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DevOps

How to Set Up AWS RDS Proxy with ClickOps

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.

David Rivkin

David Rivkin

Angular

How to Create Custom ESLint Rules (It's Not as Hard as You Think...)

Most teams develop patterns or preferred ways of writing code, but it can be tedious to enforce adhering to those patterns, especially for new team members onboarding. To help this, we rely on linters for basic formatting, but did you know you can take preference-enforcement to the next level by writing your own lint rules?

Fábio Englert Moutinho

Fábio Englert Moutinho

Testing Angular Applications End-to-End (E2E) with Cypress

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.

Denison Luz

Denison Luz

Angular

Boost Angular Performance by Rendering Pages with Scully

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.

Jessie Valladares

Jessie Valladares

React

Use Objects or Switch Statements in Javascript?

Do you use switch/case statements or do you use object literals in your Javascript? 

The Bitovi Team

The Bitovi Team

Angular

What's a Micro Frontend?

Web applications can grow in size and complexity over time, making the addition of new features difficult. Micro Frontend architecture helps you with scaling and bundle size and gives multiple teams the ability to develop and deploy different parts of the app.

Idris Shedu

Idris Shedu

How to Avoid the Infamous "Cannot read properties of undefined" Error with TypeScript

As a JavaScript developer, I’m sure you’ve encountered the frustrating runtime TypeError Cannot read properties of undefined.  TypeScript gives you two ways of interpreting null and undefined types, also known as Type Check Modes, and one of them can avoid this easily overlooked TypeError.

Fábio Englert Moutinho

Fábio Englert Moutinho

Angular

How to Build a Micro Frontend with Webpack's Module Federation Plugin

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Web applications can grow in size and complexity over time, making the addition of new features difficult. Micro Frontend architecture helps with scaling and bundle size and allows multiple teams to develop and deploy different parts of the app. Webpack 5 offers the Module Federation Plugin that lets you create multiple separate builds without dependencies between each other so they can be developed and deployed individually.

Idris Shedu

Idris Shedu

Angular

How to Support IE11 Users as You Move to Angular 13

Internet Explorer 11 is a legacy browser and support for it in Angular 13 is being dropped officially. Sticking with Angular 12 is not a viable long term option. Here are ways to support your users when upgrading your Angular version.

Mark Thompson

Mark Thompson

Angular

Enforcing Accessibility with Angular A11y ESLint Rules

Did you know that more than 25% of people in the US are living with a disability? If you don’t factor accessibility into your development process, it's entirely possible that 1 in 4 of the users you're trying to target won't be able to use your website or application. 

Wade Harkins

Wade Harkins

DevOps

DevOps Best Practices:  Managing Repository Configuration

You can't just say "we do DevOps" anymore. If DevOps best practices aren't followed, teams inevitably waste the potential gains that DevOps practices enable, and infrastructure problems still aren't resolved.

With the continued success of DevOps and Infrastructure as Code(IaC) conversions, it's no wonder that IT teams across the world are adopting these new practices.

Ready to get started? The first DevOps best practice you need to know is the separation of application and operations repositories. Avoid common pitfalls by using Bitovi's recommended DevOps practices. You'll learn what an OpsRepo is and why and how to separate your application and operation logic into their own repositories.

What Happens Without Best Practices?

When your DevOps team doesn't invest in proper operation management practices, you end up with slow, unaware infrastructure provisioning, redundant resources eating up infrastructure budget, and a critical failure point where all the knowledge of the infrastructure and its configuration is held by just one or two people.

Managing application infrastructure can be frustrating and prone to error. Configuration, builds, tagging and deployments are just a few of the many vectors SREs need to consider to create successful CI/CD pipelines.

And if these resources are handled through logging on to a server or clicking buttons on a cloud console, aka  ClickOps, the complexity of configuration management and the likelihood for error grows.  

Phil Henning

Phil Henning