Tag Archives: portable

Portable Raspberry Pi 4 computer | Hackspace magazine #24

2019-10-25 Ben Everard

Post Syndicated from Ben Everard original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/portable-raspberry-pi-4-computer-hackspace-magazine-24/

Why hunch over a laptop when you can use Raspberry Pi 4 to build a portable computer just for you? Here’s how HackSpace magazine editor Ben Everard did just that…

Yes, I have mislaid the CAPS LOCK and function keys from the keyboard. If you come across them in the Bristol area, please let me know.

Raspberry Pi 4

When Raspberry Pi 4 came out, I was pleasantly surprised by how the more powerful processor and enhanced memory allowed it to be a serious contender for a desktop computer. However, what if you don’t have a permanent desk? What if you want a more portable option? There are plenty of designs around for laptops built using Raspberry Pi computers, but I’ve never been that keen on the laptop form factor. Joining the screen and keyboard together always makes me feel like I’m either slumped over the screen or the keyboard is too high. I set out to build a portable computer that fitted my way of working rather than simply copying the laptop design that’s been making our backs and fingers hurt for the past decade.

Deciding where to put the parts on the plywood backing

Portable Raspberry Pi 4 computer

I headed into the HackSpace magazine workshop to see what I could come up with.

A few things I wanted to consider from a design point of view:

• Material. Computer designers have decided that either brushed aluminium or black plastic are the options for computers, but ever since I saw the Novena Heirloom laptop, I’ve wanted one made in wood. This natural material isn’t necessarily perfectly suited to computer construction, but it’s aesthetically pleasing and in occasionally stressful work environments, wood is a calming material. What’s more, it’s easy to work with common tools.

• Screen setup. Unsurprisingly, I spend a lot of my time reading or writing. Landscape screens aren’t brilliant choices for this, so I wanted a portrait screen. Since Raspberry Pi 4 has two HDMI ports, I decided to have two portrait HDMI screens. This lets me have one to display the thing we’re doing, and one to have the document to write about the thing we’re doing.

• No in-built keyboard or mouse. Unlike a laptop, I decided I wanted to work with external input devices to create a more comfortable working setup.

• Exposed wiring. There’s not a good reason for this — we just like the aesthetic (but it does make it easier to hack an upgrade in the future).

A few things I wanted to consider from a technical point of view:

• Cooling. Raspberry Pi can run a little hot, so I wanted a way of keeping it cool while still enabling the complete board to be accessible for working with the GPIO.

• Power. Raspberry Pi needs 5 V, but most screens need 12 V. I wanted my computer to have just a single power in. Having this on a 12 V DC means I can use an external battery pack in the future.

There’s no great secret to this build. I used two different HDMI screens (one 12 inches and one 7 inches) and mounted them on 3 mm plywood. This gives enough space to mount my Raspberry Pi below the 7-inch screen. This plywood backing is surrounded by a 2×1 inch pine wall that’s just high enough to expand beyond the screens. There’s a slight recess in this pine surround that a plywood front cover slots into to protect the screens during transport. The joints on the wood are particularly unimpressive being butt joints with gaps in. The corners are secured by protectors which I fabricated from 3 mm aluminium sheet (OK, fabricated is a bit of a grand word — we cut, bent, and drilled them from 3 mm aluminium sheet).

You can get smaller voltage converters than this, but we like the look of the large coil and seven-segment display

I made this machine quickly as we intended it to be a prototype. I fully expected that the setup would prove too unusual to be useful and planned to disassemble it and make a different form factor after I’d learned what worked and what didn’t. However, so far, I’m happy with this setup and don’t have any plans to redesign it soon.

Power comes in via a 5.1 mm jack. This goes to both the monitors and a buck converter which steps it down to 5 V for Raspberry Pi and fan (the converter has a display showing the current voltage because I like the look of seven-segment displays). Power is controlled by three rocker switches (because I like rocker switches rather than soft switches), allowing you to turn Raspberry Pi, fan, and screens on and off separately.

We used a spade drill bit and a Dremel with a sanding attachment to carve out the space for our Raspberry Pi

We’ve had to cut USB and power cables and shorten them to make them fit nicely in the case.

We had to cut quite a lot of cables up to make them fit. Fortunately, most have sensibly coloured inners to help you understand what does what

The only unusual part of the build was the cooling for Raspberry Pi. Since I wanted to leave the body of my Raspberry Pi free, that meant that I had to have a fan directing air over the CPU from the side. After jiggling the fan into various positions, I decided to mount it at 45 degrees just to the side of the board. I needed a mount for this — 3D printing would have worked well, but I’d been working through the Power Carving Manual reviewed in issue 23, so put these skills to the test and whittled a bit of wood to the right shape. Although power carving is usually used to produce artistic objects, it’s also a good choice for fabrication when you need a bit of  a ‘try-and-see’ approach, as it lets you make very quick adjustments.

Overall, my only disappointment with the making of this computer is the HDMI cables. I decided not to cut and splice them to the correct length as the high-speed nature of the HDMI signal makes this unreliable. Instead, I got the shortest cables I could and jammed them in.

We control the fan via a switch rather than automatically for two reasons: so we can run silently when we want, and so all the GPIO pins are available for HATs and other expansions

In use, I’m really happy with my new computer. So far, it has proved sturdy and reliable, and our design decisions have been vindicated by the way it works for me. Having two portrait screens may seem odd, but at least for technology journalists it’s a great option. The 7-inch screen may seem little, but these days most websites have a mobile-friendly version that renders well in this size, and it’s also big enough for a terminal window or Arduino IDE. A few programs struggle to work in this form factor (we’re looking at you, Mu).

Our corners are not the best joints, but the metal surrounds ensure they are strong and protected from bumps (oh, and we like the look of them)

We live in a world where — for many of us — computers are an indispensable tool that we spend most of our working lives using, yet the options for creating ones that are personal and genuinely fit our way of working are slim. We don’t have to accept that. We can build the machines that we want to use: build our own tools. This is a machine designed for my needs — yours may be different, but you understand them better than anyone. If you find off-the-shelf machines don’t work well for you, head to the workshop and make something that does.

Hackspace magazine

HackSpace magazine is out now, available in print from your local newsagent or from the Raspberry Pi Store in Cambridge, online from Raspberry Pi Press, or as a free PDF download. Click here to find out more and, while you’re at it, why not have a look at the subscription offers available, including the 12-month deal that comes with a free Adafruit Circuit Playground!

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Amazon SageMaker Updates – Tokyo Region, CloudFormation, Chainer, and GreenGrass ML

2018-06-01 Randall Hunt

Post Syndicated from Randall Hunt original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/sagemaker-tokyo-summit-2018/

Today, at the AWS Summit in Tokyo we announced a number of updates and new features for Amazon SageMaker. Starting today, SageMaker is available in Asia Pacific (Tokyo)! SageMaker also now supports CloudFormation. A new machine learning framework, Chainer, is now available in the SageMaker Python SDK, in addition to MXNet and Tensorflow. Finally, support for running Chainer models on several devices was added to AWS Greengrass Machine Learning.

Amazon SageMaker Chainer Estimator

Chainer is a popular, flexible, and intuitive deep learning framework. Chainer networks work on a “Define-by-Run” scheme, where the network topology is defined dynamically via forward computation. This is in contrast to many other frameworks which work on a “Define-and-Run” scheme where the topology of the network is defined separately from the data. A lot of developers enjoy the Chainer scheme since it allows them to write their networks with native python constructs and tools.

Luckily, using Chainer with SageMaker is just as easy as using a TensorFlow or MXNet estimator. In fact, it might even be a bit easier since it’s likely you can take your existing scripts and use them to train on SageMaker with very few modifications. With TensorFlow or MXNet users have to implement a train function with a particular signature. With Chainer your scripts can be a little bit more portable as you can simply read from a few environment variables like SM_MODEL_DIR, SM_NUM_GPUS, and others. We can wrap our existing script in a if __name__ == '__main__': guard and invoke it locally or on sagemaker.


import argparse
import os

if __name__ =='__main__':

    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()

    # hyperparameters sent by the client are passed as command-line arguments to the script.
    parser.add_argument('--epochs', type=int, default=10)
    parser.add_argument('--batch-size', type=int, default=64)
    parser.add_argument('--learning-rate', type=float, default=0.05)

    # Data, model, and output directories
    parser.add_argument('--output-data-dir', type=str, default=os.environ['SM_OUTPUT_DATA_DIR'])
    parser.add_argument('--model-dir', type=str, default=os.environ['SM_MODEL_DIR'])
    parser.add_argument('--train', type=str, default=os.environ['SM_CHANNEL_TRAIN'])
    parser.add_argument('--test', type=str, default=os.environ['SM_CHANNEL_TEST'])

    args, _ = parser.parse_known_args()

    # ... load from args.train and args.test, train a model, write model to args.model_dir.

Then, we can run that script locally or use the SageMaker Python SDK to launch it on some GPU instances in SageMaker. The hyperparameters will get passed in to the script as CLI commands and the environment variables above will be autopopulated. When we call fit the input channels we pass will be populated in the SM_CHANNEL_* environment variables.


from sagemaker.chainer.estimator import Chainer
# Create my estimator
chainer_estimator = Chainer(
    entry_point='example.py',
    train_instance_count=1,
    train_instance_type='ml.p3.2xlarge',
    hyperparameters={'epochs': 10, 'batch-size': 64}
)
# Train my estimator
chainer_estimator.fit({'train': train_input, 'test': test_input})

# Deploy my estimator to a SageMaker Endpoint and get a Predictor
predictor = chainer_estimator.deploy(
    instance_type="ml.m4.xlarge",
    initial_instance_count=1
)

Now, instead of bringing your own docker container for training and hosting with Chainer, you can just maintain your script. You can see the full sagemaker-chainer-containers on github. One of my favorite features of the new container is built-in chainermn for easy multi-node distribution of your chainer training jobs.

There’s a lot more documentation and information available in both the README and the example notebooks.

AWS GreenGrass ML with Chainer

AWS GreenGrass ML now includes a pre-built Chainer package for all devices powered by Intel Atom, NVIDIA Jetson, TX2, and Raspberry Pi. So, now GreenGrass ML provides pre-built packages for TensorFlow, Apache MXNet, and Chainer! You can train your models on SageMaker then easily deploy it to any GreenGrass-enabled device using GreenGrass ML.

JAWS UG

I want to give a quick shout out to all of our wonderful and inspirational friends in the JAWS UG who attended the AWS Summit in Tokyo today. I’ve very much enjoyed seeing your pictures of the summit. Thanks for making Japan an amazing place for AWS developers! I can’t wait to visit again and meet with all of you.

– Randall

3D-printed speakers from the Technical University of Denmark

2018-05-03 Alex Bate

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/technical-university-denmark-speakers/

Students taking Design of Mechatronics at the Technical University of Denmark have created some seriously elegant and striking Raspberry Pi speakers. Their builds are part of a project asking them to “explore, design and build a 3D printed speaker, around readily available electronics and components”.

The students have been uploading their designs, incorporating Raspberry Pis and HiFiBerry HATs, to Thingiverse throughout April. The task is a collaboration with luxury brand Bang & Olufsen’s Create initiative, and the results wouldn’t look out of place in a high-end showroom; I’d happily take any of these home.

The Sphere

Søren Qvist’s wall-mounted kitchen sphere uses 3D-printed and laser-cut parts, along with the HiFiBerry HAT and B&O speakers to create a sleek-looking design.

Hex One

Otto Ømann’s group have designed the Hex One – a work-in-progress wireless 360° speaker. A particular objective for their project is to create a speaker using as many 3D-printed parts as possible.

Portable B&O-Create Speaker

“The design is supposed to resemble that of a B&O speaker, and from a handful of categories we chose to create a portable and wearable speaker,” explain Gustav Larsen and his team.

Desktop Loudspeaker

Oliver Repholtz Behrens and team have housed a Raspberry Pi and HiFiBerry HAT inside this this stylish airplay speaker. You can follow their design progress on their team blog.

B&O TILE

Tue Thomsen’s six-person team Mechatastic have produced the B&O TILE. “The speaker consists of four 3D-printed cabinet and top parts, where the top should be covered by fabric,” they explain. “The speaker insides consists of laser-cut wood to hold the tweeter and driver and encase the Raspberry Pi.”

The team aimed to design a speaker that would be at home in a kitchen. With a removable upper casing allowing for a choice of colour, the TILE can be customised to fit particular tastes and colour schemes.

Build your own speakers with Raspberry Pis

Raspberry Pi’s onboard audio jack, along with third-party HATs such as the HiFiBerry and Pimoroni Speaker pHAT, make speaker design and fabrication with the Pi an interesting alternative to pre-made tech. These builds don’t tend to be technically complex, and they provide some lovely examples of tech-based projects that reflect makers’ own particular aesthetic style.

If you have access to a 3D printer or a laser cutter, perhaps at a nearby maker space, then those can be excellent resources, but fancy kit isn’t a requirement. Basic joinery and crafting with card or paper are just a couple of ways you can build things that are all your own, using familiar tools and materials. We think more people would enjoy getting hands-on with this sort of thing if they gave it a whirl, and we publish a free magazine to help.

Raspberry Pi Zero AirPlay Speaker
Looking for a new project to build around the Raspberry Pi Zero, I came across the pHAT DAC from Pimoroni. This little add-on board adds audio playback capabilities to the Pi Zero. Because the pHAT uses the GPIO pins, the USB OTG port remains available for a wifi dongle.

This video by Frederick Vandenbosch is a great example of building AirPlay speakers using a Pi and HAT, and a quick search will find you lots more relevant tutorials and ideas.

Have you built your own? Share your speaker-based Pi builds with us in the comments.

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CI/CD with Data: Enabling Data Portability in a Software Delivery Pipeline with AWS Developer Tools, Kubernetes, and Portworx

2018-05-02 Kausalya Rani Krishna Samy

Post Syndicated from Kausalya Rani Krishna Samy original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/cicd-with-data-enabling-data-portability-in-a-software-delivery-pipeline-with-aws-developer-tools-kubernetes-and-portworx/

This post is written by Eric Han – Vice President of Product Management Portworx and Asif Khan – Solutions Architect

Data is the soul of an application. As containers make it easier to package and deploy applications faster, testing plays an even more important role in the reliable delivery of software. Given that all applications have data, development teams want a way to reliably control, move, and test using real application data or, at times, obfuscated data.

For many teams, moving application data through a CI/CD pipeline, while honoring compliance and maintaining separation of concerns, has been a manual task that doesn’t scale. At best, it is limited to a few applications, and is not portable across environments. The goal should be to make running and testing stateful containers (think databases and message buses where operations are tracked) as easy as with stateless (such as with web front ends where they are often not).

Why is state important in testing scenarios? One reason is that many bugs manifest only when code is tested against real data. For example, we might simply want to test a database schema upgrade but a small synthetic dataset does not exercise the critical, finer corner cases in complex business logic. If we want true end-to-end testing, we need to be able to easily manage our data or state.

In this blog post, we define a CI/CD pipeline reference architecture that can automate data movement between applications. We also provide the steps to follow to configure the CI/CD pipeline.

Stateful Pipelines: Need for Portable Volumes

As part of continuous integration, testing, and deployment, a team may need to reproduce a bug found in production against a staging setup. Here, the hosting environment is comprised of a cluster with Kubernetes as the scheduler and Portworx for persistent volumes. The testing workflow is then automated by AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodePipeline, and AWS CodeBuild.

Portworx offers Kubernetes storage that can be used to make persistent volumes portable between AWS environments and pipelines. The addition of Portworx to the AWS Developer Tools continuous deployment for Kubernetes reference architecture adds persistent storage and storage orchestration to a Kubernetes cluster. The example uses MongoDB as the demonstration of a stateful application. In practice, the workflow applies to any containerized application such as Cassandra, MySQL, Kafka, and Elasticsearch.

Using the reference architecture, a developer calls CodePipeline to trigger a snapshot of the running production MongoDB database. Portworx then creates a block-based, writable snapshot of the MongoDB volume. Meanwhile, the production MongoDB database continues serving end users and is uninterrupted.

Without the Portworx integrations, a manual process would require an application-level backup of the database instance that is outside of the CI/CD process. For larger databases, this could take hours and impact production. The use of block-based snapshots follows best practices for resilient and non-disruptive backups.

As part of the workflow, CodePipeline deploys a new MongoDB instance for staging onto the Kubernetes cluster and mounts the second Portworx volume that has the data from production. CodePipeline triggers the snapshot of a Portworx volume through an AWS Lambda function, as shown here

AWS Developer Tools with Kubernetes: Integrated Workflow with Portworx

In the following workflow, a developer is testing changes to a containerized application that calls on MongoDB. The tests are performed against a staging instance of MongoDB. The same workflow applies if changes were on the server side. The original production deployment is scheduled as a Kubernetes deployment object and uses Portworx as the storage for the persistent volume.

The continuous deployment pipeline runs as follows:

Developers integrate bug fix changes into a main development branch that gets merged into a CodeCommit master branch.
Amazon CloudWatch triggers the pipeline when code is merged into a master branch of an AWS CodeCommit repository.
AWS CodePipeline sends the new revision to AWS CodeBuild, which builds a Docker container image with the build ID.
AWS CodeBuild pushes the new Docker container image tagged with the build ID to an Amazon ECR registry.
Kubernetes downloads the new container (for the database client) from Amazon ECR and deploys the application (as a pod) and staging MongoDB instance (as a deployment object).
AWS CodePipeline, through a Lambda function, calls Portworx to snapshot the production MongoDB and deploy a staging instance of MongoDB• Portworx provides a snapshot of the production instance as the persistent storage of the staging MongoDB
• The MongoDB instance mounts the snapshot.

At this point, the staging setup mimics a production environment. Teams can run integration and full end-to-end tests, using partner tooling, without impacting production workloads. The full pipeline is shown here.

Summary

This reference architecture showcases how development teams can easily move data between production and staging for the purposes of testing. Instead of taking application-specific manual steps, all operations in this CodePipeline architecture are automated and tracked as part of the CI/CD process.

This integrated experience is part of making stateful containers as easy as stateless. With AWS CodePipeline for CI/CD process, developers can easily deploy stateful containers onto a Kubernetes cluster with Portworx storage and automate data movement within their process.

The reference architecture and code are available on GitHub:

● Reference architecture: https://github.com/portworx/aws-kube-codesuite
● Lambda function source code for Portworx additions: https://github.com/portworx/aws-kube-codesuite/blob/master/src/kube-lambda.py

For more information about persistent storage for containers, visit the Portworx website. For more information about Code Pipeline, see the AWS CodePipeline User Guide.

Own your own working Pokémon Pokédex!

2018-05-01 Alex Bate

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/deep-learning-pokedex/

Squeal with delight as your inner Pokémon trainer witnesses the wonder of Adrian Rosebrock’s deep learning Pokédex.

Creating a real-life Pokedex with a Raspberry Pi, Python, and Deep Learning
This video demos a real-like Pokedex, complete with visual recognition, that I created using a Raspberry Pi, Python, and Deep Learning. You can find the entire blog post, including code, using this link: https://www.pyimagesearch.com/2018/04/30/a-fun-hands-on-deep-learning-project-for-beginners-students-and-hobbyists/ Music credit to YouTube user “No Copyright” for providing royalty free music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXpjqURczn8

The history of Pokémon in 30 seconds

The Pokémon franchise was created by video game designer Satoshi Tajiri in 1995. In the fictional world of Pokémon, Pokémon Trainers explore the vast landscape, catching and training small creatures called Pokémon. To date, there are 802 different types of Pokémon. They range from the ever recognisable Pikachu, a bright yellow electric Pokémon, to the highly sought-after Shiny Charizard, a metallic, playing-card-shaped Pokémon that your mate Alex claims she has in mint condition, but refuses to show you.

In the world of Pokémon, children as young as ten-year-old protagonist and all-round annoyance Ash Ketchum are allowed to leave home and wander the wilderness. There, they hunt vicious, deadly creatures in the hope of becoming a Pokémon Master.

Adrian’s deep learning Pokédex

Adrian is a bit of a deep learning pro, as demonstrated by his Santa/Not Santa detector, which we wrote about last year. For that project, he also provided a great explanation of what deep learning actually is. In a nutshell:

…a subfield of machine learning, which is, in turn, a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI).While AI embodies a large, diverse set of techniques and algorithms related to automatic reasoning (inference, planning, heuristics, etc), the machine learning subfields are specifically interested in pattern recognition and learning from data.

As with his earlier Raspberry Pi project, Adrian uses the Keras deep learning model and the TensorFlow backend, plus a few other packages such as Adrian’s own imutils functions and OpenCV.

Adrian trained a Convolutional Neural Network using Keras on a dataset of 1191 Pokémon images, obtaining 96.84% accuracy. As Adrian explains, this model is able to identify Pokémon via still image and video. It’s perfect for creating a Pokédex – an interactive Pokémon catalogue that should, according to the franchise, be able to identify and read out information on any known Pokémon when captured by camera. More information on model training can be found on Adrian’s blog.

For the physical build, a Raspberry Pi 3 with camera module is paired with the Raspberry Pi 7″ touch display to create a portable Pokédex. And while Adrian comments that the same result can be achieved using your home computer and a webcam, that’s not how Adrian rolls as a Raspberry Pi fan.

Plus, the smaller size of the Pi is perfect for one of you to incorporate this deep learning model into a 3D-printed Pokédex for ultimate Pokémon glory, pretty please, thank you.

Adrian has gone into impressive detail about how the project works and how you can create your own on his blog, pyimagesearch. So if you’re interested in learning more about deep learning, and making your own Pokédex, be sure to visit.

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MagPi 69: affordable 3D printing with a Raspberry Pi

2018-04-26 Rob Zwetsloot

Post Syndicated from Rob Zwetsloot original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/magpi-69/

Hi folks, Rob from The MagPi here with the good news that The MagPi 69 is out now! Nice. Our latest issue is all about 3D printing and how you can get yourself a very affordable 3D printer that you can control with a Raspberry Pi.

Get 3D printing from just £99!

Pi-powered 3D printing

Affordability is always a big factor when it comes to 3D printers. Like any new cosumer tech, their prices are often in the thousands of pounds. Over the last decade, however, these prices have been dropping steadily. Now you can get budget 3D printers for hundreds rather than thousands – and even for £99, like the iMakr. Pairing an iMakr with a Raspberry Pi makes for a reasonably priced 3D printing solution. In issue 69, we show you how to do just that!

Portable Raspberry Pis

Looking for a way to make your Raspberry Pi portable? One of our themes this issue is portable Pis, with a feature on how to build your very own Raspberry Pi TV stick, coincidentally with a 3D-printed case. We also review the Noodle Pi kit and the RasPad, two products that can help you take your Pi out and about away from a power socket.

And of course we have a selection of other great guides, project showcases, reviews, and community news.

Get The MagPi 69

Issue 69 is available today from WHSmith, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Asda. If you live in the US, head over to your local Barnes & Noble or Micro Center in the next few days for a print copy. You can also get the new issue online from our store, or digitally via our Android and iOS apps. And don’t forget, there’s always the free PDF as well.

New subscription offer!

Want to support the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the magazine? We’ve launched a new way to subscribe to the print version of The MagPi: you can now take out a monthly £4 subscription to the magazine, effectively creating a rolling pre-order system that saves you money on each issue.

Raspberry Pi MagPi 69 3D-printing

You can also take out a twelve-month print subscription and get a Pi Zero W, Pi Zero case, and adapter cables absolutely free! This offer does not currently have an end date.

We hope you enjoy this issue! See you next month.

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Implementing safe AWS Lambda deployments with AWS CodeDeploy

2018-04-19 Chris Munns

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.

Portspoof – Spoof All Ports Open & Emulate Valid Services

2018-04-06 Darknet

Post Syndicated from Darknet original https://www.darknet.org.uk/2018/04/portspoof-spoof-all-ports-open-emulate-valid-services/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=darknetfeed

The primary goal of the Portspoof program is to enhance your system security through a set of new camouflage techniques which spoof all ports open and also emulate valid services on every port. As a result, any attackers port scan results will become fairly meaningless and will require hours of effort to accurately identify which ports have real services on and which do not.

The tool is meant to be a lightweight, fast, portable and secure addition to any firewall system or security system.

Read the rest of Portspoof – Spoof All Ports Open & Emulate Valid Services now! Only available at Darknet.

Stone: A new era for Linux’s low-level graphics – Part 1

2018-03-20 corbet

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/749790/rss

Daniel Stone begins
a series on how the Linux graphic stack has improved in recent times.
“This has made mainline Linux much more attractive: the exact same
generic codebases of GNOME and Weston that I’m using to write this blog
post on an Intel laptop run equally well on AMD workstations, low-power NXP
boards destined for in-flight entertainment, and high-end Renesas SoCs
which might well be in your car. Now that the drivers are easy to write,
and applications are portable, we’ve seen over ten new DRM drivers merged
to the upstream kernel since atomic modesetting was merged.”

HDD vs SSD: What Does the Future for Storage Hold?

2018-03-06 Roderick Bauer

Post Syndicated from Roderick Bauer original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-vs-hdd-future-of-storage/

This is part one of a series. Use the Join button above to receive notification of future posts on this and other topics.

Customers frequently ask us whether and when we plan to move our cloud backup and data storage to SSDs (Solid-State Drives). That’s not a surprising question considering the many advantages SSDs have over magnetic platter type drives, also known as HDDs (Hard-Disk Drives).

We’re a large user of HDDs in our data centers (currently 100,000 hard drives holding over 500 petabytes of data). We want to provide the best performance, reliability, and economy for our cloud backup and cloud storage services, so we continually evaluate which drives to use for operations and in our data centers. While we use SSDs for some applications, which we’ll describe below, there are reasons why HDDs will continue to be the primary drives of choice for us and other cloud providers for the foreseeable future.

HDDs vs SSDs

HDD vs SSD

The laptop computer I am writing this on has a single 512GB SSD, which has become a common feature in higher end laptops. The SSD’s advantages for a laptop are easy to understand: they are smaller than an HDD, faster, quieter, last longer, and are not susceptible to vibration and magnetic fields. They also have much lower latency and access times.

Today’s typical online price for a 2.5” 512GB SSD is $140 to $170. The typical online price for a 3.5” 512 GB HDD is $44 to $65. That’s a pretty significant difference in price, but since the SSD helps make the laptop lighter, enables it to be more resistant to the inevitable shocks and jolts it will experience in daily use, and adds of benefits of faster booting, faster waking from sleep, and faster launching of applications and handling of big files, the extra cost for the SSD in this case is worth it.

Some of these SSD advantages, chiefly speed, also will apply to a desktop computer, so desktops are increasingly outfitted with SSDs, particularly to hold the operating system, applications, and data that is accessed frequently. Replacing a boot drive with an SSD has become a popular upgrade option to breathe new life into a computer, especially one that seems to take forever to boot or is used for notoriously slow-loading applications such as Photoshop.

We covered upgrading your computer with an SSD in our blog post SSD 101: How to Upgrade Your Computer With An SSD.

Data centers are an entirely different kettle of fish. The primary concerns for data center storage are reliability, storage density, and cost. While SSDs are strong in the first two areas, it’s the third where they are not yet competitive. At Backblaze we adopt higher density HDDs as they become available — we’re currently using both 10TB and 12TB drives (among other capacities) in our data centers. Higher density drives provide greater storage density per Storage Pod and Vault and reduce our overhead cost through less required maintenance and lower total power requirements. Comparable SSDs in those sizes would cost roughly $1,000 per terabyte, considerably higher than the corresponding HDD. Simply put, SSDs are not yet in the price range to make their use economical for the benefits they provide, which is the reason why we expect to be using HDDs as our primary storage media for the foreseeable future.

What Are HDDs?

HDDs have been around over 60 years since IBM introduced them in 1956. The first disk drive was the size of a car, stored a mere 3.75 megabytes, and cost $300,000 in today’s dollars.

IBM 350 Disk Storage System — 3.75MB in 1956

The 350 Disk Storage System was a major component of the IBM 305 RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) system, which was introduced in September 1956. It consisted of 40 platters and a dual read/write head on a single arm that moved up and down the stack of magnetic disk platters.

The basic mechanism of an HDD remains unchanged since then, though it has undergone continual refinement. An HDD uses magnetism to store data on a rotating platter. A read/write head is affixed to an arm that floats above the spinning platter reading and writing data. The faster the platter spins, the faster an HDD can perform. Typical laptop drives today spin at either 5400 RPM (revolutions per minute) or 7200 RPM, though some server-based platters spin at even higher speeds.

Exploded drawing of a hard drive

The platters inside the drives are coated with a magnetically sensitive film consisting of tiny magnetic grains. Data is recorded when a magnetic write-head flies just above the spinning disk; the write head rapidly flips the magnetization of one magnetic region of grains so that its magnetic pole points up or down, to encode a 1 or a 0 in binary code. If all this sounds like an HDD is vulnerable to shocks and vibration, you’d be right. They also are vulnerable to magnets, which is one way to destroy the data on an HDD if you’re getting rid of it.

The major advantage of an HDD is that it can store lots of data cheaply. One and two terabyte (1,024 and 2,048 gigabytes) hard drives are not unusual for a laptop these days, and 10TB and 12TB drives are now available for desktops and servers. Densities and rotation speeds continue to grow. However, if you compare the cost of common HDDs vs SSDs for sale online, the SSDs are roughly 3-5x the cost per gigabyte. So if you want cheap storage and lots of it, using a standard hard drive is definitely the more economical way to go.

What are the best uses for HDDs?

Disk arrays (NAS, RAID, etc.) where high capacity is needed
Desktops when low cost is priority
Media storage (photos, videos, audio not currently being worked on)
Drives with extreme number of reads and writes

What Are SSDs?

SSDs go back almost as far as HDDs, with the first semiconductor storage device compatible with a hard drive interface introduced in 1978, the StorageTek 4305.

Storage Technology 4305 SSD

The StorageTek was an SSD aimed at the IBM mainframe compatible market. The STC 4305 was seven times faster than IBM’s popular 2305 HDD system (and also about half the price). It consisted of a cabinet full of charge-coupled devices and cost $400,000 for 45MB capacity with throughput speeds up to 1.5 MB/sec.

SSDs are based on a type of non-volatile memory called NAND (named for the Boolean operator “NOT AND,” and one of two main types of flash memory). Flash memory stores data in individual memory cells, which are made of floating-gate transistors. Though they are semiconductor-based memory, they retain their information when no power is applied to them — a feature that’s obviously a necessity for permanent data storage.

Samsung SSD 850 Pro

Compared to an HDD, SSDs have higher data-transfer rates, higher areal storage density, better reliability, and much lower latency and access times. For most users, it’s the speed of an SSD that primarily attracts them. When discussing the speed of drives, what we are referring to is the speed at which they can read and write data.

For HDDs, the speed at which the platters spin strongly determines the read/write times. When data on an HDD is accessed, the read/write head must physically move to the location where the data was encoded on a magnetic section on the platter. If the file being read was written sequentially to the disk, it will be read quickly. As more data is written to the disk, however, it’s likely that the file will be written across multiple sections, resulting in fragmentation of the data. Fragmented data takes longer to read with an HDD as the read head has to move to different areas of the platter(s) to completely read all the data requested.

Because SSDs have no moving parts, they can operate at speeds far above those of a typical HDD. Fragmentation is not an issue for SSDs. Files can be written anywhere with little impact on read/write times, resulting in read times far faster than any HDD, regardless of fragmentation.

Samsung SSD 850 Pro (back)

Due to the way data is written and read to the drive, however, SSD cells can wear out over time. SSD cells push electrons through a gate to set its state. This process wears on the cell and over time reduces its performance until the SSD wears out. This effect takes a long time and SSDs have mechanisms to minimize this effect, such as the TRIM command. Flash memory writes an entire block of storage no matter how few pages within the block are updated. This requires reading and caching the existing data, erasing the block and rewriting the block. If an empty block is available, a write operation is much faster. The TRIM command, which must be supported in both the OS and the SSD, enables the OS to inform the drive which blocks are no longer needed. It allows the drive to erase the blocks ahead of time in order to make empty blocks available for subsequent writes.

The effect of repeated reading and erasing on an SSD is cumulative and an SSD can slow down and even display errors with age. It’s more likely, however, that the system using the SSD will be discarded for obsolescence before the SSD begins to display read/write errors. Hard drives eventually wear out from constant use as well, since they use physical recording methods, so most users won’t base their selection of an HDD or SSD drive based on expected longevity.

SSD circuit board

Overall, SSDs are considered far more durable than HDDs due to a lack of mechanical parts. The moving mechanisms within an HDD are susceptible to not only wear and tear over time, but to damage due to movement or forceful contact. If one were to drop a laptop with an HDD, there is a high likelihood that all those moving parts will collide, resulting in potential data loss and even destructive physical damage that could kill the HDD outright. SSDs have no moving parts so, while they hold the risk of a potentially shorter life span due to high use, they can survive the rigors we impose upon our portable devices and laptops.

What are the best uses for SSDs?

Notebooks, laptops, where performance, lightweight, areal storage density, resistance to shock and general ruggedness are desirable
Boot drives holding operating system and applications, which will speed up booting and application launching
Working files (media that is being edited: photos, video, audio, etc.)
Swap drives where SSD will speed up disk paging
Cache drives
Database servers
Revitalizing an older computer. If you’ve got a computer that seems slow to start up and slow to load applications and files, updating the boot drive with an SSD could make it seem, if not new, at least as if it just came back refreshed from spending some time on the beach.

Stay Tuned for Part 2 of HDD vs SSD

That’s it for part 1. In our second part we’ll take a deeper look at the differences between HDDs and SSDs, how both HDD and SSD technologies are evolving, and how Backblaze takes advantage of SSDs in our operations and data centers.

Here’s a tip on finding all the posts tagged with SSD on our blog. Just follow https://www.backblaze.com/blog/tag/ssd/.

Don’t miss future posts on HDDs, SSDs, and other topics, including hard drive stats, cloud storage, and tips and tricks for backing up to the cloud. Use the Join button above to receive notification of future posts on our blog.

The post HDD vs SSD: What Does the Future for Storage Hold? appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

libsodium – Easy-to-use Software Library For Encryption

2018-03-05 Darknet

Post Syndicated from Darknet original https://www.darknet.org.uk/2018/03/libsodium-easy-to-use-software-library-for-encryption/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=darknetfeed

Sodium is a new, easy-to-use software library for encryption, decryption, signatures, password hashing and more. It is a portable, cross-compilable, installable, packageable fork of NaCl, with a compatible API, and an extended API to improve usability even further.

Its goal is to provide all of the core operations needed to build higher-level cryptographic tools. Sodium supports a variety of compilers and operating systems, including Windows (with MingW or Visual Studio, x86 and x64), iOS, Android, as well as Javascript and Webassembly.

Read the rest of libsodium – Easy-to-use Software Library For Encryption now! Only available at Darknet.

Barbot 4: the bartending Grandfather clock

2018-02-06 Alex Bate

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/barbot-4/

Meet Barbot 4, the drink-dispensing Grandfather clock who knows when it’s time to party.

Barbot 4. Grandfather Time (first video of cocktail robot)
The first introduction to my latest barbot – this time made inside a grandfather clock. There is another video where I explain a bit about how it works, and am happy to give more explanations. https://youtu.be/hdxV_KKH5MA This can make cocktails with up to 4 spirits, and 4 mixers, and is controlled by voice, keyboard input, or a gui, depending which is easiest.

Barbot 4

Robert Prest’s Barbot 4 is a beverage dispenser loaded into an old Grandfather clock. There’s space in the back for your favourite spirits and mixers, and a Raspberry Pi controls servo motors that release the required measures of your favourite cocktail ingredients, according to preset recipes.

The clock can hold four mixers and four spirits, and a human supervisor records these using Drinkydoodad, a friendly touchscreen interface. With information about its available ingredients and a library of recipes, Barbot 4 can create your chosen drink. Patrons control the system either with voice commands or with the touchscreen UI.

Robert has experimented with various components as this project has progressed. He has switched out peristaltic pumps in order to increase the flow of liquid, and adjusted the motors so that they can handle carbonated beverages. In the video, he highlights other quirks he hopes to address, like the fact that drinks tend to splash during pouring.

As well as a Raspberry Pi, the build uses Arduinos. These control the light show, which can be adjusted according to your party-time lighting preferences.

An explanation of the build accompanies Robert’s second video. We’re hoping he’ll also release more details of Barbot 3, his suitcase-sized, portable Barbot, and of Doom Shot Bot, a bottle topper that pours a shot every time you die in the game DoomZ.

Automated bartending

Barbot 4 isn’t the first cocktail-dispensing Raspberry Pi bartender we’ve seen, though we have to admit that fitting it into a grandfather clock definitely makes it one of the quirkiest.

If you’ve built a similar project using a Raspberry Pi, we’d love to see it. Share your project in the comments, or tell us what drinks you’d ask Barbot to mix if you had your own at home.

The post Barbot 4: the bartending Grandfather clock appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

2017 Holiday Gift Guide — Backblaze Style

2017-12-12 Yev

Post Syndicated from Yev original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/2017-holiday-gift-guide-backblaze-style/

Here at Backblaze we have a lot of folks who are all about technology. With the holiday season fast approaching, you might have all of your gift buying already finished — but if not, we put together a list of things that the employees here at Backblaze are pretty excited about giving (and/or receiving) this year.

Smart Homes:

It’s no secret that having a smart home is the new hotness, and many of the items below can be used to turbocharge your home’s ascent into the future:

Raspberry Pi
The holidays are all about eating pie — well why not get a pie of a different type for the DIY fan in your life!

Wyze Cam
An inexpensive way to keep a close eye on all your favorite people…and intruders!

Snooz
Have trouble falling asleep? Try this portable white noise machine. Also great for the office!

Amazon Echo Dot
Need a cheap way to keep track of your schedule or play music? The Echo Dot is a great entry into the smart home of your dreams!

Google Wifi
These little fellows make it easy to Wifi-ify your entire home, even if it’s larger than the average shoe box here in Silicon Valley. Google Wifi acts as a mesh router and seamlessly covers your whole dwelling. Have a mansion? Buy more!

Google Home
Like the Amazon Echo Dot, this is the Google variant. It’s more expensive (similar to the Amazon Echo) but has better sound quality and is tied into the Google ecosystem.

Nest Thermostat
This is a smart thermostat. What better way to score points with the in-laws than installing one of these bad boys in their home — and then making it freezing cold randomly in the middle of winter from the comfort of your couch!

Wearables:

Homes aren’t the only things that should be smart. Your body should also get the chance to be all that it can be:

Apple AirPods
You’ve seen these all over the place, and the truth is they do a pretty good job of making sounds appear in your ears.

Bose SoundLink Wireless Headphones
If you like over-the-ear headphones, these noise canceling ones work great, are wireless and lovely. There’s no better way to ignore people this holiday season!

Garmin Fenix 5 Watch
This watch is all about fitness. If you enjoy fitness. This watch is the fitness watch for your fitness needs.

Apple Watch
The Apple Watch is a wonderful gadget that will light up any movie theater this holiday season.

Nokia Steel Health Watch
If you’re into mixing analogue and digital, this is a pretty neat little gadget.

Fossil Smart Watch
This stylish watch is a pretty neat way to dip your toe into smartwatches and activity trackers.

Pebble Time Steel Smart Watch
Some people call this the greatest smartwatch of all time. Those people might be named Yev. This watch is great at sending you notifications from your phone, and not needing to be charged every day. Bellissimo!

Random Goods:

A few of the holiday gift suggestions that we got were a bit off-kilter, but we do have a lot of interesting folks in the office. Hopefully, you might find some of these as interesting as they do:

Wireless Qi Charger
Wireless chargers are pretty great in that you don’t have to deal with dongles. There are even kits to make your electronics “wirelessly chargeable” which is pretty great!

Self-Heating Coffee Mug
Love coffee? Hate lukewarm coffee? What if your coffee cup heated itself? Brilliant!

Yeast Stirrer
Yeast. It makes beer. And bread! Sometimes you need to stir it. What cooler way to stir your yeast than with this industrial stirrer?

Toto Washlet
This one is self explanatory. You know the old rhyme: happy butts, everyone’s happy!

Good luck out there this holiday season!

The post 2017 Holiday Gift Guide — Backblaze Style appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

How to Encrypt and Decrypt Your Data with the AWS Encryption CLI

2017-11-20 June Blender

Post Syndicated from June Blender original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-encrypt-and-decrypt-your-data-with-the-aws-encryption-cli/

AWS KMS image

You can now encrypt and decrypt your data at the command line and in scripts—no cryptography or programming expertise is required. The new AWS Encryption SDK Command Line Interface (AWS Encryption CLI) brings the AWS Encryption SDK to the command line.

With the AWS Encryption CLI, you can take advantage of the advanced data protection built into the AWS Encryption SDK, including envelope encryption and strong algorithm suites, such as 256-bit AES-GCM with HKDF. The AWS Encryption CLI supports best-practice features, such as authenticated encryption with symmetric encryption keys and asymmetric signing keys, as well as unique data keys for each encryption operation. You can use the CLI with customer master keys (CMKs) from AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), master keys that you manage in AWS CloudHSM, or master keys from your own custom master key provider, but the AWS Encryption CLI does not require any AWS service.

The AWS Encryption CLI is built on the AWS Encryption SDK for Python and is fully interoperable with all language-specific implementations of the AWS Encryption SDK. It is supported on Linux, macOS, and Windows platforms. You can encrypt and decrypt your data in a shell on Linux and macOS, in a Command Prompt window (cmd.exe) on Windows, or in a PowerShell console on any system.

In this blog post, I walk you through the process of using the AWS Encryption CLI to encrypt and decrypt a file. You can find more examples of using the new CLI and detailed instructions for installing and configuring the CLI in the AWS Encryption SDK Developer Guide. You are also welcome to participate in the development of the AWS Encryption CLI (aws-encryption-sdk-cli) on GitHub.

Encrypt a file

Let’s use the AWS Encryption CLI to encrypt a file called secret.txt in your current directory. I will write the file of encrypted output to the same directory. This secret.txt file contains a Hello World string, but it might contain data that is critical to your business.

$ ls
secret.txt

$ cat secret.txt
Hello World

I’m using a Linux shell, but you can run similar commands in a macOS shell, a Command Prompt window, or a PowerShell console.

When you encrypt data, you specify a master key. This example uses an AWS KMS CMK, but you can use a master key from any master key provider that is compatible with the AWS Encryption SDK. The AWS Encryption CLI uses the master key to generate a unique data key for each file that it encrypts.

If you use an AWS KMS CMK as your master key, you need to install and configure the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) so that the credentials you use to authenticate to AWS KMS are available to the AWS Encryption CLI. Those credentials must give you permission to call the AWS KMS GenerateDataKey and Decrypt APIs on the CMK.

The first line of this example saves an AWS KMS CMK ID in the $keyID variable. The second line encrypts the data in the secret.txt file. (The backslash, “\”, is the line continuation character in Linux shells.)

To run the following command, substitute a valid CMK identifier for the placeholder value in the command.

$ keyID = "111122223333"
$ aws-encryption-cli --encrypt --input secret.txt \
                     --master-keys key=$keyID \
                     --encryption-context purpose=test \
                     --metadata-output ~/metadata \
                     --output .

This command uses the --encrypt (-e) parameter to specify the encryption action and the --master-keys (-m) parameter with a key attribute to specify an AWS KMS CMK. If you’re not using an AWS KMS CMK, you need to include a provider attribute that identifies the master key provider.

The command uses the --encryption-context parameter (-c) to specify an encryption context, purpose=test, for the operation. The encryption context is non-secret data that is cryptographically bound to the encrypted data and included in plaintext in the encrypted message that the CLI returns. Providing additional authenticated data, such as an encryption context, is a recommended best practice.

The --metadata-output parameter tells the AWS Encryption CLI where to write the metadata for the encrypt command. The metadata includes the full paths to the input and output files, the encryption context, the algorithm suite, and other valuable information that you can use to review the operation and verify that it meets your security standards.

The --input (-i) and --output (-o) parameters are required in every AWS Encryption CLI command. In this example, the input file is the secret.txt file. The output location is the current directory, which is represented by a dot (“.”).

When the --encrypt command is successful, it creates a new file that contains the encrypted data, but it does not return any output. To see the results of the command, use a directory listing command, such as ls or dir. Running an ls command in this example shows that the AWS Encryption CLI generated the secret.txt.encrypted file.

$ ls
secret.txt  secret.txt.encrypted

By default, the output file that the --encrypt command creates has the same name as the input file, plus a .encrypted suffix. You can use the --suffix parameter to specify a custom suffix.

The secret.txt.encrypted file contains a single, portable, secure encrypted message. The encrypted message includes the encrypted data, an encrypted copy of the data key that encrypted the data, and metadata, including the plaintext encryption context that I provided.

You can manage an encrypted file in any way that you choose, including copying it to an Amazon S3 bucket or archiving it for later use.

Decrypt a file

Now, let’s use the AWS Encryption CLI to decrypt the secret.txt.encrypted file. If you have the required permissions on your master key, you can use any version of the AWS Encryption SDK to decrypt a file that the AWS Encryption CLI encrypted, including the AWS Encryption SDK libraries in Java and Python.

However, you cannot use other tools, such as the Amazon S3 encryption client or the Amazon DynamoDB encryption client, to decrypt the encrypted message because they use an incompatible encrypted message format.

The following command decrypts the contents of the secret.txt.encrypted file.

$ aws-encryption-cli --decrypt --input secret.txt.encrypted \
                     --encryption-context purpose=test \
                     --metadata-output ~/metadata \
                     --output .

The --decrypt command requires an encrypted message, like the one that the --encrypt command returned, and both --input and --output parameters.

This command has no --master-keys parameter. A --master-keys parameter is required only if you’re not using an AWS KMS CMK.

In this example command, the --input parameter specifies the secret.txt.encrypted file. The --output parameter specifies the current directory, which again is represented by a dot (“.”).

The --encryption-context parameter supplies the same encryption context that was used in the encrypt command. This parameter is not required, but verifying the encryption context during decryption is a cryptographic best practice.

The --metatdata-output parameter tells the command where to write the metadata for the decrypt command. If the file exists, this parameter appends the metadata to the existing file. The AWS Encryption CLI also has parameters that overwrite the metadata file or suppress the metadata.

When it is successful, the decrypt command generates the file of decrypted (plaintext) data, but it does not return any output. To see the results of the decryption command, use a command that gets the content of the file, such as cat or Get-Content.

$ ls
secret.txt  secret.txt.encrypted  secret.txt.encrypted.decrypted

$ cat secret.txt.encrypted.decrypted
Hello World

The output file that the --decrypt command created has the same name as the input file, plus a .decrypted suffix. The --suffix parameter works on --decrypt commands, too.

Encrypt directories and more

In addition to encrypting and decrypting a single file, you can use the AWS Encryption CLI to encrypt and decrypt strings that you pipe to the CLI, and all or selected files in a directory and its subdirectories, or local or remote volumes. We have examples for you to try in the AWS Encryption SDK documentation.

The new AWS Encryption CLI also supports more advanced features of the AWS Encryption SDK, including alternate algorithm suites, alternate Python-based master key providers, encryption with multiple master keys, encrypting streamed data, creating encrypted messages with custom frame sizes, and data key caching.

For more information about the AWS Encryption CLI, see the AWS Encryption SDK Developer Guide and the full documentation.

– June

AWS re:Invent 2017 Guide to All Things Containers

2017-11-17 Nathan Taber

Post Syndicated from Nathan Taber original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/aws-reinvent-2017-guide-to-all-things-containers/

Contributed by Tiffany Jernigan, Developer Advocate for Amazon ECS

Get ready for takeoff!

We made sure that this year’s re:Invent is chock-full of containers: there are over 40 sessions! New to containers? No problem, we have several introductory sessions for you to dip your toes. Been using containers for years and know the ins and outs? Don’t miss our technical deep-dives and interactive chalk talks led by container experts.

If you can’t make it to Las Vegas, you can catch the keynotes and session recaps from our livestream and on Twitch.

Session types

Not everyone learns the same way, so we have multiple types of breakout content:

Birds of a Feather
An interactive discussion with industry leaders about containers on AWS.
Breakout sessions
60-minute presentations about building on AWS. Sessions are delivered by both AWS experts and customers and span all content levels.
Workshops
2.5-hour, hands-on sessions that teach how to build on AWS. AWS credits are provided. Bring a laptop, and have an active AWS account.
Chalk Talks
1-hour, highly interactive sessions with a smaller audience. They begin with a short lecture delivered by an AWS expert, followed by a discussion with the audience.

Session levels

Whether you’re new to containers or you’ve been using them for years, you’ll find useful information at every level.

Introductory
Sessions are focused on providing an overview of AWS services and features, with the assumption that attendees are new to the topic.
Advanced
Sessions dive deeper into the selected topic. Presenters assume that the audience has some familiarity with the topic, but may or may not have direct experience implementing a similar solution.
Expert
Sessions are for attendees who are deeply familiar with the topic, have implemented a solution on their own already, and are comfortable with how the technology works across multiple services, architectures, and implementations.

Session locations

All container sessions are located in the Aria Resort.

MONDAY 11/27

Breakout sessions

Level 200 (Introductory)

CON202 – Getting Started with Docker and Amazon ECS
By packaging software into standardized units, Docker gives code everything it needs to run, ensuring consistency from your laptop all the way into production. But once you have your code ready to ship, how do you run and scale it in the cloud? In this session, you become comfortable running containerized services in production using Amazon ECS. We cover container deployment, cluster management, service auto-scaling, service discovery, secrets management, logging, monitoring, security, and other core concepts. We also cover integrated AWS services and supplementary services that you can take advantage of to run and scale container-based services in the cloud.

Chalk talks

Level 200 (Introductory)

CON211 – Reducing your Compute Footprint with Containers and Amazon ECS
Tomas Riha, platform architect for Volvo, shows how Volvo transitioned its WirelessCar platform from using Amazon EC2 virtual machines to containers running on Amazon ECS, significantly reducing cost. Tomas dives deep into the architecture that Volvo used to achieve the migration in under four months, including Amazon ECS, Amazon ECR, Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS CloudFormation.

CON212 – Anomaly Detection Using Amazon ECS, AWS Lambda, and Amazon EMR
Learn about the architecture that Cisco CloudLock uses to enable automated security and compliance checks throughout the entire development lifecycle, from the first line of code through runtime. It includes integration with IAM roles, Amazon VPC, and AWS KMS.

Level 400 (Expert)

CON410 – Advanced CICD with Amazon ECS Control Plane
Mohit Gupta, product and engineering lead for Clever, demonstrates how to extend the Amazon ECS control plane to optimize management of container deployments and how the control plane can be broadly applied to take advantage of new AWS services. This includes ark—an AWS CLI-based deployment to Amazon ECS, Dapple—a slack-based automation system for deployments and notifications, and Kayvee—log and event routing libraries based on Amazon Kinesis.

Workshops

Level 200 (Introductory)

CON209 – Interstella 8888: Learn How to Use Docker on AWS
Interstella 8888 is an intergalactic trading company that deals in rare resources, but their antiquated monolithic logistics systems are causing the business to lose money. Join this workshop to get hands-on experience with Docker as you containerize Interstella 8888’s aging monolithic application and deploy it using Amazon ECS.

CON213 – Hands-on Deployment of Kubernetes on AWS
In this workshop, attendees get hands-on experience using Kubernetes and Kops (Kubernetes Operations), as described in our recent blog post. Attendees learn how to provision a cluster, assign role-based permissions and security, and launch a container. If you’re interested in learning best practices for running Kubernetes on AWS, don’t miss this workshop.

TUESDAY 11/28

Breakout Sessions

Level 200 (Introductory)

CON206 – Docker on AWS
In this session, Docker Technical Staff Member Patrick Chanezon discusses how Finnish Rail, the national train system for Finland, is using Docker on Amazon Web Services to modernize their customer facing applications, from ticket sales to reservations. Patrick also shares the state of Docker development and adoption on AWS, including explaining the opportunities and implications of efforts such as Project Moby, Docker EE, and how developers can use and contribute to Docker projects.

CON208 – Building Microservices on AWS
Increasingly, organizations are turning to microservices to help them empower autonomous teams, letting them innovate and ship software faster than ever before. But implementing a microservices architecture comes with a number of new challenges that need to be dealt with. Chief among these finding an appropriate platform to help manage a growing number of independently deployable services. In this session, Sam Newman, author of Building Microservices and a renowned expert in microservices strategy, discusses strategies for building scalable and robust microservices architectures. He also tells you how to choose the right platform for building microservices, and about common challenges and mistakes organizations make when they move to microservices architectures.

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON302 – Building a CICD Pipeline for Containers on AWS
Containers can make it easier to scale applications in the cloud, but how do you set up your CICD workflow to automatically test and deploy code to containerized apps? In this session, we explore how developers can build effective CICD workflows to manage their containerized code deployments on AWS.

Ajit Zadgaonkar, Director of Engineering and Operations at Edmunds walks through best practices for CICD architectures used by his team to deploy containers. We also deep dive into topics such as how to create an accessible CICD platform and architect for safe blue/green deployments.

CON307 – Building Effective Container Images
Sick of getting paged at 2am and wondering “where did all my disk space go?” New Docker users often start with a stock image in order to get up and running quickly, but this can cause problems as your application matures and scales. Creating efficient container images is important to maximize resources, and deliver critical security benefits.

In this session, AWS Sr. Technical Evangelist Abby Fuller covers how to create effective images to run containers in production. This includes an in-depth discussion of how Docker image layers work, things you should think about when creating your images, working with Amazon ECR, and mise-en-place for install dependencies. Prakash Janakiraman, Co-Founder and Chief Architect at Nextdoor discuss high-level and language-specific best practices for with building images and how Nextdoor uses these practices to successfully scale their containerized services with a small team.

CON309 – Containerized Machine Learning on AWS
Image recognition is a field of deep learning that uses neural networks to recognize the subject and traits for a given image. In Japan, Cookpad uses Amazon ECS to run an image recognition platform on clusters of GPU-enabled EC2 instances. In this session, hear from Cookpad about the challenges they faced building and scaling this advanced, user-friendly service to ensure high-availability and low-latency for tens of millions of users.

CON320 – Monitoring, Logging, and Debugging for Containerized Services
As containers become more embedded in the platform tools, debug tools, traces, and logs become increasingly important. Nare Hayrapetyan, Senior Software Engineer and Calvin French-Owen, Senior Technical Officer for Segment discuss the principals of monitoring and debugging containers and the tools Segment has implemented and built for logging, alerting, metric collection, and debugging of containerized services running on Amazon ECS.

Chalk Talks

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON314 – Automating Zero-Downtime Production Cluster Upgrades for Amazon ECS
Containers make it easy to deploy new code into production to update the functionality of a service, but what happens when you need to update the Amazon EC2 compute instances that your containers are running on? In this talk, we’ll deep dive into how to upgrade the Amazon EC2 infrastructure underlying a live production Amazon ECS cluster without affecting service availability. Matt Callanan, Engineering Manager at Expedia walk through Expedia’s “PRISM” project that safely relocates hundreds of tasks onto new Amazon EC2 instances with zero-downtime to applications.

CON322 – Maximizing Amazon ECS for Large-Scale Workloads
Head of Mobfox DevOps, David Spitzer, shows how Mobfox used Docker and Amazon ECS to scale the Mobfox services and development teams to achieve low-latency networking and automatic scaling. This session covers Mobfox’s ecosystem architecture. It compares 2015 and today, the challenges Mobfox faced in growing their platform, and how they overcame them.

CON323 – Microservices Architectures for the Enterprise
Salva Jung, Principle Engineer for Samsung Mobile shares how Samsung Connect is architected as microservices running on Amazon ECS to securely, stably, and efficiently handle requests from millions of mobile and IoT devices around the world.

CON324 – Windows Containers on Amazon ECS
Docker containers are commonly regarded as powerful and portable runtime environments for Linux code, but Docker also offers API and toolchain support for running Windows Servers in containers. In this talk, we discuss the various options for running windows-based applications in containers on AWS.

CON326 – Remote Sensing and Image Processing on AWS
Learn how Encirca services by DuPont Pioneer uses Amazon ECS powered by GPU-instances and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances to run proprietary image-processing algorithms against satellite imagery. Mark Lanning and Ethan Harstad, engineers at DuPont Pioneer show how this architecture has allowed them to process satellite imagery multiple times a day for each agricultural field in the United States in order to identify crop health changes.

Workshops

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON317 – Advanced Container Management at Catsndogs.lol
Catsndogs.lol is a (fictional) company that needs help deploying and scaling its container-based application. During this workshop, attendees join the new DevOps team at CatsnDogs.lol, and help the company to manage their applications using Amazon ECS, and help release new features to make our customers happier than ever.Attendees get hands-on with service and container-instance auto-scaling, spot-fleet integration, container placement strategies, service discovery, secrets management with AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store, time-based and event-based scheduling, and automated deployment pipelines. If you are a developer interested in learning more about how Amazon ECS can accelerate your application development and deployment workflows, or if you are a systems administrator or DevOps person interested in understanding how Amazon ECS can simplify the operational model associated with running containers at scale, then this workshop is for you. You should have basic familiarity with Amazon ECS, Amazon EC2, and IAM.

Additional requirements:

The AWS CLI or AWS Tools for PowerShell installed
An AWS account with administrative permissions (including the ability to create IAM roles and policies) created at least 24 hours in advance.

WEDNESDAY 11/29

Birds of a Feather (BoF)

CON01 – Birds of a Feather: Containers and Open Source at AWS
Cloud native architectures take advantage of on-demand delivery, global deployment, elasticity, and higher-level services to enable developer productivity and business agility. Open source is a core part of making cloud native possible for everyone. In this session, we welcome thought leaders from the CNCF, Docker, and AWS to discuss the cloud’s direction for growth and enablement of the open source community. We also discuss how AWS is integrating open source code into its container services and its contributions to open source projects.

Breakout Sessions

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON308 – Mastering Kubernetes on AWS
Much progress has been made on how to bootstrap a cluster since Kubernetes’ first commit and is now only a matter of minutes to go from zero to a running cluster on Amazon Web Services. However, evolving a simple Kubernetes architecture to be ready for production in a large enterprise can quickly become overwhelming with options for configuration and customization.

In this session, Arun Gupta, Open Source Strategist for AWS and Raffaele Di Fazio, software engineer at leading European fashion platform Zalando, show the common practices for running Kubernetes on AWS and share insights from experience in operating tens of Kubernetes clusters in production on AWS. We cover options and recommendations on how to install and manage clusters, configure high availability, perform rolling upgrades and handle disaster recovery, as well as continuous integration and deployment of applications, logging, and security.

CON310 – Moving to Containers: Building with Docker and Amazon ECS
If you’ve ever considered moving part of your application stack to containers, don’t miss this session. We cover best practices for containerizing your code, implementing automated service scaling and monitoring, and setting up automated CI/CD pipelines with fail-safe deployments. Manjeeva Silva and Thilina Gunasinghe show how McDonalds implemented their home delivery platform in four months using Docker containers and Amazon ECS to serve tens of thousands of customers.

Level 400 (Expert)

CON402 – Advanced Patterns in Microservices Implementation with Amazon ECS
Scaling a microservice-based infrastructure can be challenging in terms of both technical implementation and developer workflow. In this talk, AWS Solutions Architect Pierre Steckmeyer is joined by Will McCutchen, Architect at BuzzFeed, to discuss Amazon ECS as a platform for building a robust infrastructure for microservices. We look at the key attributes of microservice architectures and how Amazon ECS supports these requirements in production, from configuration to sophisticated workload scheduling to networking capabilities to resource optimization. We also examine what it takes to build an end-to-end platform on top of the wider AWS ecosystem, and what it’s like to migrate a large engineering organization from a monolithic approach to microservices.

CON404 – Deep Dive into Container Scheduling with Amazon ECS
As your application’s infrastructure grows and scales, well-managed container scheduling is critical to ensuring high availability and resource optimization. In this session, we deep dive into the challenges and opportunities around container scheduling, as well as the different tools available within Amazon ECS and AWS to carry out efficient container scheduling. We discuss patterns for container scheduling available with Amazon ECS, the Blox scheduling framework, and how you can customize and integrate third-party scheduler frameworks to manage container scheduling on Amazon ECS.

Chalk Talks

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON312 – Building a Selenium Fleet on the Cheap with Amazon ECS with Spot Fleet
Roberto Rivera and Matthew Wedgwood, engineers at RetailMeNot, give a practical overview of setting up a fleet of Selenium nodes running on Amazon ECS with Spot Fleet. Discuss the challenges of running Selenium with high availability at minimum cost using Amazon ECS container introspection to connect the Selenium Hub with its nodes.

CON315 – Virtually There: Building a Render Farm with Amazon ECS
Learn how 8i Corp scales its multi-tenanted, volumetric render farm up to thousands of instances using AWS, Docker, and an API-driven infrastructure. This render farm enables them to turn the video footage from an array of synchronized cameras into a photo-realistic hologram capable of playback on a range of devices, from mobile phones to high-end head mounted displays. Join Owen Evans, VP of Engineering for 8i, as they dive deep into how 8i’s rendering infrastructure is built and maintained by just a handful of people and powered by Amazon ECS.

CON325 – Developing Microservices – from Your Laptop to the Cloud
Wesley Chow, Staff Engineer at Adroll, shows how his team extends Amazon ECS by enabling local development capabilities. Hologram, Adroll’s local development program, brings the capabilities of the Amazon EC2 instance metadata service to non-EC2 hosts, so that developers can run the same software on local machines with the same credentials source as in production.

CON327 – Patterns and Considerations for Service Discovery
Roven Drabo, head of cloud operations at Kaplan Test Prep, illustrates Kaplan’s complete container automation solution using Amazon ECS along with how his team uses NGINX and HashiCorp Consul to provide an automated approach to service discovery and container provisioning.

CON328 – Building a Development Platform on Amazon ECS
Quinton Anderson, Head of Engineering for Commonwealth Bank of Australia, walks through how they migrated their internal development and deployment platform from Mesos/Marathon to Amazon ECS. The platform uses a custom DSL to abstract a layered application architecture, in a way that makes it easy to plug or replace new implementations into each layer in the stack.

Workshops

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON318 – Interstella 8888: Monolith to Microservices with Amazon ECS
Interstella 8888 is an intergalactic trading company that deals in rare resources, but their antiquated monolithic logistics systems are causing the business to lose money. Join this workshop to get hands-on experience deploying Docker containers as you break Interstella 8888’s aging monolithic application into containerized microservices. Using Amazon ECS and an Application Load Balancer, you create API-based microservices and deploy them leveraging integrations with other AWS services.

CON332 – Build a Java Spring Application on Amazon ECS
This workshop teaches you how to lift and shift existing Spring and Spring Cloud applications onto the AWS platform. Learn how to build a Spring application container, understand bootstrap secrets, push container images to Amazon ECR, and deploy the application to Amazon ECS. Then, learn how to configure the deployment for production.

THURSDAY 11/30

Breakout Sessions

Level 200 (Introductory)

CON201 – Containers on AWS – State of the Union
Just over four years after the first public release of Docker, and three years to the day after the launch of Amazon ECS, the use of containers has surged to run a significant percentage of production workloads at startups and enterprise organizations. Join Deepak Singh, General Manager of Amazon Container Services, as he covers the state of containerized application development and deployment trends, new container capabilities on AWS that are available now, options for running containerized applications on AWS, and how AWS customers successfully run container workloads in production.

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON304 – Batch Processing with Containers on AWS
Batch processing is useful to analyze large amounts of data. But configuring and scaling a cluster of virtual machines to process complex batch jobs can be difficult. In this talk, we show how to use containers on AWS for batch processing jobs that can scale quickly and cost-effectively. We also discuss AWS Batch, our fully managed batch-processing service. You also hear from GoPro and Here about how they use AWS to run batch processing jobs at scale including best practices for ensuring efficient scheduling, fine-grained monitoring, compute resource automatic scaling, and security for your batch jobs.

Level 400 (Expert)

CON406 – Architecting Container Infrastructure for Security and Compliance
While organizations gain agility and scalability when they migrate to containers and microservices, they also benefit from compliance and security, advantages that are often overlooked. In this session, Kelvin Zhu, lead software engineer at Okta, joins Mitch Beaumont, enterprise solutions architect at AWS, to discuss security best practices for containerized infrastructure. Learn how Okta built their development workflow with an emphasis on security through testing and automation. Dive deep into how containers enable automated security and compliance checks throughout the development lifecycle. Also understand best practices for implementing AWS security and secrets management services for any containerized service architecture.

Chalk Talks

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON329 – Full Software Lifecycle Management for Containers Running on Amazon ECS
Learn how The Washington Post uses Amazon ECS to run Arc Publishing, a digital journalism platform that powers The Washington Post and a growing number of major media websites. Amazon ECS enabled The Washington Post to containerize their existing microservices architecture, avoiding a complete rewrite that would have delayed the platform’s launch by several years. In this session, Jason Bartz, Technical Architect at The Washington Post, discusses the platform’s architecture. He addresses the challenges of optimizing Arc Publishing’s workload, and managing the application lifecycle to support 2,000 containers running on more than 50 Amazon ECS clusters.

CON330 – Running Containerized HIPAA Workloads on AWS
Nihar Pasala, Engineer at Aetion, discusses the Aetion Evidence Platform, a system for generating the real-world evidence used by healthcare decision makers to implement value-based care. This session discusses the architecture Aetion uses to run HIPAA workloads using containers on Amazon ECS, best practices, and learnings.

Level 400 (Expert)

CON408 – Building a Machine Learning Platform Using Containers on AWS
DeepLearni.ng develops and implements machine learning models for complex enterprise applications. In this session, Thomas Rogers, Engineer for DeepLearni.ng discusses how they worked with Scotiabank to leverage Amazon ECS, Amazon ECR, Docker, GPU-accelerated Amazon EC2 instances, and TensorFlow to develop a retail risk model that helps manage payment collections for millions of Canadian credit card customers.

Workshops

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON319 – Interstella 8888: CICD for Containers on AWS
Interstella 8888 is an intergalactic trading company that deals in rare resources, but their antiquated monolithic logistics systems are causing the business to lose money. Join this workshop to learn how to set up a CI/CD pipeline for containerized microservices. You get hands-on experience deploying Docker container images using Amazon ECS, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodePipeline, automating everything from code check-in to production.

FRIDAY 12/1

Breakout Sessions

Level 400 (Expert)

CON405 – Moving to Amazon ECS – the Not-So-Obvious Benefits
If you ask 10 teams why they migrated to containers, you will likely get answers like ‘developer productivity’, ‘cost reduction’, and ‘faster scaling’. But teams often find there are several other ‘hidden’ benefits to using containers for their services. In this talk, Franziska Schmidt, Platform Engineer at Mapbox and Yaniv Donenfeld from AWS will discuss the obvious, and not so obvious benefits of moving to containerized architecture. These include using Docker and Amazon ECS to achieve shared libraries for dev teams, separating private infrastructure from shareable code, and making it easier for non-ops engineers to run services.

Chalk Talks

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON331 – Deploying a Regulated Payments Application on Amazon ECS
Travelex discusses how they built an FCA-compliant international payments service using a microservices architecture on AWS. This chalk talk covers the challenges of designing and operating an Amazon ECS-based PaaS in a regulated environment using a DevOps model.

Workshops

Level 400 (Expert)

CON407 – Interstella 8888: Advanced Microservice Operations
Interstella 8888 is an intergalactic trading company that deals in rare resources, but their antiquated monolithic logistics systems are causing the business to lose money. In this workshop, you help Interstella 8888 build a modern microservices-based logistics system to save the company from financial ruin. We give you the hands-on experience you need to run microservices in the real world. This includes implementing advanced container scheduling and scaling to deal with variable service requests, implementing a service mesh, issue tracing with AWS X-Ray, container and instance-level logging with Amazon CloudWatch, and load testing.

Know before you go

Want to brush up on your container knowledge before re:Invent? Here are some helpful resources to get started:

– Tiffany
@tiffanyfayj

Pip: digital creation in your pocket from Curious Chip

2017-11-17 Alex Bate

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pip-curious-chip/

Get your hands on Pip, the handheld Raspberry Pi–based device for aspiring young coders and hackers from Curious Chip.

Pip is a handheld gaming console from Curios Chip which you can now back on Kickstarter. Using the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3, Pip allows users to code, hack, and play wherever they are.

We created Pip so that anyone can tinker with technology. From beginners to those who know more — Pip makes it easy, simple, and fun!

For gaming

Pip’s smart design may well remind you of a certain handheld gaming console released earlier this year. With its central screen and detachable side controllers, Pip has a size and shape ideal for gaming.

Those who have used a Raspberry Pi with the Raspbian OS might be familiar with Minecraft Pi, a variant of the popular Minecraft game created specifically for Pi users to play and hack for free. Users of Pip will be able to access Minecraft Pi from the portable device and take their block-shaped creations with them wherever they go.

And if that’s not enough, Pip’s Pi brain allows coders to create their own games using Scratch, in addition to giving access a growing library of games in Curious Chip’s online arcade.

Digital making

Pip’s GPIO pins are easily accessible, so that you can expand upon your digital making skills with physical computing projects. Grab your Pip and a handful of jumper leads, and you will be able to connect and control components such as lights, buttons, servomotors, and more!

You can also attach any of the range of HAT add-on boards available on the market, such as our own Sense HAT, or ones created by Pimoroni, Adafruit, and others. And if you’re looking to learn a new coding language, you’re in luck: Pip supports Python, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Lua, and PHP.

Maker Pack and add-ons

Backers can also pledge their funds for additional hardware, such as the Maker Pack, an integrated camera, or a Pip Breadboard Kit.

The breadboard and the optional PipHAT are also compatible with any Raspberry Pi 2 and 3. Nice!

Curiosity from Curious Chip

Users of Pip can program their device via Curiosity, a tool designed specifically for this handheld device.

Pip’s programming tool is called Curiosity, and it’s hosted on Pip itself and accessed via WiFi from any modern web browser, so there’s no software to download and install. Curiosity allows Pip to be programmed using a number of popular programming languages, including JavaScript, Python, Lua, PHP, and HTML5. Scratch-inspired drag-and-drop block programming is also supported with our own Google Blockly–based editor, making it really easy to access all of Pip’s built-in functionality from a simple, visual programming language.

Back the project

If you’d like to back Curious Chip and bag your own Pip, you can check out their Kickstarter page here. And if you watch their promo video closely, you may see a familiar face from the Raspberry Pi community.

Are you planning on starting your own Raspberry Pi-inspired crowd-funded campaign? Then be sure to tag us on social media. We love to see what the community is creating for our little green (or sometimes blue) computer.

The post Pip: digital creation in your pocket from Curious Chip appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Event-Driven Computing with Amazon SNS and AWS Compute, Storage, Database, and Networking Services

2017-11-16 Christie Gifrin

Post Syndicated from Christie Gifrin original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/event-driven-computing-with-amazon-sns-compute-storage-database-and-networking-services/

Contributed by Otavio Ferreira, Manager, Software Development, AWS Messaging

Like other developers around the world, you may be tackling increasingly complex business problems. A key success factor, in that case, is the ability to break down a large project scope into smaller, more manageable components. A service-oriented architecture guides you toward designing systems as a collection of loosely coupled, independently scaled, and highly reusable services. Microservices take this even further. To improve performance and scalability, they promote fine-grained interfaces and lightweight protocols.

However, the communication among isolated microservices can be challenging. Services are often deployed onto independent servers and don’t share any compute or storage resources. Also, you should avoid hard dependencies among microservices, to preserve maintainability and reusability.

If you apply the pub/sub design pattern, you can effortlessly decouple and independently scale out your microservices and serverless architectures. A pub/sub messaging service, such as Amazon SNS, promotes event-driven computing that statically decouples event publishers from subscribers, while dynamically allowing for the exchange of messages between them. An event-driven architecture also introduces the responsiveness needed to deal with complex problems, which are often unpredictable and asynchronous.

What is event-driven computing?

Given the context of microservices, event-driven computing is a model in which subscriber services automatically perform work in response to events triggered by publisher services. This paradigm can be applied to automate workflows while decoupling the services that collectively and independently work to fulfil these workflows. Amazon SNS is an event-driven computing hub, in the AWS Cloud, that has native integration with several AWS publisher and subscriber services.

Which AWS services publish events to SNS natively?

Several AWS services have been integrated as SNS publishers and, therefore, can natively trigger event-driven computing for a variety of use cases. In this post, I specifically cover AWS compute, storage, database, and networking services, as depicted below.

Compute services

Auto Scaling: Helps you ensure that you have the correct number of Amazon EC2 instances available to handle the load for your application. You can configure Auto Scaling lifecycle hooks to trigger events, as Auto Scaling resizes your EC2 cluster.As an example, you may want to warm up the local cache store on newly launched EC2 instances, and also download log files from other EC2 instances that are about to be terminated. To make this happen, set an SNS topic as your Auto Scaling group’s notification target, then subscribe two Lambda functions to this SNS topic. The first function is responsible for handling scale-out events (to warm up cache upon provisioning), whereas the second is in charge of handling scale-in events (to download logs upon termination).
- Getting SNS Notifications When Your Auto Scaling Group Scales
- Auto Scaling Lifecycle Hooks

AWS Elastic Beanstalk: An easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and web services developed in a number of programming languages. You can configure event notifications for your Elastic Beanstalk environment so that notable events can be automatically published to an SNS topic, then pushed to topic subscribers.As an example, you may use this event-driven architecture to coordinate your continuous integration pipeline (such as Jenkins CI). That way, whenever an environment is created, Elastic Beanstalk publishes this event to an SNS topic, which triggers a subscribing Lambda function, which then kicks off a CI job against your newly created Elastic Beanstalk environment.
- Configuring Amazon SNS Notifications with Elastic Beanstalk

Elastic Load Balancing: Automatically distributes incoming application traffic across Amazon EC2 instances, containers, or other resources identified by IP addresses.You can configure CloudWatch alarms on Elastic Load Balancing metrics, to automate the handling of events derived from Classic Load Balancers. As an example, you may leverage this event-driven design to automate latency profiling in an Amazon ECS cluster behind a Classic Load Balancer. In this example, whenever your ECS cluster breaches your load balancer latency threshold, an event is posted by CloudWatch to an SNS topic, which then triggers a subscribing Lambda function. This function runs a task on your ECS cluster to trigger a latency profiling tool, hosted on the cluster itself. This can enhance your latency troubleshooting exercise by making it timely.
- CloudWatch Metrics and SNS Notifications for Your Classic Load Balancer

Storage services

Amazon S3: Object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data.You can enable S3 event notifications, and automatically get them posted to SNS topics, to automate a variety of workflows. For instance, imagine that you have an S3 bucket to store incoming resumes from candidates, and a fleet of EC2 instances to encode these resumes from their original format (such as Word or text) into a portable format (such as PDF).In this example, whenever new files are uploaded to your input bucket, S3 publishes these events to an SNS topic, which in turn pushes these messages into subscribing SQS queues. Then, encoding workers running on EC2 instances poll these messages from the SQS queues; retrieve the original files from the input S3 bucket; encode them into PDF; and finally store them in an output S3 bucket.
- Configuring Amazon S3 Event Notifications
- Configuring Amazon S3 Buckets for Amazon SNS Notifications (Walkthrough)
- Messaging Fan-out Pattern for Serverless Architectures Using Amazon SNS (Multimedia Encoding Example)

Amazon EFS: Provides simple and scalable file storage, for use with Amazon EC2 instances, in the AWS Cloud.You can configure CloudWatch alarms on EFS metrics, to automate the management of your EFS systems. For example, consider a highly parallelized genomics analysis application that runs against an EFS system. By default, this file system is instantiated on the “General Purpose” performance mode. Although this performance mode allows for lower latency, it might eventually impose a scaling bottleneck. Therefore, you may leverage an event-driven design to handle it automatically.Basically, as soon as the EFS metric “Percent I/O Limit” breaches 95%, CloudWatch could post this event to an SNS topic, which in turn would push this message into a subscribing Lambda function. This function automatically creates a new file system, this time on the “Max I/O” performance mode, then switches the genomics analysis application to this new file system. As a result, your application starts experiencing higher I/O throughput rates.

Amazon Glacier: A secure, durable, and low-cost cloud storage service for data archiving and long-term backup.You can set a notification configuration on an Amazon Glacier vault so that when a job completes, a message is published to an SNS topic. Retrieving an archive from Amazon Glacier is a two-step asynchronous operation, in which you first initiate a job, and then download the output after the job completes. Therefore, SNS helps you eliminate polling your Amazon Glacier vault to check whether your job has been completed, or not. As usual, you may subscribe SQS queues, Lambda functions, and HTTP endpoints to your SNS topic, to be notified when your Amazon Glacier job is done.
- Configuring Vault Notifications in Amazon Glacier
- Retrieving Amazon Glacier Archives

AWS Snowball: A petabyte-scale data transport solution that uses secure appliances to transfer large amounts of data.You can leverage Snowball notifications to automate workflows related to importing data into and exporting data from AWS. More specifically, whenever your Snowball job status changes, Snowball can publish this event to an SNS topic, which in turn can broadcast the event to all its subscribers.As an example, imagine a Geographic Information System (GIS) that distributes high-resolution satellite images to users via Web browser. In this example, the GIS vendor could capture up to 80 TB of satellite images; create a Snowball job to import these files from an on-premises system to an S3 bucket; and provide an SNS topic ARN to be notified upon job status changes in Snowball. After Snowball changes the job status from “Importing” to “Completed”, Snowball publishes this event to the specified SNS topic, which delivers this message to a subscribing Lambda function, which finally creates a CloudFront web distribution for the target S3 bucket, to serve the images to end users.
- Snowball Notifications with Amazon SNS (AWS Snowball User Guide)
- Snowball Notifications with Amazon SNS (AWS Snowball API Reference)
- Getting Started with CloudFront

Database services

Amazon RDS: Makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.RDS leverages SNS to broadcast notifications when RDS events occur. As usual, these notifications can be delivered via any protocol supported by SNS, including SQS queues, Lambda functions, and HTTP endpoints.As an example, imagine that you own a social network website that has experienced organic growth, and needs to scale its compute and database resources on demand. In this case, you could provide an SNS topic to listen to RDS DB instance events. When the “Low Storage” event is published to the topic, SNS pushes this event to a subscribing Lambda function, which in turn leverages the RDS API to increase the storage capacity allocated to your DB instance. The provisioning itself takes place within the specified DB maintenance window.
- Using Amazon RDS Event Notifications via Amazon SNS
- Viewing Amazon RDS Events

Amazon ElastiCache: A web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory data store or cache in the cloud.ElastiCache can publish messages using Amazon SNS when significant events happen on your cache cluster. This feature can be used to refresh the list of servers on client machines connected to individual cache node endpoints of a cache cluster. For instance, an ecommerce website fetches product details from a cache cluster, with the goal of offloading a relational database and speeding up page load times. Ideally, you want to make sure that each web server always has an updated list of cache servers to which to connect.To automate this node discovery process, you can get your ElastiCache cluster to publish events to an SNS topic. Thus, when ElastiCache event “AddCacheNodeComplete” is published, your topic then pushes this event to all subscribing HTTP endpoints that serve your ecommerce website, so that these HTTP servers can update their list of cache nodes.

Amazon Redshift: A fully managed data warehouse that makes it simple to analyze data using standard SQL and BI (Business Intelligence) tools.Amazon Redshift uses SNS to broadcast relevant events so that data warehouse workflows can be automated. As an example, imagine a news website that sends clickstream data to a Kinesis Firehose stream, which then loads the data into Amazon Redshift, so that popular news and reading preferences might be surfaced on a BI tool. At some point though, this Amazon Redshift cluster might need to be resized, and the cluster enters a ready-only mode. Hence, this Amazon Redshift event is published to an SNS topic, which delivers this event to a subscribing Lambda function, which finally deletes the corresponding Kinesis Firehose delivery stream, so that clickstream data uploads can be put on hold.At a later point, after Amazon Redshift publishes the event that the maintenance window has been closed, SNS notifies a subscribing Lambda function accordingly, so that this function can re-create the Kinesis Firehose delivery stream, and resume clickstream data uploads to Amazon Redshift.
- Amazon Redshift Event Notifications with Amazon SNS
- Managing Event Notifications Using the Amazon Redshift Console

AWS DMS: Helps you migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. The source database remains fully operational during the migration, minimizing downtime to applications that rely on the database.DMS also uses SNS to provide notifications when DMS events occur, which can automate database migration workflows. As an example, you might create data replication tasks to migrate an on-premises MS SQL database, composed of multiple tables, to MySQL. Thus, if replication tasks fail due to incompatible data encoding in the source tables, these events can be published to an SNS topic, which can push these messages into a subscribing SQS queue. Then, encoders running on EC2 can poll these messages from the SQS queue, encode the source tables into a compatible character set, and restart the corresponding replication tasks in DMS. This is an event-driven approach to a self-healing database migration process.
- Working with DMS Event Notifications via Amazon SNS

Networking services

Amazon Route 53: A highly available and scalable cloud-based DNS (Domain Name System). Route 53 health checks monitor the health and performance of your web applications, web servers, and other resources.You can set CloudWatch alarms and get automated Amazon SNS notifications when the status of your Route 53 health check changes. As an example, imagine an online payment gateway that reports the health of its platform to merchants worldwide, via a status page. This page is hosted on EC2 and fetches platform health data from DynamoDB. In this case, you could configure a CloudWatch alarm for your Route 53 health check, so that when the alarm threshold is breached, and the payment gateway is no longer considered healthy, then CloudWatch publishes this event to an SNS topic, which pushes this message to a subscribing Lambda function, which finally updates the DynamoDB table that populates the status page. This event-driven approach avoids any kind of manual update to the status page visited by merchants.
- Monitoring Route 53 Health Check Status and Getting Notifications via Amazon SNS
- Creating and Updating Route 53 Health Checks with Notifications

AWS Direct Connect (AWS DX): Makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from your premises to AWS, which can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections.You can monitor physical DX connections using CloudWatch alarms, and send SNS messages when alarms change their status. As an example, when a DX connection state shifts to 0 (zero), indicating that the connection is down, this event can be published to an SNS topic, which can fan out this message to impacted servers through HTTP endpoints, so that they might reroute their traffic through a different connection instead. This is an event-driven approach to connectivity resilience.
- Monitoring Direct Connect with Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon SNS

More event-driven computing on AWS

In addition to SNS, event-driven computing is also addressed by Amazon CloudWatch Events, which delivers a near real-time stream of system events that describe changes in AWS resources. With CloudWatch Events, you can route each event type to one or more targets, including:

SNS topics
Amazon SQS queues
Amazon EC2 instances
Amazon ECS tasks
Amazon Kinesis Streams
Amazon Kinesis Firehose delivery streams
AWS Lambda functions
AWS Step Functions state machines
AWS CodePipeline pipelines

Many AWS services publish events to CloudWatch. As an example, you can get CloudWatch Events to capture events on your ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) jobs running on AWS Glue and push failed ones to an SQS queue, so that you can retry them later.

Conclusion

Amazon SNS is a pub/sub messaging service that can be used as an event-driven computing hub to AWS customers worldwide. By capturing events natively triggered by AWS services, such as EC2, S3 and RDS, you can automate and optimize all kinds of workflows, namely scaling, testing, encoding, profiling, broadcasting, discovery, failover, and much more. Business use cases presented in this post ranged from recruiting websites, to scientific research, geographic systems, social networks, retail websites, and news portals.

Start now by visiting Amazon SNS in the AWS Management Console, or by trying the AWS 10-Minute Tutorial, Send Fan-out Event Notifications with Amazon SNS and Amazon SQS.

timeShift(GrafanaBuzz, 1w) Issue 19

2017-10-27 Blogs on Grafana Labs Blog

Post Syndicated from Blogs on Grafana Labs Blog original https://grafana.com/blog/2017/10/27/timeshiftgrafanabuzz-1w-issue-19/

This week, we were busy prepping for our latest stable release, Grafana 4.6! This is a sizeable release that adds some key new functionality, but there’s no time to pat ourselves on the back – now it’s time to focus on Grafana 5.0! In the meantime, find out more about what’s in 4.6 in our release blog post, and let us know what you think of the new features and enhancements.

Latest Release

Grafana 4.6 Stable is now available! The Grafana 4.6 release contains some exciting and much anticipated new additions:

The new Postgres Data Source
Create your own Annotations from the Graph panel
Cloudwatch Alerting Support
Prometheus query editor enhancements

Download Grafana 4.6 Stable Now

From the Blogosphere

Lyft’s Envoy dashboards: Lyft developed Envoy to relieve operational and reliability headaches. Envoy is a “service mesh” substrate that provides common utilities such as service discovery, load balancing, rate limiting, circuit breaking, stats, logging, tracing, etc. to application architectures. They’ve recently shared their Envoy dashboards, and walk you through their setup.

Monitoring Data in a SQL Table with Prometheus and Grafana Joseph recently built a proof-of-concept to add monitoring and alerting on the results of a Microsoft SQL Server query. Since he knew he’d eventually want to monitor many other things, from many other sources, he chose Prometheus and Grafana as his starting point. In this article, he walks us through his steps of exposing SQL queries to Prometheus, collecting metrics, alerting, and visualizing the results in Grafana.

Crypto Exchange Trading Data Discovering interesting public Grafana dashboards has been happening more and more lately. This week, I came across a dashboard visualizing trading data on the crypto exchanges. If you have a public dashboard you’d like shared, Let us know.

GrafanaCon EU Early Bird is Ending

Early bird discounts will be ending October 31; this is your last chance to take advantage of the discounted tickets!

Get Your Early Bird Ticket Now

Grafana Plugins

Each week we review updated plugins to ensure code quality and compatibility before publishing them on grafana.com. This process can take time, and we appreciate all of the communication from plugin authors. This week we have two plugins that received some major TLC. These are two very popular plugins, so we encourage you to update. We’ve made updating easy; for on-prem Grafana, use the Grafana-cli tool, or update with 1 click if you are using Hosted Grafana.

UPDATED PLUGIN

Zabbix App Plugin – The Zabbix App Plugin just got a big update! Here are just a few of the changes:

PostgreSQL support for Direct DB Connection.
Triggers query mode, which allows counting active alerts by group, host and application, #141.
sortSeries() function that sorts multiple timeseries by name, #447, thanks to @mdorenkamp.
percentil() function, thanks to @pedrohrf.
Zabbix System Status example dashboard.

Update

UPDATED PLUGIN

Wroldmap Panel Plugin – The Worldmap panel also got a new update. Zooming with the mouse wheel has been turned off, as it was too easy to accidentally zoom in when scrolling the page. You can zoom in with the mouse by either double-clicking or using shift+drag to zoom in on an area.

Support for new data source integration, the Dynamic JSON endpoint #103, thanks @LostInBrittany
Fix for using floats in thresholds #79, thanks @fabienpomerol
Turned off mouse wheel zoom

Update

Upcoming Events:

In between code pushes we like to speak at, sponsor and attend all kinds of conferences and meetups. We have some awesome talks lined up this November. Hope to see you at one of these events!

Tweet of the Week

We scour Twitter each week to find an interesting/beautiful dashboard and show it off! #monitoringLove

Cool #Dashboards with #Grafana #Icinga2 #Graphite #NOC #Monitoring #Security https://t.co/cGXQS5EDXW pic.twitter.com/QqoFcA0E2S
— Quality NOC S.L. (@QualityNoc) October 23, 2017

Nice – but dashboards are meant for sharing! You should upload that to our list of Icinga2 dashboards.

Grafana Labs is Hiring!

We are passionate about open source software and thrive on tackling complex challenges to build the future. We ship code from every corner of the globe and love working with the community. If this sounds exciting, you’re in luck – WE’RE HIRING!

Check out our Open Positions

How are we doing?

Well, that wraps up another week! How we’re doing? Submit a comment on this article below, or post something at our community forum. Help us make these weekly roundups better!

N O D E’s Handheld Linux Terminal

2017-10-19 Alex Bate

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/n-o-d-es-handheld-linux-terminal/

Fit an entire Raspberry Pi-based laptop into your pocket with N O D E’s latest Handheld Linux Terminal build.

The Handheld Linux Terminal Version 3 (Portable Pi 3)
Hey everyone. Today I want to show you the new version 3 of the Handheld Linux Terminal. It’s taken a long time, but I’m finally finished. This one takes all the things I’ve learned so far, and improves on many of the features from the previous iterations.

N O D E

With interests in modding tech, exploring the boundaries of the digital world, and open source, YouTuber N O D E has become one to watch within the digital maker world. He maintains a channel focused on “the transformative power of technology.”

“Understanding that electronics isn’t voodoo is really powerful”, he explains in his Patreon video. “And learning how to build your own stuff opens up so many possibilities.”

NODE Youtube channel logo - Handheld Linux Terminal v3

The topics of his videos range from stripped-down devices, upgraded tech, and security upgrades, to the philosophy behind technology. He also provides weekly roundups of, and discussions about, new releases.

Essentially, if you like technology, you’ll like N O D E.

Handheld Linux Terminal v3

Subscribers to N O D E’s YouTube channel, of whom there are currently over 44000, will have seen him documenting variations of this handheld build throughout the last year. By stripping down a Raspberry Pi 3, and incorporating a Zero W, he’s been able to create interesting projects while always putting functionality first.

Handheld Linux Terminal v3

With the third version of his terminal, N O D E has taken experiences gained from previous builds to create something of which he’s obviously extremely proud. And so he should be. The v3 handheld is impressively small considering he managed to incorporate a fully functional keyboard with mouse, a 3.5″ screen, and a fan within the 3D-printed body.

Handheld Linux Terminal v3

“The software side of things is where it really shines though, and the Pi 3 is more than capable of performing most non-intensive tasks,” N O D E goes on to explain. He demonstrates various applications running on Raspbian, plus other operating systems he has pre-loaded onto additional SD cards:

“I have also installed Exagear Desktop, which allows it to run x86 apps too, and this works great. I have x86 apps such as Sublime Text and Spotify running without any problems, and it’s technically possible to use Wine to also run Windows apps on the device.”

We think this is an incredibly neat build, and we can’t wait to see where N O D E takes it next!

The post N O D E’s Handheld Linux Terminal appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

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