Have you ever tried to do something with CloudFormation but just needed a little something more to get the job done? In those cases I’ve started using CloudFormation custom resources. These resources essentially allow you to extend the use of CloudFormation templates whenever you create, update or delete a stack.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how you could use these custom resources to provision your DynamoDB tables with some data. This can be useful if you’d like to run additional testing on your AWS environment that requires actual data inside of the environment.

In this tutorial, we’ll use Flask to create an API that serves up historical weather data in the Seattle area. We’ll put together a very simple API using open weather data and finally, we’ll suggest a few modifications you could make to continue expanding and improving the functionality of your API.

I’ve recently decided to scale back some of my social media and other time-wasting activities.

Initially I was trying to do this with browser plugins to block specific sites. Unfortunately, I was too clever for my own good and removed those plugins or opened incognito windows whenever I wanted to, say watch Youtube or browse Twitter.

So I tried to think about how I could make this even harder for myself and decided to change my hosts file to redirect urls to another IP effectively blocking all my site vices. Here’s how I did it.

It’s official, I now hold all three associate level AWS certifications. After procrastinating for the last three months, I finally passed my SysOps exam and completed the trifecta of AWS associate level certifications: AWS Certified Developer, AWS Certified Solutions Architect and AWS Certified SysOps Administrator.

Here are a few thoughts and suggestions for those of you considering taking any or all of these exams.

Interested in creating and deploying your own Flask application using Docker and ECS? Well, good news, I just published a post on how you can do this. Here are the highlights: