AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

After a solid break from both the blogging and certifications, I decided to get back into the game and attempted the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate certification. It was sort of inevitable for a person in my situation. The products I am helping to create and manage run in AWS, and given the company’s commitment to embrace the cloud it only made sense to become familiar with the fundamentals of this platform. Amazon describes Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow. Corporate PR aside, AWS is really cool piece of technology allowing you to do pretty much anything. Having day-to-day practical experience with this platform and desire to learn more led me to explore more and more till I took and passed the exam. Here are some notes I would like to share regarding this experience. Continue reading “AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate”

Spring Cloud AWS with proxy settings

In my previous article, Spring and Amazon Web Services, I provided a brief introduction to Spring Cloud AWS module and what you as a developer can expect from it at this point in time. One thing that is not obvious from the official documentation is how to use this module when your Internet connection is restricted by a proxy server. In this post I will outline how to approach passing of proxy configuration for both Java-based and XML-based configuration. This aspect of configuration will probably be addressed in the future releases however it might help you now in case you work with this module and need your application to work with a company proxy.
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Spring and Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (or AWS) is nowadays one of the most common choices of the infrastructure and hardware providers to use and deploy to. Many Spring applications have tackled challenges of integrating the application infrastructure and the underlying layer. These in-house solutions differ in complexity and the degree of sophistication when it comes to the design and the actual functionality. One of the key attributes of success of such a solution besides the proficiency of the team is the overall knowledge and experience with AWS Java SDK. Based on the way Spring Framework has been designed and maintained, it was only a matter of time before Spring introduced a module dedicated to bridging the gap between AWS and the way we configure our Spring applications. I want to discuss some aspects of adoption of this relatively new module in this post and also point out what to look forward to and what to watch out for.

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