9/Feb 2020
1 min. read
Benefits of a serverless cron job What’s great about going serverless with a cron job is that there is no need to setup the environment, configure crontab, logging, error detection, etc. And you don’t have to worry about if the VM is down. It is also easier on your wallet.
Here I am using AWS Lambda for my serverless cron job.
Configuration and tips AWS Lambda function can be triggered periodically using CloudWatch events.28/Dec 2019
2 min. read
1. OpenVPN & MFA There are few tutorials about setting up OpenVPN and multi-factor authentication. For MFA, Google Authenticator is used here.
To setup OpenVPN server, I use OpenVPN road warrior installer. For MFA config, the script from egonbraun is forked and modified to work with road warrior setup: https://gist.github.com/carsonip/b02eecf9f7d036555a53fea6f516ced8
Also, the default OVPN server will renegotiate every 1 hour, but this will fail the MFA authentication, effectively disconnecting the OVPN connection periodically.9/Mar 2019
3 min. read
Background I come across some Python code using boto, the Python interface to AWS. There’s boto3, which is a newer version of boto. If you are starting a new project, you should be looking at boto3 instead of boto.
I am told that boto pools connections. This is a good thing in terms of performance. Never waste HTTPS connections because it is expensive to setup. But does it limit the number of outgoing connections like SQLAlchemy’s QueuePool, or is it configurable in terms of number of pooled connections?10/Dec 2018
3 min. read
I have recently migrated to Amazon RDS from MySQL on Azure VM.
This percona article about migrating to RDS is actually very helpful. I have a few things to add though.
Setup My setup is a self-hosted MySQL 5.6 server in VM on Azure and a new Amazon RDS for MySQL 5.6.
AWS DMS I have tried AWS Database Migration Service (DMS). It is reasonably fast. The main problem is it does not look like mature technology at all.30/May 2017
3 min. read
Update 21 Aug 2017 The skill is now open-source! Visit it on GitHub: github.com/carsonip/alexa-pocket
Intro I don’t have much time for this blog post because I’ll be taking an early flight tomorrow. Maybe I’ll add something later.
Hackathon To state the obvious, the hackathon is about building Alexa skills. I have submitted 2 entries: My Pocket and Tomato Helper. I’ll focus on My Pocket in this blog post.
My Pocket The Alexa skill is about reading your saved pocket articles to you using Alexa.28/Aug 2016
2 min. read
Hackathon It is the second and the last hackathon in my SF trip. The /hack hackathon organized by HackerEarth gives me an enjoyable weekend.
Participants are supposed to team up before the day. I didn’t manage to find a team beforehand and end up meeting 2 wonderful teammates at the venue. One Singaporean, one Japanese. They want to work on Amazon Echo and luckily I bring one. Match made in heaven.