One of the best ways to learn something new is to actually try it. I wanted to learn how to use AWS and some of its services, so I moved my projects to AWS. This was just a very basic setup (EC2, S3, CloudFront). Later I wanted to use additional services like Cognito, RDS, MediaConvert, Simple Queue Service, Simple Email Service, etc. So I started building a new project where I was able to use those. It started "slowly" with costs like $20 per month, grew with database to $100 per month and later to almost $300 per month with Kubernetes and other services. And now I am back to $20 per month.

In one of my previous blog posts, I wrote about how to Extend logs in Node.js with unique trace ID. It is a great starting point to improve logging and tracing of your application. But... can it be upgraded to somehow connect the trace IDs into a usable diagram?

This is where AWS X-Ray can help. It generates its own unique trace ID, which you can send to AWS services or other microservices in your environment, and then collects the data. This allows it to show a map of all services that are used along with a lot of other important information.

User management is part of nearly every application and it is not easy to do it in a proper secure way. One of the possibilities is to use an existing solution such as AWS Cognito.

Nearly every project I worked on in the past has this part done inhouse. In these cases it is not unusual to see plain text passwords stored in the database. Or passwords hashed with MD5 hash which is deprecated. And even if everything was done correctly, there are still many other things that can pop up.

It is easy to say that someone is not good or weak. But it is not easy to make the decision to fire him / her and it is even harder to tell him / her.

This story actually happened 2 years ago. We had a developer we were not happy with. Underperforming or not delivering at all. In the end it was clear he is not a fit and we should say goodbye to him.

When number of requests to an application grows, it might be hard to read logs and group them together to one single request. This can be solved with trace ID that is unique for each request.

Learning new technologies goes always better if you have something to test it on. When I wanted to start using AWS I decided to move there my blog (you are currently reading). And these are the steps it takes.

Container should be able to perform only a very limited set of operations and it is highly recommended to use different user from root. To achieve this both docker file and kubernetes config must be changed.

Write simple Node.js backend using TypeScript, Express and Terminus and run it in Digital Ocean Kubernetes cluster. In the end you will have application which is running in multiple replications and has access to environment variable passed to the application by Kubernetes secret.

This week, 1 - 4 November, Web Summit conference held in Lisbon, Portugal. Me and two other colleagues from Kontentino were there to present Kontentino and listen to some speakers.

A brief tutorial how to create a Node, TypeScript and GraphQL server from scratch with MySQL database. The ouput is a very basic GraphQL server, which you can run, send a simple query to it and get a response. The whole project is available on GitHub.