aws-blog.de-projects VS Hugo

With this theory out of the way, let‘s see how we can implement it. I have once again created a repository with a SAM-based app. The app deploys the required Cognito user pool and app client for authentication and grants the Frontend Lambda permission to describe the User Pool and retrieve some secrets at runtime so that they don‘t have to be hardcoded. Almost all the rest happens in the Lambda function.

You can deploy the solution to your own account, as explained in the Github repository. It's basically a combination of sam build and sam deploy --guided because we need SAM to create an ECR repository for the docker image. After the deployment, you need to add credentials to the Parameter Store parameter; otherwise, you won't be able to access the webapp. I didn't include default credentials on purpose.

The code for this setup is available on Github again. I'm not going to walk through all of the authorizer code here, feel free to check out the full implementation, it should be relatively easy to read.

The build_app function creates a Dash app that displays some text, an image, and some dynamic functionality. I've omitted some of the code for brevity, you can find the full code on Github. I wrapped the instantiation in a function that allows me to pass additional arguments to the apps' constructor.

In order to fix these shortcomings, we can extend boto3 to teach it how to deal with more data types than it can on its own. The code, including some tests for it is available on GitHub, and you can jump straight into that if you're impatient, but we're also going to walk through it and talk about some background info that may interest you.

This works well for situations where only one set of credentials can be active at any point in time. There's only one problem here. There is no built-in hook in the lifecycle to decommission or deactivate the old credentials after a grace period, so we have to build our own. Fortunately, the architecture for that isn't too complicated. We extend the four-step lifecycle with a fifth deletePreviousSecret step implemented through custom logic. A self-contained example implementation in Terraform and Python is available here. Let's go through each step in the sequence and see what's happening.

By playing around with the two different implementations, I also learned a few more performance details that surprised me. Let's talk a bit about my experiment setup. The complete code is also available on GitHub if you want to follow along.

Pictures are cheap. Let's look at some code that you can also find on GitHub. You need the AWS SDK for Python and a standard SQS queue to run this yourself. We begin with code that can send a few dummy messages to our SQS queue.

This lambda function sleeps for a random number of seconds between one and ten. It fails in about 15% of all invocations, simulating a broken configuration. In all other cases, it returns the message that processing was successful. Let's look at the implementation now. You can find the complete code on Github if you're interested.

aws-blog.de

At one point though I realized there is a scaling problem with my build minutes. I knew that golang has considerably faster builds and in my case the easy fix is swapping over to Hugo.

This blog is running on Hugo. It had previously been running on Jekyll. Both these SSGs ship with the ability to create excerpts from your markdown content in 1 line or thereabouts.

Hugo

Hugo is a popular static site generator specifically designed to create websites and documentation lightning-fast. Its minimalist approach, emphasis on speed, and ease of use have made it popular among developers, technical writers, and anybody looking to construct high-quality websites without the complexity of typical CMS platforms.

As per many other comments, it sounds like a static site generator like Hugo (https://gohugo.io/) or Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/), hosted on GitHub Pages (https://pages.github.com/) or GitLab Pages (https://about.gitlab.com/stages-devops-lifecycle/pages/), would be a good match. If you set up GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD to do the build and deploy (see e.g. https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/), your normal workflow will simply be to edit markdown and do a git push to make your changes live. There are a number of pre-built themes (e.g. https://themes.gohugo.io/) you can use, and these are realtively straightforward to tweak to your requirements.

Create the technical documentation of your project You can use any of the following options: * A wiki, like the ArchWiki that uses MediaWiki * Read the Docs, used by projects like Setuptools. Check Awesome Read the Docs for more examples. * Create a website * Create a blog, like the documentation of Blowfish, a theme for Hugo.

Doing this made me appreciate existing SSGs like Hugo and Next.js even more👏👏

I suggest hugo: https://gohugo.io/

Generates a completely static website from MD (and other formats) files; also handles themes (including a lot of them rendering well on mobile), and different types of content - posts, articles, etc. - depending on the theme.

It's open source and, being completely static, cheap as fuck to self host.