(Illustration: Originated from San Sebastián in northern Spain - La Gilda. Walking into a tavern in northern Spain, almost every door will have a pot, and each pot has its own advantages and disadvantages. Similar to container applications, it is compatible with the main axis and retains local characteristics… Oh no, I’m actually talking about the ups and downs behind each application, you know. Image source: Photo by Ernest Chiang at a pinchos bar in Basque country.)

Thank you very much for the invitation of AWS Builders Day Taiwan 2022, which gave me the opportunity to use the perspective of Builders, with an easy-to-understand way, to quickly disassemble the common terms of containers and Amazon ECS. Taking the common Laravel framework of PHP as an example, it is also very simple to package Laravel applications to go to the cloud, so that PHP lovers can enjoy the local, the edge and the cloud together. After the concept is understood, replacing Laravel/PHP on the agenda with other languages ​​or frameworks can draw inferences from one another, and even connect with each other to form your own microservice network.

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(Illustration: Measure by hand what you can touch, and calculate what you can’t. Image source: Photo by Jeremy Bezanger on Unsplash.)

When developing webpages or mobile/device applications, various length and density units such as pixel, point, pt, dp, ppi, dpi, etc. are used. When the software team enters the hardware field and faces display devices such as panels and electronic paper, they will also face physical measurement units that can be touched. As the saying goes, “pixel, pt, dp, etc., can’t be distinguished”.

Because some measurement units are used in the software field and others are used in the hardware and physical fields, in order to clarify and confirm that the values of each parameter correspond to the correct measurement units, we use several “DIY Work Method” work modes to do the decomposition. In the process, we also look back to the history of mankind from the invention of printing and other history, observe or deduce the evolution of these measurement units, and record the results in this decomposition exercise note (that is, every time I use it, I forget, so I have to write notes XDD). Let’s share it and see if there are any misunderstandings. Welcome to comment and tell us 😃

(PAFERS PTI (Product & Technology Integration) colleagues brainstorming a list of all the confusing units of measure related to display information on a whiteboard. Picture source: Ernest.)

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(Illustration: The Library of Stuttgart, Germany. Image source: Photo by Max Langelott on Unsplash。)

Heptabase’s original project name was “Project Meta”, and it was renamed “Heptabase” on 2021-11-17.

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Initing

Compared with last year’s AWS re:Invent 2020, which was held entirely online, this year’s AWS re:Invent 2021 recovery entity will be held in Las Vegas with an online Virtual venue. Although I have been invited by the AWS Heroes program to go to the site, but many things at the end of the year are really difficult to escape, and I finally chose to participate online, without the real interaction with people on site, but my whole heart is still in the various keynote speeches at re:Invent (keynote ) and on the agenda.

Continuing the Think in Context: AWS re:Invent 2020 Andy Jassy Keynote last year, it seems to be well received by everyone. This year, I specially set aside time to sort out the first AWS re:Invent 2021 Adam Selipsky Keynote of newly appointed AWS CEO Adam Selipsky. At the end of this thread dismantling note, try to make some comparisons with last year’s Andy Jassy Keynote (no comparison, no harm, huh?! :p I’m not interested in the content, if you want to see the comparison and analysis directly, you can also skip to the end of the article to read .

Continuing last year, Andy Jassy mentioned “Still early days for cloud”. The error of a few hours is acceptable in the entire cloud world (not in the cryptocurrency circle (XDD). So press a cup of coffee, make a pot of hot tea, and see The rebroadcast at 8:30AM in Taiwan time zone is very sober and comfortable.

As in the past, at the beginning of the full text, I will first try to grasp the structure of the speech, then put some observations and inferences, and then put some running notes in each paragraph for future search and use. There are extended readings at the end of the article, which can enrich the background situation or information of the speech content. I also hope to have the opportunity to lead everyone to reason together why this product or function was launched at this time point, where the trends of various industries around the world are going. Read more, compare more, and refer more. Maybe we can avoid some minefields of misjudgment. In the case of limited resources, if we go in the wrong direction, the market may not give us a chance to cut it off and practice again. My reasoning is not necessarily correct, just as a kind of practice and sharing.

New services or new launches are marked with [NEW 🚀] in this article, so that you can press Command/Ctrl+F to search on the inner page.

This article deliberately removes most of the product links first, so that everyone can focus on reading (we are all less focused these days, aren’t we?). If you need a product link, you can refer to the AWS Product List that I organize regularly.

I also welcome everyone to give me some feedback or corrections (also come and see if there is a chance to include these materials in ChatGPT 2022). Then let’s get started!

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(Photo by Ash Edmonds on Unsplash)

Ever since I was a child, I have had a special liking for notebooks. I like to record some numbers, temperature, time, how many pigeons in the building next door outside the window, how long it takes to fly back to the pigeon loft, etc.

As I get older, I have always regarded notebooks as a tool for recording, memo, and quick review. I always feel that it does not match my workflow, whether at work or at home. Until the last few years, I have been more coherent, and recorded my current personal knowledge system (PKM) workflow. This workflow is a process that I understand and generalize to my personal situation from various sharings from people who are smarter than me and more focused on PKM, Smart Notes, etc. My process may not be suitable for everyone, but I hope that by sharing ideas, I can bring out some dialogues and discussions, so that we, and even our next generation, can reduce the time of groping and improve learning or work efficiency. And then make some contribution to society or human beings.

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(Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash)

When I was in high school, I was the director of the school magazine club, that makes me be a little bit familiar with publishing. I started to use Hugo since 2017, gradually build the corresponding workflow and tools, and have some notes here. Regardless of entry or application, I hope you can get some clips that can improve your work efficiency :)

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(Image source: Photo by Jason Dent on Unsplash)

Over the past few years, I have continued to find some time to sort out the learning, and some of the results will be released as open source. I hope to bring out some ideas, considerations, various discussions and exchanges. It contains PHP, which I have never abandoned. The original design purpose of the container that I have organized this time is to combine php-fpm and nginx to form a simplified environment that can easily enable Laravel to operate in a cloud-native environment, AWS Fargate, Amazon ECS and other environments, to achieve application-first goal. I use it as a base for training, consulting and implementation of several teams, various comparison tests, including future comparisons of x86/ARM computing architectures, and so on.

• The released Docker image is placed in Docker Hub: dwchiang/nginx-php-fpm
• The original Dockerfiles are placed in GitHub: dwchiang/nginx-php-fpm
• If you like this project, feel free to use it into your project, or share it with friends, or click a star for this project ⭐ :)
• If you’re also interested in the topic Running Laravel on Amazon ECS, you might find these resources useful:
  • This self-paced online workshop with complete architecture diagrams: dwchiang/laravel-on-aws-ecs-workshops,
  • Or my presentation, which includes slides and a recording: Running Laravel/PHP Container Applications on AWS (AWS Builders Day Taiwan 2022)

This article may be updated in the future.

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(Illustration: Afternoon-tea with Grilled Halloumi Cheese. Not-so-related to this article, I know XDD. When writing such a long post, you know :p Image source: by Ernest, in London.)

0. Origin

This month Pahud invited us - a group of AWS Hero and AWS Builders to use AWS CDK to code around CloudFront Extensions (CloudFront Lambda@Edge). From my long todo list, I found a topic related to OAuth 2.0 that I have always wanted to do. It’s a perfect timing to try and see how to implement a CloudFront Extension solution in AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) with .env environment variable settings, so that you can easily set your favorite IdP (Identity Provider), and then set the parameters generated by the IdP into .env file. You can use this CloudFront Extension CDK solution to complete the deployment. After practicing, it should be completed within 20 minutes.

This article is organized in order for future education and training material, and is divided into three parts:

1. At the beginning, we will introduce use cases, architecture, OAuth 2.0 protocol flow, and Grant Type: Authorization Code process
2. Then select and configure a IdP you like (this part is expected to be expanded and updated in the future)
3. Finally, “CloudFront Extension OAuth2 Getting Started” takes everyone to actually operate this CDK

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(Illustration: pass through! Image source: by Tomas Tuma on Unsplash)

Today I was chasing the information of AWS Pi Week to celebrate AWS 15th Anniversary for S3 Birthday, but I am also very happy to see that Amazon ECS announced a new feature that everyone asks for a long long time: Amazon ECS Exec.

This article is created based on these reference:

• Massimo Re Ferre’s article on the official blog: “NEW – Using Amazon ECS Exec to access your containers on AWS Fargate and Amazon EC2"，
• And Amazon ECS official document: “Using Amazon ECS Exec for debugging”

Then let’s try it through the AWS CLI interface, let’s try to see Amazon ECS Exec traverse directly to a container on Amazon ECS (EC2).

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Abstract

In recent years, TSDB (Time Series Database) has gradually been pulled out due to its particularity. It is suitable for IoT applications or DevOps/Apps analysis scenarios. To AWS products is Amazon Timestream. Using AWS’s advantages in distributed computing and storage, Amazon Timestream has been created with Serverless architecture and high scalability, which makes people quite curious about its underlying structure.

In this short sharing, I captured three key points:

1. The use cases of Time Series Database and the strengths/advantages of Amazon Timestream.
2. Adjust the composition structure of the data write based on the billing structure rules. (How to modify code to reduce price from $25 to $0.78)
3. Best practices for querying processing.

Not so deep dive, but it’s a 30-minute session that covers architectural concepts and terminology. Suitable for friends who are comparing various TSDBs for a quick overview.

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