I’ve been so busy making my second course of 2019 that I forgot to announce my first one! A few weeks ago I finished my newest Pluralsight course, AWS IoT the Big Picture.

This course is perfect for people just getting started with IoT in general or AWS in particular. We’ll cover a vast amount of information about the unique challenges that IoT presents and how AWS IoT can help you address those issues.

It’s time for my annual review! Starting last year, I began to review what I’ve managed to accomplish over the course of the previous 365 days.

I regularly see questions related to the various bits of terminology surrounding DynamoDB. Specifically, questions always come up related to Primary Keys, Partition Keys, Sort Keys, and a bunch of the other names and types of each of them. I wanted to do my best to describe what each of these terms means and how they relate to one another.

I’ll assume a little bit of DynamoDB knowledge going into this post. If you’d like to dive into this yourself I’d suggest getting started with the DynamoDB Developer Guide. So let’s get started breaking apart all the jargon involved with AWS’s Managed NoSQL offering.

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.