This meetup has already happened, but you can still watch the videos! Check out four presentations on DevOps-focused topics. 

The ngrx-forms library is a valuable tool for bringing Redux-style state management to your application’s forms. However, its concept of Value Boxing hides a few pitfalls that can be tricky to troubleshoot.

Learn what Value Boxing is and find out how to parse common error messages and add Value Boxing to your ngrx-forms.

In Angular and other modern web frameworks, the UI is so intertwined that one unexpected response from the server can turn a beautiful website into a blank screen. Fortunately, you can build in error handling to help avoid this terrible scenario.

End-to-end tests are meant to simulate a user interacting with your website. Selenium took the approach of building browser plugins that allow tests to interact with the browser, similar to how a user would. Cypress tests run inside the browser with an accompanying Node.js process for observing and controlling the network. This gives Cypress insights into the application's execution that Selenium doesn't have.

Amazon RDS Proxy is a service from Amazon Web Services (AWS). It's a fully managed, highly available database proxy for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) that makes applications more scalable, more resilient to database failures, and more secure.  What I like most about RDS Proxy is its ability to speed up recovery from RDS failovers, from as much as 10 minutes down to 15 seconds or less. I'm sure all you SREs and TPOs will appreciate this too.

That sounds great, right?  Well, the truth is RDS Proxy is not easy to set up, and getting the configuration right takes extensive searches of the internet including both AWS documentation and third-party sources, and you STILL may need to contact AWS Technical Support.

I'm going to show you how to set up RDS Proxies via ClickOps, both for a new environment and for adding a new service. Future articles will cover CLI and TerraForm approaches.

Overview

As a member of the DevOps/SRE team at Bitovi, I was asked by one of our Bitovi clients to investigate POC RDS Proxy for use in a large-scale microservices system.  After trial and error and time spent on a call with AWS support to better understand a cryptic error message or two, I was able to get things working well.  From that experience, I built a procedure to set up an RDS Proxy between your services and RDS/Aurora clusters with a minimum of time and headaches.  I am sharing that procedure with my fellow infrastructure engineers here.

Below are the steps needed to successfully set up RDS Proxy, as well as some helpful debugging information. First set up your AWS account and your RDS instances if you have not already done so.  To get started on the RDS Proxy-specific steps, you will create Secrets in AWS Secrets Manager in the format required by RDS Proxy.  Next, you will create an AWS IAM Policy and IAM Role.  Then you will be ready to create the RDS Proxy.  Finally, I'll show you some testing ideas so you can be sure everything is working correctly.

As an Angular developer, one of your most important skills is testing. You need to test your application before releasing it to make sure it is working correctly. But even with testing, the truth is that you always miss some bugs. That's why an experienced developer will always advise you to test your code to reduce the number of bugs that go to production either with end-to-end or unit testing. Read on to learn what end-to-end testing is and how to use Cypress to make it easy.

While Angular is one of the most widely used frameworks in the world, it has a problem with generating static sites that are performant and search engine optimized.