Learn By Doing Newsletter

Wow it's hard to believe that in just a few weeks this newsletter will be 1 year old. It has been quite an adventure these first 46 issues so let's make this 47th a smashing hit.

This week we dive into the new AWS Lambda whitepaper that provides a security overview of the popular serverless offering. We also have a great post from Paul Swail on how to use an API Gateway to proxy requests to your monolith application. Rancher Labs released a new tool that looks very cool for those Kubernetes fans out there, it allows you to deploy K8s to just about any device. Then we have a fun read on creating the perfect March Madness bracket using a bit of machine learning.

Check out all of those fantastic articles and many more in this week's volume of the Learn By Doing newsletter. Remember to share this newsletter with all of your friends!

☁️ Cloud

Security Overview of AWS LambdaThe folks over on the AWS Lambda team released this new whitepaper earlier this week. It dives into some of the details surrounding AWS Lambda from a security perspective. Most notably is the fact that microVMs are not shared across AWS accounts.

Deploying API Gateway as a proxy in front of a legacy APIPaul Swail is undertaking the big task of moving a monolith architecture to serverless. Each blog post in this series is like an entry in a decision journal and it's quite useful. In this post Paul explores how you can deploy an API Gateway in front of an existing ELB to proxy requests to your monolith.

Develop and Test AWS Step Functions Workflows LocallyThis one slipped by me last month but this is fairly substantial news. If testing your serverless workloads locally is important to you then you are going to enjoy this announcement from AWS. You can now test the AWS Step Functions locally using a JAR package or a Docker image.

🔨 Tools

Lightweight KubernetesWe haven't talked about K8s in this newsletter recently. But this release from the folks at Rancher Labs is pretty cool. K3s allows you to deploy a lightweight Kubernetes cluster to just about any device. The binary is less than 40 MB and it only requires 512 MB of memory to run.

Monsters in the Middleboxes: Introducing Two New Tools for Detecting HTTPS InterceptionCloudflare is releasing even more cool things related to networking. This time it's two new tools for detecting HTTPS interception. But this blog post is worth a read even if you don't use the tools because it does a great job of explaining what HTTPS interception is.

Announcing Terraform 0.12 Beta 1Terraform 0.12 has been a long sought upgrade to the start Hashicorp product. It has also been rumored to be released for months now and there has been very little movement in that arena. However, it looks like things are changing now. Terraform 0.12 is now in it's first beta release and ready for developers to give it a try. I probably wouldn't go change your production infrastructure to this, but the progress is awesome.

Code && Languages

Applying Machine Learning To March MadnessIt's March and that means the American tradition of March Madness for college basketball is here. I don't follow the sport that close but it's always a fun time to try and create that perfect bracket. This is a blog post from Adit Deshpande on how he tried to create the perfect bracket by using a bit of machine learning. He even open sourced the code so that you can try it yourself this year.

Rebuilding My Personal Infrastructure With Alpine Linux and DockerThis is a really good read on moving existing infrastructure to a new platform like Docker. While this isn't Netflix scale or anything like that, it's actually a lot more practical than those blog posts tend to be. This is a small developer setup and Wesley Moore does a great job walking us through how he moved a few servers on one platform.

A K7 TutorialK7 is a rather unknown language to a lot of people but it's actually very powerful. It's used in large financial applications that are data intensive and need to be very performant. Up until this post there wasn't a ton of material to actually learn the language. This is a great guide for walking through the basic features of the language as well as some use cases for it.

😎 Cool find of the week

Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn't Designed To Make MoneyMany companies have tried and some have been successful but quite a few have failed as well. This is a great read from Ian Bicking who explains that maybe the reason open source projects don't make money is because they lack focus on business solutions.

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