Simple DynamoDB Table Backup & Restore

Dmitry Kireev published on 2021-10-10 included in Second Head

When migrating AWS environments there is a typical need to migrate data. In terms of data migration & backup there are many very nice options for DynamoDB today, including Amazon S3 and AWS Glue Data Pipeline Amazon EMR They are serverless and mostly don’t require any coding. They support Dynamo Streams and should be generally used during warm/hot no-downtime migrations. But what should we do if the downtime requirements are much more liberal and the data amount is rather small?

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Tired of Documentation? Try Runner Experience Design

Dmitry Kireev published on 2020-07-10 included in Second Head

I’m an adept of a Credo of Phoenix approach when we talk about infrastructure design: Whatever you build should have an ability to be rebuilt with no-to-minimal effort over and over again by anyone or anything with sufficient permissions.

Credo of Phoenix

Dmitry Kireev published on 2020-05-10 included in Second Head

One day I was trying to describe to someone the approach I am taking when designing systems. Later it struck me, that such approach closely resembles a mythological Phoenix bird, that dies and recreates from ashes. So I decided to use that analogy for all my further discussions. Phoenix System Design Whatever you build should have an ability to be rebuilt with no-to-minimal effort over and over again by anyone or anything with sufficient permissions.

How to Avoid Human Bottlenecks in Production

Dmitry Kireev published on 2020-05-10 included in Second Head

There is no doubt we’ve all heard of a term “bottleneck”: A bottleneck is one process in a chain of processes, such that its limited capacity reduces the capacity of the whole chain ( Wiki). Generally speaking, it is required to have multiple humans to run a larger business to perform ideation, design, project management, development, QA, marketing and infrastructure operations. When a single human limits a capacity of a team it becomes a Human Bottleneck.

What is DevOps? - Not a Person

Dmitry Kireev published on 2020-05-03 included in Second Head

DevOps is a methodology. DevOps is not a person. We should stop labeling people as “DevOps Engineers”, as it clearly doesn’t define a skill set one may be looking for. DevOps Definition DevOps a set of practices intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into normal production, while ensuring high quality. In other words, it is a methodology that allows us to deliver quality code at a higher velocity, by essentially saying “works on my machine” phrase to our colleagues less often.

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Static Website with CI/CD, CDN, TLS, Release Reviews with Hugo & Netlify

Dmitry Kireev published on 2020-03-19 included in Howto

I’ve been a “Wordpress does the trick” guy. But only until recently, when I’ve started hearing more and more about static website generators, such as Hugo, Jekyll, Gatsby and others, which are, apparently, taking over the webpage space.

I’ve used Jekyll before, so I am very familiar with the static generator concept, but I haven’t expected it to pick up it’s popularity so fast, that even big companies and communities, such as kubernetes.io, datadog.com and many others would actually use it as a part of their marketing and branding efforts.

So I decided to give it a try. I had a personal profile page on about.me, which became a great candidate for transplantation. In addition to it I was aspiring to recover my blogging habit, aka “Second Head” style blog, which used to be hosted on Wordpress and had gone south since.