName)
    obj = bucket.Object(objectKey)
    filename = tempdirname + '/' + objectKey
    try:
        if os.path.dirname(objectKey):
            directory = os.path.dirname(filename)
            os.makedirs(directory)
        print('Downloading the %s object and writing it to disk in %s location' % (objectKey, tempdirname))
        with open(filename, 'wb') as data:
            obj.download_fileobj(data)
    except ClientError as e:
        print('Downloading the object and writing the file to disk raised this error: ' + str(e))
        raise
    return(filename, tempdirname)

 

 

Because the downloaded artifact from S3 is a zip file, the worker must unzip it first. To have a clean area in which to work, I extract the downloaded zip archive into a new directory:

def unzip_codepipeline_artifact(artifact, origtmpdir):
    # create a new temp directory
    # Unzip artifact into new directory
    try:
        newtempdir = tempfile.mkdtemp()
        print('Extracting artifact %s into temporary directory %s' % (artifact, newtempdir))
        zip_ref = zipfile.ZipFile(artifact, 'r')
        zip_ref.extractall(newtempdir)
        zip_ref.close()
        shutil.rmtree(origtmpdir)
        return(os.listdir(newtempdir), newtempdir)
    except OSError as e:
        if e.errno != errno.EEXIST:
            shutil.rmtree(newtempdir)
            raise

The worker now has the npm package that I want to store in my Artifactory NPM repository.

To authenticate with the NPM repository, the worker requests a temporary token from the Artifactory host. After receiving this temporary token, it creates a .npmrc file in the worker user’s home directory that includes a hash of the user name and temporary token. After it has authenticated, the worker runs npm config set registry <URL OF REPOSITORY> to configure the npm registry value to be the Artifactory host.  Next, the worker runs npm publish –registry <URL OF REPOSITORY>, which publishes the node package to the NPM repository in the Artifactory host.

def push_to_npm(configuration, artifact_list, temp_dir, jobId):
    reponame = configuration['RepoKey']
    art_type = configuration['TypeOfArtifact']
    print("Putting artifact into NPM repository " + reponame)
    token, hostname, username = gen_artifactory_auth_token(configuration)
    npmconfigfile = create_npmconfig_file(configuration, username, token)
    url = hostname + '/artifactory/api/' + art_type + '/' + reponame
    print("Changing directory to " + str(temp_dir))
    os.chdir(temp_dir)
    try:
        print("Publishing following files to the repository: %s " % os.listdir(temp_dir))
        print("Sending artifact to Artifactory NPM registry URL: " + url)
        subprocess.call(["npm", "config", "set", "registry", url])
        req = subprocess.call(["npm", "publish", "--registry", url])
        print("Return code from npm publish: " + str(req))
        if req != 0:
            err_msg = "npm ERR! Recieved non OK response while sending response to Artifactory. Return code from npm publish: " + str(req)
            signal_failure(jobId, err_msg)
        else:
            signal_success(jobId)
    except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
       print("Received an error when trying to commit artifact %s to repository %s: " % (str(art_type), str(configuration['RepoKey']), str(e)))
       raise
    return(req, npmconfigfile)

 

If the return value from publishing to the repository is not 0, the worker signals a failure to CodePipeline. If the value is 0, the worker signals success to CodePipeline to indicate that the stage of the pipeline has been completed successfully.

For the custom worker code, see npm_job_worker.py in the GitHub repository.

I run my custom worker on an EC2 instance using the command python npm_job_worker.py, with an optional --version flag that can be used to specify worker versions other than 1. Then I trigger a release change in my pipeline:

From my custom worker output logs, I have just committed a package named node_example at version 1.0.3:

On artifact: index.js
Committing to the repo: https://artifactory.myexamplehost.com/artifactory/api/npm/npm
Sending artifact to Artifactory URL: https:// artifactoryhost.myexamplehost.com/artifactory/api/npm/npm
npm config: 0
npm http PUT https://artifactory.myexamplehost.com/artifactory/api/npm/npm/node_example
npm http 201 https://artifactory.myexamplehost.com/artifactory/api/npm/npm/node_example
+ [email protected]
Return code from npm publish: 0
Signaling success to CodePipeline

After that has been built successfully, I can find my artifact in my Artifactory repository:

To help you automate this process, I have created this AWS CloudFormation template that automates the creation of the CodeBuild project, the custom action, and the CodePipeline pipeline. It also launches the Amazon EC2-based custom job worker in an AWS Auto Scaling group. This template requires you to have a VPC and CodeCommit repository for your Node.js project. If you do not currently have a VPC in which you want to run your custom worker EC2 instances, you can use this AWS QuickStart to create one. If you do not have an existing Node.js project, I’ve provided a sample project in the GitHub repository.

Conclusion

I‘ve shown you the steps to integrate your JFrog Artifactory repository with your CodePipeline workflow. I’ve shown you how to create a custom action in CodePipeline and how to create a custom worker that works in your CI/CD pipeline. To dig deeper into custom actions and see how you can integrate your Artifactory repositories into your AWS CodePipeline projects, check out the full code base on GitHub.

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to us through the AWS CodePipeline forum.

Erin McGill is a Solutions Architect in the AWS Partner Program with a focus on DevOps and automation tooling.

Implementing safe AWS Lambda deployments with AWS CodeDeploy

Post Syndicated from Chris Munns original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/implementing-safe-aws-lambda-deployments-with-aws-codedeploy/

This post courtesy of George Mao, AWS Senior Serverless Specialist – Solutions Architect

AWS Lambda and AWS CodeDeploy recently made it possible to automatically shift incoming traffic between two function versions based on a preconfigured rollout strategy. This new feature allows you to gradually shift traffic to the new function. If there are any issues with the new code, you can quickly rollback and control the impact to your application.

Previously, you had to manually move 100% of traffic from the old version to the new version. Now, you can have CodeDeploy automatically execute pre- or post-deployment tests and automate a gradual rollout strategy. Traffic shifting is built right into the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM), making it easy to define and deploy your traffic shifting capabilities. SAM is an extension of AWS CloudFormation that provides a simplified way of defining serverless applications.

In this post, I show you how to use SAM, CloudFormation, and CodeDeploy to accomplish an automated rollout strategy for safe Lambda deployments.

Scenario

For this walkthrough, you write a Lambda application that returns a count of the S3 buckets that you own. You deploy it and use it in production. Later on, you receive requirements that tell you that you need to change your Lambda application to count only buckets that begin with the letter “a”.

Before you make the change, you need to be sure that your new Lambda application works as expected. If it does have issues, you want to minimize the number of impacted users and roll back easily. To accomplish this, you create a deployment process that publishes the new Lambda function, but does not send any traffic to it. You use CodeDeploy to execute a PreTraffic test to ensure that your new function works as expected. After the test succeeds, CodeDeploy automatically shifts traffic gradually to the new version of the Lambda function.

Your Lambda function is exposed as a REST service via an Amazon API Gateway deployment. This makes it easy to test and integrate.

Prerequisites

To execute the SAM and CloudFormation deployment, you must have the following IAM permissions:

  • cloudformation:*
  • lambda:*
  • codedeploy:*
  • iam:create*

You may use the AWS SAM Local CLI or the AWS CLI to package and deploy your Lambda application. If you choose to use SAM Local, be sure to install it onto your system. For more information, see AWS SAM Local Installation.

All of the code used in this post can be found in this GitHub repository: https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-safe-lambda-deployments.

Walkthrough

For this post, use SAM to define your resources because it comes with built-in CodeDeploy support for safe Lambda deployments.  The deployment is handled and automated by CloudFormation.

SAM allows you to define your Serverless applications in a simple and concise fashion, because it automatically creates all necessary resources behind the scenes. For example, if you do not define an execution role for a Lambda function, SAM automatically creates one. SAM also creates the CodeDeploy application necessary to drive the traffic shifting, as well as the IAM service role that CodeDeploy uses to execute all actions.

Create a SAM template

To get started, write your SAM template and call it template.yaml.

AWSTemplateFormatVersion : '2010-09-09'
Transform: AWS::Serverless-2016-10-31
Description: An example SAM template for Lambda Safe Deployments.

Resources:

  returnS3Buckets:
    Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
    Properties:
      Handler: returnS3Buckets.handler
      Runtime: nodejs6.10
      AutoPublishAlias: live
      Policies:
        - Version: "2012-10-17"
          Statement: 
          - Effect: "Allow"
            Action: 
              - "s3:ListAllMyBuckets"
            Resource: '*'
      DeploymentPreference:
          Type: Linear10PercentEvery1Minute
          Hooks:
            PreTraffic: !Ref preTrafficHook
      Events:
        Api:
          Type: Api
          Properties:
            Path: /test
            Method: get

  preTrafficHook:
    Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
    Properties:
      Handler: preTrafficHook.handler
      Policies:
        - Version: "2012-10-17"
          Statement: 
          - Effect: "Allow"
            Action: 
              - "codedeploy:PutLifecycleEventHookExecutionStatus"
            Resource:
              !Sub 'arn:aws:codedeploy:${AWS::Region}:${AWS::AccountId}:deploymentgroup:${ServerlessDeploymentApplication}/*'
        - Version: "2012-10-17"
          Statement: 
          - Effect: "Allow"
            Action: 
              - "lambda:InvokeFunction"
            Resource: !Ref returnS3Buckets.Version
      Runtime: nodejs6.10
      FunctionName: 'CodeDeployHook_preTrafficHook'
      DeploymentPreference:
        Enabled: false
      Timeout: 5
      Environment:
        Variables:
          NewVersion: !Ref returnS3Buckets.Version

This template creates two functions:

  • returnS3Buckets
  • preTrafficHook

The returnS3Buckets function is where your application logic lives. It’s a simple piece of code that uses the AWS SDK for JavaScript in Node.JS to call the Amazon S3 listBuckets API action and return the number of buckets.

'use strict';

var AWS = require('aws-sdk');
var s3 = new AWS.S3();

exports.handler = (event, context, callback) => {
	console.log("I am here! " + context.functionName  +  ":"  +  context.functionVersion);

	s3.listBuckets(function (err, data){
		if(err){
			console.log(err, err.stack);
			callback(null, {
				statusCode: 500,
				body: "Failed!"
			});
		}
		else{
			var allBuckets = data.Buckets;

			console.log("Total buckets: " + allBuckets.length);
			callback(null, {
				statusCode: 200,
				body: allBuckets.length
			});
		}
	});	
}

Review the key parts of the SAM template that defines returnS3Buckets:

  • The AutoPublishAlias attribute instructs SAM to automatically publish a new version of the Lambda function for each new deployment and link it to the live alias.
  • The Policies attribute specifies additional policy statements that SAM adds onto the automatically generated IAM role for this function. The first statement provides the function with permission to call listBuckets.
  • The DeploymentPreference attribute configures the type of rollout pattern to use. In this case, you are shifting traffic in a linear fashion, moving 10% of traffic every minute to the new version. For more information about supported patterns, see Serverless Application Model: Traffic Shifting Configurations.
  • The Hooks attribute specifies that you want to execute the preTrafficHook Lambda function before CodeDeploy automatically begins shifting traffic. This function should perform validation testing on the newly deployed Lambda version. This function invokes the new Lambda function and checks the results. If you’re satisfied with the tests, instruct CodeDeploy to proceed with the rollout via an API call to: codedeploy.putLifecycleEventHookExecutionStatus.
  • The Events attribute defines an API-based event source that can trigger this function. It accepts requests on the /test path using an HTTP GET method.
'use strict';

const AWS = require('aws-sdk');
const codedeploy = new AWS.CodeDeploy({apiVersion: '2014-10-06'});
var lambda = new AWS.Lambda();

exports.handler = (event, context, callback) => {

	console.log("Entering PreTraffic Hook!");
	
	// Read the DeploymentId & LifecycleEventHookExecutionId from the event payload
    var deploymentId = event.DeploymentId;
	var lifecycleEventHookExecutionId = event.LifecycleEventHookExecutionId;

	var functionToTest = process.env.NewVersion;
	console.log("Testing new function version: " + functionToTest);

	// Perform validation of the newly deployed Lambda version
	var lambdaParams = {
		FunctionName: functionToTest,
		InvocationType: "RequestResponse"
	};

	var lambdaResult = "Failed";
	lambda.invoke(lambdaParams, function(err, data) {
		if (err){	// an error occurred
			console.log(err, err.stack);
			lambdaResult = "Failed";
		}
		else{	// successful response
			var result = JSON.parse(data.Payload);
			console.log("Result: " +  JSON.stringify(result));

			// Check the response for valid results
			// The response will be a JSON payload with statusCode and body properties. ie:
			// {
			//		"statusCode": 200,
			//		"body": 51
			// }
			if(result.body == 9){	
				lambdaResult = "Succeeded";
				console.log ("Validation testing succeeded!");
			}
			else{
				lambdaResult = "Failed";
				console.log ("Validation testing failed!");
			}

			// Complete the PreTraffic Hook by sending CodeDeploy the validation status
			var params = {
				deploymentId: deploymentId,
				lifecycleEventHookExecutionId: lifecycleEventHookExecutionId,
				status: lambdaResult // status can be 'Succeeded' or 'Failed'
			};
			
			// Pass AWS CodeDeploy the prepared validation test results.
			codedeploy.putLifecycleEventHookExecutionStatus(params, function(err, data) {
				if (err) {
					// Validation failed.
					console.log('CodeDeploy Status update failed');
					console.log(err, err.stack);
					callback("CodeDeploy Status update failed");
				} else {
					// Validation succeeded.
					console.log('Codedeploy status updated successfully');
					callback(null, 'Codedeploy status updated successfully');
				}
			});
		}  
	});
}

The hook is hardcoded to check that the number of S3 buckets returned is 9.

Review the key parts of the SAM template that defines preTrafficHook:

  • The Policies attribute specifies additional policy statements that SAM adds onto the automatically generated IAM role for this function. The first statement provides permissions to call the CodeDeploy PutLifecycleEventHookExecutionStatus API action. The second statement provides permissions to invoke the specific version of the returnS3Buckets function to test
  • This function has traffic shifting features disabled by setting the DeploymentPreference option to false.
  • The FunctionName attribute explicitly tells CloudFormation what to name the function. Otherwise, CloudFormation creates the function with the default naming convention: [stackName]-[FunctionName]-[uniqueID].  Name the function with the “CodeDeployHook_” prefix because the CodeDeployServiceRole role only allows InvokeFunction on functions named with that prefix.
  • Set the Timeout attribute to allow enough time to complete your validation tests.
  • Use an environment variable to inject the ARN of the newest deployed version of the returnS3Buckets function. The ARN allows the function to know the specific version to invoke and perform validation testing on.

Deploy the function

Your SAM template is all set and the code is written—you’re ready to deploy the function for the first time. Here’s how to do it via the SAM CLI. Replace “sam” with “cloudformation” to use CloudFormation instead.

First, package the function. This command returns a CloudFormation importable file, packaged.yaml.

sam package –template-file template.yaml –s3-bucket mybucket –output-template-file packaged.yaml

Now deploy everything:

sam deploy –template-file packaged.yaml –stack-name mySafeDeployStack –capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM

At this point, both Lambda functions have been deployed within the CloudFormation stack mySafeDeployStack. The returnS3Buckets has been deployed as Version 1:

SAM automatically created a few things, including the CodeDeploy application, with the deployment pattern that you specified (Linear10PercentEvery1Minute). There is currently one deployment group, with no action, because no deployments have occurred. SAM also created the IAM service role that this CodeDeploy application uses:

There is a single managed policy attached to this role, which allows CodeDeploy to invoke any Lambda function that begins with “CodeDeployHook_”.

An API has been set up called safeDeployStack. It targets your Lambda function with the /test resource using the GET method. When you test the endpoint, API Gateway executes the returnS3Buckets function and it returns the number of S3 buckets that you own. In this case, it’s 51.

Publish a new Lambda function version

Now implement the requirements change, which is to make returnS3Buckets count only buckets that begin with the letter “a”. The code now looks like the following (see returnS3BucketsNew.js in GitHub):

'use strict';

var AWS = require('aws-sdk');
var s3 = new AWS.S3();

exports.handler = (event, context, callback) => {
	console.log("I am here! " + context.functionName  +  ":"  +  context.functionVersion);

	s3.listBuckets(function (err, data){
		if(err){
			console.log(err, err.stack);
			callback(null, {
				statusCode: 500,
				body: "Failed!"
			});
		}
		else{
			var allBuckets = data.Buckets;

			console.log("Total buckets: " + allBuckets.length);
			//callback(null, allBuckets.length);

			//  New Code begins here
			var counter=0;
			for(var i  in allBuckets){
				if(allBuckets[i].Name[0] === "a")
					counter++;
			}
			console.log("Total buckets starting with a: " + counter);

			callback(null, {
				statusCode: 200,
				body: counter
			});
			
		}
	});	
}

Repackage and redeploy with the same two commands as earlier:

sam package –template-file template.yaml –s3-bucket mybucket –output-template-file packaged.yaml
	
sam deploy –template-file packaged.yaml –stack-name mySafeDeployStack –capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM

CloudFormation understands that this is a stack update instead of an entirely new stack. You can see that reflected in the CloudFormation console:

During the update, CloudFormation deploys the new Lambda function as version 2 and adds it to the “live” alias. There is no traffic routing there yet. CodeDeploy now takes over to begin the safe deployment process.

The first thing CodeDeploy does is invoke the preTrafficHook function. Verify that this happened by reviewing the Lambda logs and metrics:

The function should progress successfully, invoke Version 2 of returnS3Buckets, and finally invoke the CodeDeploy API with a success code. After this occurs, CodeDeploy begins the predefined rollout strategy. Open the CodeDeploy console to review the deployment progress (Linear10PercentEvery1Minute):

Verify the traffic shift

During the deployment, verify that the traffic shift has started to occur by running the test periodically. As the deployment shifts towards the new version, a larger percentage of the responses return 9 instead of 51. These numbers match the S3 buckets.

A minute later, you see 10% more traffic shifting to the new version. The whole process takes 10 minutes to complete. After completion, open the Lambda console and verify that the “live” alias now points to version 2:

After 10 minutes, the deployment is complete and CodeDeploy signals success to CloudFormation and completes the stack update.

Check the results

If you invoke the function alias manually, you see the results of the new implementation.

aws lambda invoke –function [lambda arn to live alias] out.txt

You can also execute the prod stage of your API and verify the results by issuing an HTTP GET to the invoke URL:

Summary

This post has shown you how you can safely automate your Lambda deployments using the Lambda traffic shifting feature. You used the Serverless Application Model (SAM) to define your Lambda functions and configured CodeDeploy to manage your deployment patterns. Finally, you used CloudFormation to automate the deployment and updates to your function and PreTraffic hook.

Now that you know all about this new feature, you’re ready to begin automating Lambda deployments with confidence that things will work as designed. I look forward to hearing about what you’ve built with the AWS Serverless Platform.

How to retain system tables’ data spanning multiple Amazon Redshift clusters and run cross-cluster diagnostic queries

Post Syndicated from Karthik Sonti original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/how-to-retain-system-tables-data-spanning-multiple-amazon-redshift-clusters-and-run-cross-cluster-diagnostic-queries/

Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse service that logs the history of the system in STL log tables. The STL log tables manage disk space by retaining only two to five days of log history, depending on log usage and available disk space.

To retain STL tables’ data for an extended period, you usually have to create a replica table for every system table. Then, for each you load the data from the system table into the replica at regular intervals. By maintaining replica tables for STL tables, you can run diagnostic queries on historical data from the STL tables. You then can derive insights from query execution times, query plans, and disk-spill patterns, and make better cluster-sizing decisions. However, refreshing replica tables with live data from STL tables at regular intervals requires schedulers such as Cron or AWS Data Pipeline. Also, these tables are specific to one cluster and they are not accessible after the cluster is terminated. This is especially true for transient Amazon Redshift clusters that last for only a finite period of ad hoc query execution.

In this blog post, I present a solution that exports system tables from multiple Amazon Redshift clusters into an Amazon S3 bucket. This solution is serverless, and you can schedule it as frequently as every five minutes. The AWS CloudFormation deployment template that I provide automates the solution setup in your environment. The system tables’ data in the Amazon S3 bucket is partitioned by cluster name and query execution date to enable efficient joins in cross-cluster diagnostic queries.

I also provide another CloudFormation template later in this post. This second template helps to automate the creation of tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog for the system tables’ data stored in Amazon S3. After the system tables are exported to Amazon S3, you can run cross-cluster diagnostic queries on the system tables’ data and derive insights about query executions in each Amazon Redshift cluster. You can do this using Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, or Amazon Redshift Spectrum.

You can find all the code examples in this post, including the CloudFormation templates, AWS Glue extract, transform, and load (ETL) scripts, and the resolution steps for common errors you might encounter in this GitHub repository.

Solution overview

The solution in this post uses AWS Glue to export system tables’ log data from Amazon Redshift clusters into Amazon S3. The AWS Glue ETL jobs are invoked at a scheduled interval by AWS Lambda. AWS Systems Manager, which provides secure, hierarchical storage for configuration data management and secrets management, maintains the details of Amazon Redshift clusters for which the solution is enabled. The last-fetched time stamp values for the respective cluster-table combination are maintained in an Amazon DynamoDB table.

The following diagram covers the key steps involved in this solution.

The solution as illustrated in the preceding diagram flows like this:

  1. The Lambda function, invoke_rs_stl_export_etl, is triggered at regular intervals, as controlled by Amazon CloudWatch. It’s triggered to look up the AWS Systems Manager parameter store to get the details of the Amazon Redshift clusters for which the system table export is enabled.
  2. The same Lambda function, based on the Amazon Redshift cluster details obtained in step 1, invokes the AWS Glue ETL job designated for the Amazon Redshift cluster. If an ETL job for the cluster is not found, the Lambda function creates one.
  3. The ETL job invoked for the Amazon Redshift cluster gets the cluster credentials from the parameter store. It gets from the DynamoDB table the last exported time stamp of when each of the system tables was exported from the respective Amazon Redshift cluster.
  4. The ETL job unloads the system tables’ data from the Amazon Redshift cluster into an Amazon S3 bucket.
  5. The ETL job updates the DynamoDB table with the last exported time stamp value for each system table exported from the Amazon Redshift cluster.
  6. The Amazon Redshift cluster system tables’ data is available in Amazon S3 and is partitioned by cluster name and date for running cross-cluster diagnostic queries.

Understanding the configuration data

This solution uses AWS Systems Manager parameter store to store the Amazon Redshift cluster credentials securely. The parameter store also securely stores other configuration information that the AWS Glue ETL job needs for extracting and storing system tables’ data in Amazon S3. Systems Manager comes with a default AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key that it uses to encrypt the password component of the Amazon Redshift cluster credentials.

The following table explains the global parameters and cluster-specific parameters required in this solution. The global parameters are defined once and applicable at the overall solution level. The cluster-specific parameters are specific to an Amazon Redshift cluster and repeat for each cluster for which you enable this post’s solution. The CloudFormation template explained later in this post creates these parameters as part of the deployment process.

Parameter nameTypeDescription
Global parameters—defined once and applied to all jobs
redshift_query_logs.global.s3_prefixStringThe Amazon S3 path where the query logs are exported. Under this path, each exported table is partitioned by cluster name and date.
redshift_query_logs.global.tempdirStringThe Amazon S3 path that AWS Glue ETL jobs use for temporarily staging the data.
redshift_query_logs.global.role>StringThe name of the role that the AWS Glue ETL jobs assume. Just the role name is sufficient. The complete Amazon Resource Name (ARN) is not required.
redshift_query_logs.global.enabled_cluster_listStringListA comma-separated list of cluster names for which system tables’ data export is enabled. This gives flexibility for a user to exclude certain clusters.
Cluster-specific parameters—for each cluster specified in the enabled_cluster_list parameter
redshift_query_logs.<<cluster_name>>.connectionStringThe name of the AWS Glue Data Catalog connection to the Amazon Redshift cluster. For example, if the cluster name is product_warehouse, the entry is redshift_query_logs.product_warehouse.connection.
redshift_query_logs.<<cluster_name>>.userStringThe user name that AWS Glue uses to connect to the Amazon Redshift cluster.
redshift_query_logs.<<cluster_name>>.passwordSecure StringThe password that AWS Glue uses to connect the Amazon Redshift cluster’s encrypted-by key that is managed in AWS KMS.

For example, suppose that you have two Amazon Redshift clusters, product-warehouse and category-management, for which the solution described in this post is enabled. In this case, the parameters shown in the following screenshot are created by the solution deployment CloudFormation template in the AWS Systems Manager parameter store.

Solution deployment

To make it easier for you to get started, I created a CloudFormation template that automatically configures and deploys the solution—only one step is required after deployment.

Prerequisites

To deploy the solution, you must have one or more Amazon Redshift clusters in a private subnet. This subnet must have a network address translation (NAT) gateway or a NAT instance configured, and also a security group with a self-referencing inbound rule for all TCP ports. For more information about why AWS Glue ETL needs the configuration it does, described previously, see Connecting to a JDBC Data Store in a VPC in the AWS Glue documentation.

To start the deployment, launch the CloudFormation template:

CloudFormation stack parameters

The following table lists and describes the parameters for deploying the solution to export query logs from multiple Amazon Redshift clusters.

PropertyDefaultDescription
S3BucketmybucketThe bucket this solution uses to store the exported query logs, stage code artifacts, and perform unloads from Amazon Redshift. For example, the mybucket/extract_rs_logs/data bucket is used for storing all the exported query logs for each system table partitioned by the cluster. The mybucket/extract_rs_logs/temp/ bucket is used for temporarily staging the unloaded data from Amazon Redshift. The mybucket/extract_rs_logs/code bucket is used for storing all the code artifacts required for Lambda and the AWS Glue ETL jobs.
ExportEnabledRedshiftClustersRequires InputA comma-separated list of cluster names from which the system table logs need to be exported.
DataStoreSecurityGroupsRequires InputA list of security groups with an inbound rule to the Amazon Redshift clusters provided in the parameter, ExportEnabledClusters. These security groups should also have a self-referencing inbound rule on all TCP ports, as explained on Connecting to a JDBC Data Store in a VPC.

After you launch the template and create the stack, you see that the following resources have been created:

  1. AWS Glue connections for each Amazon Redshift cluster you provided in the CloudFormation stack parameter, ExportEnabledRedshiftClusters.
  2. All parameters required for this solution created in the parameter store.
  3. The Lambda function that invokes the AWS Glue ETL jobs for each configured Amazon Redshift cluster at a regular interval of five minutes.
  4. The DynamoDB table that captures the last exported time stamps for each exported cluster-table combination.
  5. The AWS Glue ETL jobs to export query logs from each Amazon Redshift cluster provided in the CloudFormation stack parameter, ExportEnabledRedshiftClusters.
  6. The IAM roles and policies required for the Lambda function and AWS Glue ETL jobs.

After the deployment

For each Amazon Redshift cluster for which you enabled the solution through the CloudFormation stack parameter, ExportEnabledRedshiftClusters, the automated deployment includes temporary credentials that you must update after the deployment:

  1. Go to the parameter store.
  2. Note the parameters <<cluster_name>>.user and redshift_query_logs.<<cluster_name>>.password that correspond to each Amazon Redshift cluster for which you enabled this solution. Edit these parameters to replace the placeholder values with the right credentials.

For example, if product-warehouse is one of the clusters for which you enabled system table export, you edit these two parameters with the right user name and password and choose Save parameter.

Querying the exported system tables

Within a few minutes after the solution deployment, you should see Amazon Redshift query logs being exported to the Amazon S3 location, <<S3Bucket_you_provided>>/extract_redshift_query_logs/data/. In that bucket, you should see the eight system tables partitioned by customer name and date: stl_alert_event_log, stl_dlltext, stl_explain, stl_query, stl_querytext, stl_scan, stl_utilitytext, and stl_wlm_query.

To run cross-cluster diagnostic queries on the exported system tables, create external tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. To make it easier for you to get started, I provide a CloudFormation template that creates an AWS Glue crawler, which crawls the exported system tables stored in Amazon S3 and builds the external tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog.

Launch this CloudFormation template to create external tables that correspond to the Amazon Redshift system tables. S3Bucket is the only input parameter required for this stack deployment. Provide the same Amazon S3 bucket name where the system tables’ data is being exported. After you successfully create the stack, you can see the eight tables in the database, redshift_query_logs_db, as shown in the following screenshot.

Now, navigate to the Athena console to run cross-cluster diagnostic queries. The following screenshot shows a diagnostic query executed in Athena that retrieves query alerts logged across multiple Amazon Redshift clusters.

You can build the following example Amazon QuickSight dashboard by running cross-cluster diagnostic queries on Athena to identify the hourly query count and the key query alert events across multiple Amazon Redshift clusters.

How to extend the solution

You can extend this post’s solution in two ways:

  • Add any new Amazon Redshift clusters that you spin up after you deploy the solution.
  • Add other system tables or custom query results to the list of exports from an Amazon Redshift cluster.

Extend the solution to other Amazon Redshift clusters

To extend the solution to more Amazon Redshift clusters, add the three cluster-specific parameters in the AWS Systems Manager parameter store following the guidelines earlier in this post. Modify the redshift_query_logs.global.enabled_cluster_list parameter to append the new cluster to the comma-separated string.

Extend the solution to add other tables or custom queries to an Amazon Redshift cluster

The current solution ships with the export functionality for the following Amazon Redshift system tables:

  • stl_alert_event_log
  • stl_dlltext
  • stl_explain
  • stl_query
  • stl_querytext
  • stl_scan
  • stl_utilitytext
  • stl_wlm_query

You can easily add another system table or custom query by adding a few lines of code to the AWS Glue ETL job, <<cluster-name>_extract_rs_query_logs. For example, suppose that from the product-warehouse Amazon Redshift cluster you want to export orders greater than $2,000. To do so, add the following five lines of code to the AWS Glue ETL job product-warehouse_extract_rs_query_logs, where product-warehouse is your cluster name:

  1. Get the last-processed time-stamp value. The function creates a value if it doesn’t already exist.

salesLastProcessTSValue = functions.getLastProcessedTSValue(trackingEntry=”mydb.sales_2000",job_configs=job_configs)

  1. Run the custom query with the time stamp.

returnDF=functions.runQuery(query="select * from sales s join order o where o.order_amnt > 2000 and sale_timestamp > '{}'".format (salesLastProcessTSValue) ,tableName="mydb.sales_2000",job_configs=job_configs)

  1. Save the results to Amazon S3.

functions.saveToS3(dataframe=returnDF,s3Prefix=s3Prefix,tableName="mydb.sales_2000",partitionColumns=["sale_date"],job_configs=job_configs)

  1. Get the latest time-stamp value from the returned data frame in Step 2.

latestTimestampVal=functions.getMaxValue(returnDF,"sale_timestamp",job_configs)

  1. Update the last-processed time-stamp value in the DynamoDB table.

functions.updateLastProcessedTSValue(“mydb.sales_2000",latestTimestampVal[0],job_configs)

Conclusion

In this post, I demonstrate a serverless solution to retain the system tables’ log data across multiple Amazon Redshift clusters. By using this solution, you can incrementally export the data from system tables into Amazon S3. By performing this export, you can build cross-cluster diagnostic queries, build audit dashboards, and derive insights into capacity planning by using services such as Athena. I also demonstrate how you can extend this solution to other ad hoc query use cases or tables other than system tables by adding a few lines of code.

Additional Reading

If you found this post useful, be sure to check out Using Amazon Redshift Spectrum, Amazon Athena, and AWS Glue with Node.js in Production and Amazon Redshift – 2017 Recap.

About the Author

Karthik Sonti is a senior big data architect at Amazon Web Services. He helps AWS customers build big data and analytical solutions and provides guidance on architecture and best practices.

 

 

 

 

Node.js 8.10 runtime now available in AWS Lambda

Post Syndicated from Chris Munns original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/node-js-8-10-runtime-now-available-in-aws-lambda/

This post courtesy of Ed Lima, AWS Solutions Architect

We are excited to announce that you can now develop your AWS Lambda functions using the Node.js 8.10 runtime, which is the current Long Term Support (LTS) version of Node.js. Start using this new version today by specifying a runtime parameter value of nodejs8.10 when creating or updating functions.

Supporting async/await

The Lambda programming model for Node.js 8.10 now supports defining a function handler using the async/await pattern.

Asynchronous or non-blocking calls are an inherent and important part of applications, as user and human interfaces are asynchronous by nature. If you decide to have a coffee with a friend, you usually order the coffee then start or continue a conversation with your friend while the coffee is getting ready. You don’t wait for the coffee to be ready before you start talking. These activities are asynchronous, because you can start one and then move to the next without waiting for completion. Otherwise, you’d delay (or block) the start of the next activity.

Asynchronous calls used to be handled in Node.js using callbacks. That presented problems when they were nested within other callbacks in multiple levels, making the code difficult to maintain and understand.

Promises were implemented to try to solve issues caused by “callback hell.” They allow asynchronous operations to call their own methods and handle what happens when a call is successful or when it fails. As your requirements become more complicated, even promises become harder to work with and may still end up complicating your code.

Async/await is the new way of handling asynchronous operations in Node.js, and makes for simpler, easier, and cleaner code for non-blocking calls. It still uses promises but a callback is returned directly from the asynchronous function, just as if it were a synchronous blocking function.

Take for instance the following Lambda function to get the current account settings, using the Node.js 6.10 runtime:

let AWS = require('aws-sdk');
let lambda = new AWS.Lambda();

exports.handler = (event, context, callback) => {
    let getAccountSettingsPromise = lambda.getAccountSettings().promise();
    getAccountSettingsPromise.then(
        (data) => {
            callback(null, data);
        },
        (err) => {
            console.log(err);
            callback(err);
        }
    );
};

With the new Node.js 8.10 runtime, there are new handler types that can be declared with the “async” keyword or can return a promise directly.

This is how the same function looks like using async/await with Node.js 8.10:

let AWS = require('aws-sdk');
let lambda = new AWS.Lambda();

exports.handler = async (event) => {
    return await lambda.getAccountSettings().promise() ;
};

Alternatively, you could have the handler return a promise directly:

let AWS = require('aws-sdk');
let lambda = new AWS.Lambda();

exports.handler = (event) => {
    return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
        lambda.getAccountSettings(event)
        .then((data) => {
            resolve data;
        })
        .catch(reject);
     });
};

The new handler types are alternatives to the callback pattern, which is still fully supported.

All three functions return the same results. However, in the new runtime with async/await, all callbacks in the code are gone, which makes it easier to read. This is especially true for those less familiar with promises.

{
    "AccountLimit":{
        "TotalCodeSize":80530636800,
        "CodeSizeUnzipped":262144000,
        "CodeSizeZipped":52428800, 
        "ConcurrentExecutions":1000,
        "UnreservedConcurrentExecutions":1000
    },
    "AccountUsage":{
        "TotalCodeSize":52234461,
        "FunctionCount":53
    }
}

Another great advantage of async/await is better error handling. You can use a try/catch block inside the scope of an async function. Even though the function awaits an asynchronous operation, any errors end up in the catch block.

You can improve your previous Node.js 8.10 function with this trusted try/catch error handling pattern:

let AWS = require('aws-sdk');
let lambda = new AWS.Lambda();
let data;

exports.handler = async (event) => {
    try {
        data = await lambda.getAccountSettings().promise();
    }
    catch (err) {
        console.log(err);
        return err;
    }
    return data;
};

While you now have a similar number of lines in both runtimes, the code is cleaner and more readable with async/await. It makes the asynchronous calls look more synchronous. However, it is important to notice that the code is still executed the same way as if it were using a callback or promise-based API.

Backward compatibility

You may port your existing Node.js 4.3 and 6.10 functions over to Node.js 8.10 by updating the runtime. Node.js 8.10 does include numerous breaking changes from previous Node versions.

Make sure to review the API changes between Node.js 4.3, 6.10, and Node.js 8.10 to see if there are other changes that might affect your code. We recommend testing that your Lambda function passes internal validation for its behavior when upgrading to the new runtime version.

You can use Lambda versions/aliases to safely test that your function runs as expected on Node 8.10, before routing production traffic to it.

New node features

You can now get better performance when compared to the previous LTS version 6.x (up to 20%). The new V8 6.0 engine comes with Turbofan and the Ignition pipeline, which leads to lower memory consumption and faster startup time across Node.js applications.

HTTP/2, which is subject to future changes, allows developers to use the new protocol to speed application development and undo many of HTTP/1.1 workarounds to make applications faster, simpler, and more powerful.

For more information, see the AWS Lambda Developer Guide.

Hope you enjoy and… go build with Node.js 8.10!

Voice-controlled magnification glasses

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/voice-controlled-magnification-glasses/

Go hands-free in the laboratory or makerspace with Mauro Pichiliani’s voice-controlled magnification glasses.

Voice Controlled Glasses With Magnifying Lens

This video presents the project MoveLens: a voice controlled glasses with magnifying lens. It was the my entry for the Voice Activated context on unstructables. Check the step by step guide at Voice Controlled Glasses With Magnifying Lens. Source code: https://github.com/pichiliani/MoveLens Step by Step guide: https://www.instructables.com/id/Voice-Controlled-Glasses-With-Magnifying-Lens/

It’s a kind of magnification

We’ve all been there – that moment when you need another pair of hands to complete a task. And while these glasses may not hold all the answers, they’re a perfect addition to any hobbyist’s arsenal.

Introducing Mauro Pichilliani’s voice-activated glasses: a pair of frames with magnification lenses that can flip up and down in response to a voice command, depending on the task at hand. No more needing to put down your tools in order to put magnifying glasses on. No more trying to re-position a magnifying glass with the back of your left wrist, or getting grease all over your lenses.

As Mauro explains in his tutorial for the glasses:

Many professionals work for many hours looking at very small areas, such as surgeons, watchmakers, jewellery designers and so on. Most of the time these professionals use some kind of magnification glasses that helps them to see better the area they are working with and other tiny items used on the job. The devices that had magnifications lens on a form factor of a glass usually allow the professional to move the lens out of their eye sight, i.e. put aside the lens. However, in some scenarios touching the lens or the glass rim to move away the lens can contaminate the fingers. Also, it is cumbersome and can break the concentration of the professional.

Voice-controlled magnification glasses

Using a Raspberry Pi Zero W, a servo motor, a microphone, and the IBM Watson speech-to-text service, Mauro built a pair of glasses that lets users control the position of the magnification lenses with voice commands.

Magnification glasses, before modification and addition of Raspberry Pi

The glasses Mauro modified, before he started work on them; you have to move the lenses with your hands, like it’s October 2015

Mauro started by dismantling a pair of standard magnification glasses in order to modify the lens supports to allow them to move freely. He drilled a hole in one of the lens supports to provide a place to attach the servo, and used lollipop sticks and hot glue to fix the lenses relative to one another, so they would both move together under the control of the servo. Then, he set up a Raspberry Pi Zero, installing Raspbian and software to use a USB microphone; after connecting the servo to the Pi Zero’s GPIO pins, he set up the Watson speech-to-text service.

Finally, he wrote the code to bring the project together. Two Python scripts direct the servo to raise and lower the lenses, and a Node.js script captures audio from the microphone, passes it on to Watson, checks for an “up” or “down” command, and calls the appropriate Python script as required.

Your turn

You can follow the tutorial on the Instructables website, where Mauro entered the glasses into the Instructables Voice Activated Challenge. And if you’d like to take your first steps into digital making using the Raspberry Pi, take a look at our free online projects.

The post Voice-controlled magnification glasses appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Amazon Redshift – 2017 Recap

Post Syndicated from Larry Heathcote original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/amazon-redshift-2017-recap/

We have been busy adding new features and capabilities to Amazon Redshift, and we wanted to give you a glimpse of what we’ve been doing over the past year. In this article, we recap a few of our enhancements and provide a set of resources that you can use to learn more and get the most out of your Amazon Redshift implementation.

In 2017, we made more than 30 announcements about Amazon Redshift. We listened to you, our customers, and delivered Redshift Spectrum, a feature of Amazon Redshift, that gives you the ability to extend analytics to your data lake—without moving data. We launched new DC2 nodes, doubling performance at the same price. We also announced many new features that provide greater scalability, better performance, more automation, and easier ways to manage your analytics workloads.

To see a full list of our launches, visit our what’s new page—and be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed.

Major launches in 2017

Amazon Redshift Spectrum—extend analytics to your data lake, without moving data

We launched Amazon Redshift Spectrum to give you the freedom to store data in Amazon S3, in open file formats, and have it available for analytics without the need to load it into your Amazon Redshift cluster. It enables you to easily join datasets across Redshift clusters and S3 to provide unique insights that you would not be able to obtain by querying independent data silos.

With Redshift Spectrum, you can run SQL queries against data in an Amazon S3 data lake as easily as you analyze data stored in Amazon Redshift. And you can do it without loading data or resizing the Amazon Redshift cluster based on growing data volumes. Redshift Spectrum separates compute and storage to meet workload demands for data size, concurrency, and performance. Redshift Spectrum scales processing across thousands of nodes, so results are fast, even with massive datasets and complex queries. You can query open file formats that you already use—such as Apache Avro, CSV, Grok, ORC, Apache Parquet, RCFile, RegexSerDe, SequenceFile, TextFile, and TSV—directly in Amazon S3, without any data movement.

“For complex queries, Redshift Spectrum provided a 67 percent performance gain,” said Rafi Ton, CEO, NUVIAD. “Using the Parquet data format, Redshift Spectrum delivered an 80 percent performance improvement. For us, this was substantial.”

To learn more about Redshift Spectrum, watch our AWS Summit session Intro to Amazon Redshift Spectrum: Now Query Exabytes of Data in S3, and read our announcement blog post Amazon Redshift Spectrum – Exabyte-Scale In-Place Queries of S3 Data.

DC2 nodes—twice the performance of DC1 at the same price

We launched second-generation Dense Compute (DC2) nodes to provide low latency and high throughput for demanding data warehousing workloads. DC2 nodes feature powerful Intel E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) CPUs, fast DDR4 memory, and NVMe-based solid state disks (SSDs). We’ve tuned Amazon Redshift to take advantage of the better CPU, network, and disk on DC2 nodes, providing up to twice the performance of DC1 at the same price. Our DC2.8xlarge instances now provide twice the memory per slice of data and an optimized storage layout with 30 percent better storage utilization.

“Redshift allows us to quickly spin up clusters and provide our data scientists with a fast and easy method to access data and generate insights,” said Bradley Todd, technology architect at Liberty Mutual. “We saw a 9x reduction in month-end reporting time with Redshift DC2 nodes as compared to DC1.”

Read our customer testimonials to see the performance gains our customers are experiencing with DC2 nodes. To learn more, read our blog post Amazon Redshift Dense Compute (DC2) Nodes Deliver Twice the Performance as DC1 at the Same Price.

Performance enhancements— 3x-5x faster queries

On average, our customers are seeing 3x to 5x performance gains for most of their critical workloads.

We introduced short query acceleration to speed up execution of queries such as reports, dashboards, and interactive analysis. Short query acceleration uses machine learning to predict the execution time of a query, and to move short running queries to an express short query queue for faster processing.

We launched results caching to deliver sub-second response times for queries that are repeated, such as dashboards, visualizations, and those from BI tools. Results caching has an added benefit of freeing up resources to improve the performance of all other queries.

We also introduced late materialization to reduce the amount of data scanned for queries with predicate filters by batching and factoring in the filtering of predicates before fetching data blocks in the next column. For example, if only 10 percent of the table rows satisfy the predicate filters, Amazon Redshift can potentially save 90 percent of the I/O for the remaining columns to improve query performance.

We launched query monitoring rules and pre-defined rule templates. These features make it easier for you to set metrics-based performance boundaries for workload management (WLM) queries, and specify what action to take when a query goes beyond those boundaries. For example, for a queue that’s dedicated to short-running queries, you might create a rule that aborts queries that run for more than 60 seconds. To track poorly designed queries, you might have another rule that logs queries that contain nested loops.

Customer insights

Amazon Redshift and Redshift Spectrum serve customers across a variety of industries and sizes, from startups to large enterprises. Visit our customer page to see the success that customers are having with our recent enhancements. Learn how companies like Liberty Mutual Insurance saw a 9x reduction in month-end reporting time using DC2 nodes. On this page, you can find case studies, videos, and other content that show how our customers are using Amazon Redshift to drive innovation and business results.

In addition, check out these resources to learn about the success our customers are having building out a data warehouse and data lake integration solution with Amazon Redshift:

Partner solutions

You can enhance your Amazon Redshift data warehouse by working with industry-leading experts. Our AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners have certified their solutions to work with Amazon Redshift. They offer software, tools, integration, and consulting services to help you at every step. Visit our Amazon Redshift Partner page and choose an APN Partner. Or, use AWS Marketplace to find and immediately start using third-party software.

To see what our Partners are saying about Amazon Redshift Spectrum and our DC2 nodes mentioned earlier, read these blog posts:

Resources

Blog posts

Visit the AWS Big Data Blog for a list of all Amazon Redshift articles.

YouTube videos

GitHub

Our community of experts contribute on GitHub to provide tips and hints that can help you get the most out of your deployment. Visit GitHub frequently to get the latest technical guidance, code samples, administrative task automation utilities, the analyze & vacuum schema utility, and more.

Customer support

If you are evaluating or considering a proof of concept with Amazon Redshift, or you need assistance migrating your on-premises or other cloud-based data warehouse to Amazon Redshift, our team of product experts and solutions architects can help you with architecting, sizing, and optimizing your data warehouse. Contact us using this support request form, and let us know how we can assist you.

If you are an Amazon Redshift customer, we offer a no-cost health check program. Our team of database engineers and solutions architects give you recommendations for optimizing Amazon Redshift and Amazon Redshift Spectrum for your specific workloads. To learn more, email us at [email protected].

If you have any questions, email us at [email protected].

 

Additional Reading

If you found this post useful, be sure to check out Amazon Redshift Spectrum – Exabyte-Scale In-Place Queries of S3 Data, Using Amazon Redshift for Fast Analytical Reports and How to Migrate Your Oracle Data Warehouse to Amazon Redshift Using AWS SCT and AWS DMS.

About the Author

Larry Heathcote is a Principle Product Marketing Manager at Amazon Web Services for data warehousing and analytics. Larry is passionate about seeing the results of data-driven insights on business outcomes. He enjoys family time, home projects, grilling out and the taste of classic barbeque.

 

 

 

Reactive Microservices Architecture on AWS

Post Syndicated from Sascha Moellering original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/reactive-microservices-architecture-on-aws/

Microservice-application requirements have changed dramatically in recent years. These days, applications operate with petabytes of data, need almost 100% uptime, and end users expect sub-second response times. Typical N-tier applications can’t deliver on these requirements.

Reactive Manifesto, published in 2014, describes the essential characteristics of reactive systems including: responsiveness, resiliency, elasticity, and being message driven.

Being message driven is perhaps the most important characteristic of reactive systems. Asynchronous messaging helps in the design of loosely coupled systems, which is a key factor for scalability. In order to build a highly decoupled system, it is important to isolate services from each other. As already described, isolation is an important aspect of the microservices pattern. Indeed, reactive systems and microservices are a natural fit.

Implemented Use Case
This reference architecture illustrates a typical ad-tracking implementation.

Many ad-tracking companies collect massive amounts of data in near-real-time. In many cases, these workloads are very spiky and heavily depend on the success of the ad-tech companies’ customers. Typically, an ad-tracking-data use case can be separated into a real-time part and a non-real-time part. In the real-time part, it is important to collect data as fast as possible and ask several questions including:,  “Is this a valid combination of parameters?,””Does this program exist?,” “Is this program still valid?”

Because response time has a huge impact on conversion rate in advertising, it is important for advertisers to respond as fast as possible. This information should be kept in memory to reduce communication overhead with the caching infrastructure. The tracking application itself should be as lightweight and scalable as possible. For example, the application shouldn’t have any shared mutable state and it should use reactive paradigms. In our implementation, one main application is responsible for this real-time part. It collects and validates data, responds to the client as fast as possible, and asynchronously sends events to backend systems.

The non-real-time part of the application consumes the generated events and persists them in a NoSQL database. In a typical tracking implementation, clicks, cookie information, and transactions are matched asynchronously and persisted in a data store. The matching part is not implemented in this reference architecture. Many ad-tech architectures use frameworks like Hadoop for the matching implementation.

The system can be logically divided into the data collection partand the core data updatepart. The data collection part is responsible for collecting, validating, and persisting the data. In the core data update part, the data that is used for validation gets updated and all subscribers are notified of new data.

Components and Services

Main Application
The main application is implemented using Java 8 and uses Vert.x as the main framework. Vert.x is an event-driven, reactive, non-blocking, polyglot framework to implement microservices. It runs on the Java virtual machine (JVM) by using the low-level IO library Netty. You can write applications in Java, JavaScript, Groovy, Ruby, Kotlin, Scala, and Ceylon. The framework offers a simple and scalable actor-like concurrency model. Vert.x calls handlers by using a thread known as an event loop. To use this model, you have to write code known as “verticles.” Verticles share certain similarities with actors in the actor model. To use them, you have to implement the verticle interface. Verticles communicate with each other by generating messages in  a single event bus. Those messages are sent on the event bus to a specific address, and verticles can register to this address by using handlers.

With only a few exceptions, none of the APIs in Vert.x block the calling thread. Similar to Node.js, Vert.x uses the reactor pattern. However, in contrast to Node.js, Vert.x uses several event loops. Unfortunately, not all APIs in the Java ecosystem are written asynchronously, for example, the JDBC API. Vert.x offers a possibility to run this, blocking APIs without blocking the event loop. These special verticles are called worker verticles. You don’t execute worker verticles by using the standard Vert.x event loops, but by using a dedicated thread from a worker pool. This way, the worker verticles don’t block the event loop.

Our application consists of five different verticles covering different aspects of the business logic. The main entry point for our application is the HttpVerticle, which exposes an HTTP-endpoint to consume HTTP-requests and for proper health checking. Data from HTTP requests such as parameters and user-agent information are collected and transformed into a JSON message. In order to validate the input data (to ensure that the program exists and is still valid), the message is sent to the CacheVerticle.

This verticle implements an LRU-cache with a TTL of 10 minutes and a capacity of 100,000 entries. Instead of adding additional functionality to a standard JDK map implementation, we use Google Guava, which has all the features we need. If the data is not in the L1 cache, the message is sent to the RedisVerticle. This verticle is responsible for data residing in Amazon ElastiCache and uses the Vert.x-redis-client to read data from Redis. In our example, Redis is the central data store. However, in a typical production implementation, Redis would just be the L2 cache with a central data store like Amazon DynamoDB. One of the most important paradigms of a reactive system is to switch from a pull- to a push-based model. To achieve this and reduce network overhead, we’ll use Redis pub/sub to push core data changes to our main application.

Vert.x also supports direct Redis pub/sub-integration, the following code shows our subscriber-implementation:

vertx.eventBus().<JsonObject>consumer(REDIS_PUBSUB_CHANNEL_VERTX, received -> {

JsonObject value = received.body().getJsonObject("value");

String message = value.getString("message");

JsonObject jsonObject = new JsonObject(message);

eb.send(CACHE_REDIS_EVENTBUS_ADDRESS, jsonObject);

});

redis.subscribe(Constants.REDIS_PUBSUB_CHANNEL, res -> {

if (res.succeeded()) {

LOGGER.info("Subscribed to " + Constants.REDIS_PUBSUB_CHANNEL);

} else {

LOGGER.info(res.cause());

}

});

The verticle subscribes to the appropriate Redis pub/sub-channel. If a message is sent over this channel, the payload is extracted and forwarded to the cache-verticle that stores the data in the L1-cache. After storing and enriching data, a response is sent back to the HttpVerticle, which responds to the HTTP request that initially hit this verticle. In addition, the message is converted to ByteBuffer, wrapped in protocol buffers, and send to an Amazon Kinesis Data Stream.

The following example shows a stripped-down version of the KinesisVerticle:

public class KinesisVerticle extends AbstractVerticle {

private static final Logger LOGGER = LoggerFactory.getLogger(KinesisVerticle.class);

private AmazonKinesisAsync kinesisAsyncClient;

private String eventStream = "EventStream";

@Override

public void start() throws Exception {

EventBus eb = vertx.eventBus();

kinesisAsyncClient = createClient();

eventStream = System.getenv(STREAM_NAME) == null ? "EventStream" : System.getenv(STREAM_NAME);

eb.consumer(Constants.KINESIS_EVENTBUS_ADDRESS, message -> {

try {

TrackingMessage trackingMessage = Json.decodeValue((String)message.body(), TrackingMessage.class);

String partitionKey = trackingMessage.getMessageId();

byte [] byteMessage = createMessage(trackingMessage);

ByteBuffer buf = ByteBuffer.wrap(byteMessage);

sendMessageToKinesis(buf, partitionKey);

message.reply("OK");

}

catch (KinesisException exc) {

LOGGER.error(exc);

}

});

}

Kinesis Consumer
This AWS Lambda function consumes data from an Amazon Kinesis Data Stream and persists the data in an Amazon DynamoDB table. In order to improve testability, the invocation code is separated from the business logic. The invocation code is implemented in the class KinesisConsumerHandler and iterates over the Kinesis events pulled from the Kinesis stream by AWS Lambda. Each Kinesis event is unwrapped and transformed from ByteBuffer to protocol buffers and converted into a Java object. Those Java objects are passed to the business logic, which persists the data in a DynamoDB table. In order to improve duration of successive Lambda calls, the DynamoDB-client is instantiated lazily and reused if possible.

Redis Updater
From time to time, it is necessary to update core data in Redis. A very efficient implementation for this requirement is using AWS Lambda and Amazon Kinesis. New core data is sent over the AWS Kinesis stream using JSON as data format and consumed by a Lambda function. This function iterates over the Kinesis events pulled from the Kinesis stream by AWS Lambda. Each Kinesis event is unwrapped and transformed from ByteBuffer to String and converted into a Java object. The Java object is passed to the business logic and stored in Redis. In addition, the new core data is also sent to the main application using Redis pub/sub in order to reduce network overhead and converting from a pull- to a push-based model.

The following example shows the source code to store data in Redis and notify all subscribers:

public void updateRedisData(final TrackingMessage trackingMessage, final Jedis jedis, final LambdaLogger logger) {

try {

ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();

String jsonString = mapper.writeValueAsString(trackingMessage);

Map<String, String> map = marshal(jsonString);

String statusCode = jedis.hmset(trackingMessage.getProgramId(), map);

}

catch (Exception exc) {

if (null == logger)

exc.printStackTrace();

else

logger.log(exc.getMessage());

}

}

public void notifySubscribers(final TrackingMessage trackingMessage, final Jedis jedis, final LambdaLogger logger) {

try {

ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();

String jsonString = mapper.writeValueAsString(trackingMessage);

jedis.publish(Constants.REDIS_PUBSUB_CHANNEL, jsonString);

}

catch (final IOException e) {

log(e.getMessage(), logger);

}

}

Similarly to our Kinesis Consumer, the Redis-client is instantiated somewhat lazily.

Infrastructure as Code
As already outlined, latency and response time are a very critical part of any ad-tracking solution because response time has a huge impact on conversion rate. In order to reduce latency for customers world-wide, it is common practice to roll out the infrastructure in different AWS Regions in the world to be as close to the end customer as possible. AWS CloudFormation can help you model and set up your AWS resources so that you can spend less time managing those resources and more time focusing on your applications that run in AWS.

You create a template that describes all the AWS resources that you want (for example, Amazon EC2 instances or Amazon RDS DB instances), and AWS CloudFormation takes care of provisioning and configuring those resources for you. Our reference architecture can be rolled out in different Regions using an AWS CloudFormation template, which sets up the complete infrastructure (for example, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) cluster, Lambda functions, DynamoDB table, Amazon ElastiCache cluster, etc.).

Conclusion
In this blog post we described reactive principles and an example architecture with a common use case. We leveraged the capabilities of different frameworks in combination with several AWS services in order to implement reactive principles—not only at the application-level but also at the system-level. I hope I’ve given you ideas for creating your own reactive applications and systems on AWS.

About the Author

Sascha Moellering is a Senior Solution Architect. Sascha is primarily interested in automation, infrastructure as code, distributed computing, containers and JVM. He can be reached at [email protected]

 

 

Invoking AWS Lambda from Amazon MQ

Post Syndicated from Tara Van Unen original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/invoking-aws-lambda-from-amazon-mq/

Contributed by Josh Kahn, AWS Solutions Architect

Message brokers can be used to solve a number of needs in enterprise architectures, including managing workload queues and broadcasting messages to a number of subscribers. Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ that makes it easy to set up and operate message brokers in the cloud.

In this post, I discuss one approach to invoking AWS Lambda from queues and topics managed by Amazon MQ brokers. This and other similar patterns can be useful in integrating legacy systems with serverless architectures. You could also integrate systems already migrated to the cloud that use common APIs such as JMS.

For example, imagine that you work for a company that produces training videos and which recently migrated its video management system to AWS. The on-premises system used to publish a message to an ActiveMQ broker when a video was ready for processing by an on-premises transcoder. However, on AWS, your company uses Amazon Elastic Transcoder. Instead of modifying the management system, Lambda polls the broker for new messages and starts a new Elastic Transcoder job. This approach avoids changes to the existing application while refactoring the workload to leverage cloud-native components.

This solution uses Amazon CloudWatch Events to trigger a Lambda function that polls the Amazon MQ broker for messages. Instead of starting an Elastic Transcoder job, the sample writes the received message to an Amazon DynamoDB table with a time stamp indicating the time received.

Getting started

To start, navigate to the Amazon MQ console. Next, launch a new Amazon MQ instance, selecting Single-instance Broker and supplying a broker name, user name, and password. Be sure to document the user name and password for later.

For the purposes of this sample, choose the default options in the Advanced settings section. Your new broker is deployed to the default VPC in the selected AWS Region with the default security group. For this post, you update the security group to allow access for your sample Lambda function. In a production scenario, I recommend deploying both the Lambda function and your Amazon MQ broker in your own VPC.

After several minutes, your instance changes status from “Creation Pending” to “Available.” You can then visit the Details page of your broker to retrieve connection information, including a link to the ActiveMQ web console where you can monitor the status of your broker, publish test messages, and so on. In this example, use the Stomp protocol to connect to your broker. Be sure to capture the broker host name, for example:

<BROKER_ID>.mq.us-east-1.amazonaws.com

You should also modify the Security Group for the broker by clicking on its Security Group ID. Click the Edit button and then click Add Rule to allow inbound traffic on port 8162 for your IP address.

Deploying and scheduling the Lambda function

To simplify the deployment of this example, I’ve provided an AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) template that deploys the sample function and DynamoDB table, and schedules the function to be invoked every five minutes. Detailed instructions can be found with sample code on GitHub in the amazonmq-invoke-aws-lambda repository, with sample code. I discuss a few key aspects in this post.

First, SAM makes it easy to deploy and schedule invocation of our function:

SubscriberFunction:
	Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
	Properties:
		CodeUri: subscriber/
		Handler: index.handler
		Runtime: nodejs6.10
		Role: !GetAtt SubscriberFunctionRole.Arn
		Timeout: 15
		Environment:
			Variables:
				HOST: !Ref AmazonMQHost
				LOGIN: !Ref AmazonMQLogin
				PASSWORD: !Ref AmazonMQPassword
				QUEUE_NAME: !Ref AmazonMQQueueName
				WORKER_FUNCTIOn: !Ref WorkerFunction
		Events:
			Timer:
				Type: Schedule
				Properties:
					Schedule: rate(5 minutes)

WorkerFunction:
Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
	Properties:
		CodeUri: worker/
		Handler: index.handler
		Runtime: nodejs6.10
Role: !GetAtt WorkerFunctionRole.Arn
		Environment:
			Variables:
				TABLE_NAME: !Ref MessagesTable

In the code, you include the URI, user name, and password for your newly created Amazon MQ broker. These allow the function to poll the broker for new messages on the sample queue.

The sample Lambda function is written in Node.js, but clients exist for a number of programming languages.

stomp.connect(options, (error, client) => {
	if (error) { /* do something */ }

	let headers = {
		destination: ‘/queue/SAMPLE_QUEUE’,
		ack: ‘auto’
	}

	client.subscribe(headers, (error, message) => {
		if (error) { /* do something */ }

		message.readString(‘utf-8’, (error, body) => {
			if (error) { /* do something */ }

			let params = {
				FunctionName: MyWorkerFunction,
				Payload: JSON.stringify({
					message: body,
					timestamp: Date.now()
				})
			}

			let lambda = new AWS.Lambda()
			lambda.invoke(params, (error, data) => {
				if (error) { /* do something */ }
			})
		}
})
})

Sending a sample message

For the purpose of this example, use the Amazon MQ console to send a test message. Navigate to the details page for your broker.

About midway down the page, choose ActiveMQ Web Console. Next, choose Manage ActiveMQ Broker to launch the admin console. When you are prompted for a user name and password, use the credentials created earlier.

At the top of the page, choose Send. From here, you can send a sample message from the broker to subscribers. For this example, this is how you generate traffic to test the end-to-end system. Be sure to set the Destination value to “SAMPLE_QUEUE.” The message body can contain any text. Choose Send.

You now have a Lambda function polling for messages on the broker. To verify that your function is working, you can confirm in the DynamoDB console that the message was successfully received and processed by the sample Lambda function.

First, choose Tables on the left and select the table name “amazonmq-messages” in the middle section. With the table detail in view, choose Items. If the function was successful, you’ll find a new entry similar to the following:

If there is no message in DynamoDB, check again in a few minutes or review the CloudWatch Logs group for Lambda functions that contain debug messages.

Alternative approaches

Beyond the approach described here, you may consider other approaches as well. For example, you could use an intermediary system such as Apache Flume to pass messages from the broker to Lambda or deploy Apache Camel to trigger Lambda via a POST to API Gateway. There are trade-offs to each of these approaches. My goal in using CloudWatch Events was to introduce an easily repeatable pattern familiar to many Lambda developers.

Summary

I hope that you have found this example of how to integrate AWS Lambda with Amazon MQ useful. If you have expertise or legacy systems that leverage APIs such as JMS, you may find this useful as you incorporate serverless concepts in your enterprise architectures.

To learn more, see the Amazon MQ website and Developer Guide. You can try Amazon MQ for free with the AWS Free Tier, which includes up to 750 hours of a single-instance mq.t2.micro broker and up to 1 GB of storage per month for one year.

Turn your smartphone into a universal remote

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/zero-universal-remote/

Honolulu-based software developer bbtinkerer was tired of never being able to find the TV remote. So he made his own using a Raspberry Pi Zero, and connected it to a web app accessible on his smartphone.

bbtinkerer universal remote Raspberry Pi zero

Finding a remote alternative

“I needed one because the remote in my house tends to go missing a lot,” explains Bernard aka bbtinkerer on the Instructables page for his Raspberry Pi Zero Universal Remote.”If I want the controller, I have to hunt down three people and hope one of them remembers that they took it.”

bbtinkerer universal remote Raspberry Pi zero

For the build, Bernard used a Raspberry Pi Zero, an IR LED and corresponding receiver, Raspbian Lite, and a neat little 3D-printed housing.

bbtinkerer universal remote Raspberry Pi zero
bbtinkerer universal remote Raspberry Pi zero
bbtinkerer universal remote Raspberry Pi zero

First, he soldered a circuit for the LED and resistors on a small piece of perf board. Then he assembled the hardware components. Finally, all he needed to do was to write the code to control his devices (including a tower fan), and to set up the app.

bbtinkerer universal remote Raspberry Pi zero

Bernard employed the Linux Infrared Remote Control (LIRC) package to control the television with the Raspberry Pi Zero, accessing the Zero via SSH. He gives a complete rundown of the installation process on Instructables.

bbtinkerer universal remote Raspberry Pi zero

Setting up a remote’s buttons with LIRC is a simple case of pressing them and naming their functions one by one. You’ll need the remote to set up the system, but after that, feel free to lock it in a drawer and use your smartphone instead.



Finally, Bernard created the web interface using Node.js, and again, because he’s lovely, he published the code for anyone wanting to build their own. Thanks, Bernard!

Life hacks

If you’ve used a Raspberry Pi to build a time-saving life hack like Bernard’s, be sure to share it with us. Other favourites of ours include fridge cameras, phone app doorbell notifications, and Alan’s ocarina home automation system. I’m not sure if this last one can truly be considered a time-saving life hack. It’s still cool though!

The post Turn your smartphone into a universal remote appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

AWS Architecture Monthly for Kindle

Post Syndicated from Jamey Tisdale original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/aws-architecture-monthly-for-kindle/

We recently launched AWS Architecture Monthly, a new subscription service on Kindle that will push a selection of the best content around cloud architecture from AWS, with a few pointers to other content you might also enjoy.

From building a simple website to crafting an AI-based chat bot, the choices of technologies and the best practices in how to apply them are constantly evolving. Our goal is to supply you each month with a broad selection of the best new tech content from AWS — from deep-dive tutorials to industry-trend articles.

With your free subscription, you can look forward to fresh content delivered directly to your Kindledevice or Kindle app including:
– Technical whitepapers
– Reference architectures
– New solutions and implementation guides
– Training and certification opportunities
– Industry trends

The January issue is now live. This month includes:
– AWS Architecture Blog: Glenn Gore’s Take on re:Invent 2017 (Chief Architect for AWS)
– AWS Reference Architectures: Java Microservices Deployed on EC2 Container Service; Node.js Microservices Deployed on EC2 Container Service
– AWS Training & Certification: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
– Sample Code: aws-serverless-express
– Technical Whitepaper: Serverless Architectures with AWS Lambda – Overview and Best Practices

At this time, Architecture Monthly annual subscriptions are only available in the France (new), US, UK, and Germany. As more countries become available, we’ll update you here on the blog. For Amazon.com countries not listed above, we are offering single-issue downloads — also accessible from our landing page. The content is the same as in the subscription but requires individual-issue downloads.

FAQ
I have to submit my credit card information for a free subscription?
While you do have to submit your card information at this time (as you would for a free book in the Kindle store), it won’t be charged. This will remain a free, annual subscription and includes all 10 issues for the year.

Why isn’t the subscription available everywhere?
As new countries get added to Kindle Newsstand, we’ll ensure we add them for Architecture Monthly. This month we added France but anticipate it will take some time for the new service to move into additional markets.

What countries are included in the Amazon.com list where the issues can be downloaded?
Andorra, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Gibraltar, Guernsey, India, Ireland, Isle of Man, Japan, Jersey, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Mexico, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, San Marino, Spain, Switzerland, Vatican City