In early 2020, Custom Ink implemented an AWS Application Load Balancer in front of CustomInk.com and decommissioned a set of EC2 instances running an open-source HTTP accelerator called Varnish. This transition was the latest step in our long journey to make CustomInk.com faster, more reliable, and easier to maintain. Read on to see how we used caching and load balancing to make our website more scalable and less complicated, and how we eventually got to use Amazon Web Services' managed...
Recently I blogged about using SAM Cookicutter Projects to kickstart your development. One aspect of that work was leveraging Docker containers for all the SAM CLI commands. However, sometimes we all have AWS CLI tasks that fall outside a project. At Custom Ink we make heavy usage of Homebrew and projects like pyenv, a Python Version Manager, to install both system and project-scoped tooling. Neither of which help me maintain a sane global AWS CLI setup. Especially when multi factor...
To Kickstart Your Lambda Projects
For the upcoming Lamby work, we really want to improve our "getting started" experience. Creating a new Rails app on AWS Lambda should feel just as natural as running the $ rails new command line tool. One option to explore could be AWS' Serverless Application Repository. Commonly called SAR (czar, not es•ay•are) for short, it offers re-usable applications similiar to Heroku's deploy button.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a wide array of tools, storage, guides, and services for hosting and monitoring your web and cloud applications. There is no shortage of what AWS can do, with an ever increasing set of new tools at your disposal. With Custom Ink hosted on AWS, it is essential that our company stays ahead of the curve and takes initiative in keeping up with latest industry trends and standards. This allows us to provide the most secure,...
Having your mobile phone on you has become almost a daily necessity. Yesterday, I was driving and while I was looking at my dwindling battery life, I considered what I could do if I didn’t have my phone. Well, since I had my car… I could drive home.. But that’s about it. I couldn’t get ahold of any of my family or friends without being able to call them. I wouldn’t be able to find out the best traffic route,...
Using The New ActiveRecord Aurora Serverless Adapter Need a More Robust Rails on Lambda Database Solution? AWS announced that RDS Proxy is Generally Available. Our Lamby guides now have detailed steps to deploy your first RDS Proxy with Rails using native MySQL connnections with our very own statically built gem for Amazon Linux 1 & 2. Are you someone with a pet Rails project running on a Free, Hobby, or Professional Heroku plan? Perhaps your company or freelance gig has...
This previous week I had the privilege of attending the Nation Frontrunner’s React JavaScript conference (http://nationjs.com/main). This is a ReactJS and Javascript web stack conference and one of the bigger events of this type in the Mid-Atlantic region. Custom Ink served as one of the three main sponsors to the event and were graciously given extra tickets for employees to attend and gain important knowledge in this field of technology. This year’s event was held in Washington DC at the...