Tech articles, talks, and videos by Nathan Peck| nathanpeck.com
Context I am running a small homelab powered by Raspberry Pi devices. By default, a Raspberry Pi advertises itself on your local network using mDNS. This allows you to reach it by using it’s hostname.| Nathan Peck
“Ten decisions shape your life, you’ll be aware of five, about.” It’s a lyric from The Strokes. It’s also a surprisingly deep description of the relationship between choice, circumstance, and luck.| Nathan Peck
Over the past two years I’ve begun writing more and more code with the assistance of AI. I started out, like many people, by using the early versions of ChatGPT to generate little snippets of code.| Nathan Peck
In the beginning, we searched for God in the stars. Our ancestors huddled around fires beneath vast night skies, tracing constellations between the shimmering stars, finding divine patterns in the heavens.| Nathan Peck
This evening, I was thinking about AI when one of my favorite songs came up on the playlist: Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”.| Nathan Peck
The next revolutionary programming framework might be dead before you even discover it. AI coding assistants are reshaping software development practices in some unexpected ways.| Nathan Peck
Recently I was watching my toddler son play with a copy of “Computer Engineering for Babies”. This interactive book has two buttons and a light bulb.| Nathan Peck
The day after the election, my toddler son wakes up at 6:00am. He’s bright and awake. He is happy. Mom and Dad stayed up late, doomscrolling the election news, but he doesn’t know any of this.| Nathan Peck
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about artificial intelligence, the nature of human consciousness, and the challenging problem of alignment, both for artificial and human intelligences.| Nathan Peck
I delivered this talk about chaos engineering at CIVO Navigate North America. It felt great to deliver this talk back in my hometown, at the alumni center of The University of Texas at Austin.| Nathan Peck
For the past seven years I’ve been working with builders who want to deploy containers on AWS. You may know me from personal assistance I’ve given you in direct messages, from reading my social media posts and blog posts about Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate, or from using my reference architecture patterns on Containers on AWS.| nathanpeck.com
It has been well over a decade since I embarked on my journey with the cloud. I spent the first five years of my career as a customer of Amazon Web Services (AWS).| nathanpeck.com
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about infrastructure complexity, and the current state of infrastructure as code. This is problem space that many talented people are tackling.| nathanpeck.com
I’m about to reach six years as a developer advocate at Amazon Web Services. Two years ago I shared a retrospective look at my first four years as a developer advocate and many people have told me that article was helpful for them.| nathanpeck.com
I delivered this talk at AWS re:Invent 2022, as part of the serverless containers track. It compares the ease and efficiency of AWS Lambda, AWS App Runner, and AWS Fargate, with a particular focus on the built-in features of each compute model, and how it scales as you receive large amounts of concurrent web traffic.| nathanpeck.com
I delivered this talk at AWS re:Invent 2022, alongside Cam Mac, Head of Product at Ocado Technology. This talk does a deep dive into the concept of hybrid cloud, and explains how Amazon ECS Anywhere works to help you orchestrate your own hardware using a cloud control plane.| nathanpeck.com
I gave this talk and demo for AWS Innovate. I introduce the basics of infrastructure automation with infrastructure as code, and then introduce and demo to different abstraction tools for working with infrastructure: AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), and AWS Copilot| nathanpeck.com
Workshop link: https://catalog.workshops.aws/exploring-foundations-of-aws-containers See also: Downloads Explore the foundations of AWS containers.pptx (10650 kb)| nathanpeck.com
You are a Node.js developer. You have written Node code and can run your application on your local developer machine, but you aren’t really that familiar with containers and container orchestration.| nathanpeck.com
At the AWS Summit 2022 Farrah Campbell and I did an interview for AWS on Air, about AWS Cloud WAN, and new capabilities for AWS to define wide area networks with the help of the AWS backbone!| nathanpeck.com
At the AWS Summit 2022 Dani Traphagen and I did an interview about new capabilities in AWS DeepRacer to better enable educators and other organizations to share an AWS account with students and other event participants.| nathanpeck.com
At the AWS Summit 2022 Dani Traphagen and I did an interview for AWS on Air, about new learning badges available in AWS Skill Builder to prove that you know your AWS stuff!| nathanpeck.com
Official article link: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/migrating-fargate-service-quotas-to-vcpu-based-quotas/ Note: The dates in the migration timeline have been updated as of August 30, 2022 Since the launch of AWS Fargate in 2017, we have steadily increased the quota on various concurrent Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) tasks and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) pods that can be launched:| nathanpeck.com
Container orchestrators like Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) are constantly watching over your application, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, more attentively than any human operator ever could.| nathanpeck.com
For this Containers from the Couch episode I joined Adam Keller, Justin Garrison, and Vlad Ionescu to talk about scaling container workloads on AWS. We discussed recent improvements to task launch rate with Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate and Vlad’s detailed benchmarks which compare the task launch rates across Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS, with both EC2 and Fargate capacity.| nathanpeck.com
Read the full article here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/under-the-hood-amazon-elastic-container-service-and-aws-fargate-increase-task-launch-rates/ Or download the assets: Downloads ecs-under-the-hood.pptx (111 kb)| nathanpeck.com
If you are a developer who is building a client/server application, then you are probably interested in building a server architecture that can handle high traffic from a large number of concurrent users.| nathanpeck.com
For this segment of AWS on Air I joined Tasha Luksa, to interview Jordan Sullivan, Tech Evangelist for Amazon Braket, about the recent launch of 80 qubit superconducting quantum computers on Braket.| nathanpeck.com
For this segment of AWS on Air I joined Tasha Luksa, to interview Alan Erdley, about the recent launch of a free tier for Amazon Cloudfront.| nathanpeck.com
For this segment of AWS on Air I joined Tasha Luksa, to interview Avinash Upadhyaya, Sr. PMT for AWS Backup, about the recent launch of snapshots and point in time recovery for S3.| nathanpeck.com
If you work in software development for the cloud you have probably heard of infrastructure orchestrators such as Kubernetes, Amazon Elastic Container Service, or Hashicorp Nomad.| nathanpeck.com
Concurrency is one of the core principles of modern computing. When concurrency is combined with the cloud, it becomes even more powerful. In this article you’ll learn about how concurrency works across three of the compute options available on Amazon Web Services.| nathanpeck.com
Senior Developer Advocate for Container Services at Amazon Web Services| nathanpeck.com
Senior Developer Advocate for Container Services at Amazon Web Services| nathanpeck.com
At AWS re:Invent 2021, I joined Shashank Prasana to interview Bhavin Patel and Shubhodeep Sengupta about AWS Backup launching support for VMware workloads. This enables customers to centrally manage data protection of on-premises VMware and VMware Cloud on AWS resources, to meet their business and regulatory compliance needs.| nathanpeck.com
At AWS re:Invent 2021, I joined Shashank Prasana to interview Manish Goel about the launch of Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth Plus. Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth Plus allows you to easily create high-quality training datasets without having to build labeling applications and manage the labeling workforce on your own.| nathanpeck.com
At AWS re:Invent 2021, I joined Kunal Batra to interview René Brandel about the launch of AWS Amplify Studio. AWS Amplify Studio is a visual development environment that lets developers easily build and ship complete web and mobile apps in hours instead of weeks.| nathanpeck.com
At AWS re:Invent 2021, I joined Boaz Zinniman to interview Jared Heywood about the launch of Amazon SageMaker Canvas. This new service helps analysts and others to import their data, automatically create machine learning models, and introspect the results and qualities of those models in order to make better predictions without requiring deep knowledge about machine leanring.| nathanpeck.com
At AWS re:Invent 2021, I joined Robert Zhu to interview Don Gillet about the launch of AWS IoT TwinMaker. This new service helps you to create a digital twin of a facility, for improved observability of real world things like factory floors, fulfillment centers, or assembly lines.| nathanpeck.com
At AWS re:Invent 2021, I joined Darko Meszaros to interview Nitin Tomar about the launch of AWS re:Post. This new service helps AWS customers to ask questions and get answers from AWS experts.| nathanpeck.com
This session aired during AWS Application Modernization Day. I discuss the benefits of using containers, and container orchestration with Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate. Then I take a small sample application, and show how to write a Dockerfile to containerize the application.| nathanpeck.com
I gave a joint talk with Heeki Park for an AWS webinar on application modernization. We discussed how to break down monolithic applications into microservices, with a focus on containers and serverless.| nathanpeck.com
Darko Mesaros and I did an interview for AWS on Air, with Andrey Belik, about the launch of Auto Scaling for Amazon Elasticache.| nathanpeck.com
Darko Mesaros and I did an interview for AWS on Air, with Jon Fritz, about Amazon MemoryDB for Redis.| nathanpeck.com
Darko Mesaros and I did an interview for AWS on Air, with James Jory, about AWS Personalize, and how it unlocks the information trapped in product descriptions, reviews, movie synopses or other unstructured text to generate highly relevant recommendations for users.| nathanpeck.com
If you have played an MMORPG then you know the feeling of starting out in a new game. Your character is level one. You have a vast open world to explore, and there are tons of game systems and gear and skills to learn about.| nathanpeck.com
I joined Nicki Stone on air for Episode #453 of the AWS Podcast, to talk about the launch of Amazon ECS Anywhere. You can also see a video demo of ECS Anywhere that I recorded.| nathanpeck.com
For this episode of AWS What’s Next I talked about the launch of Amazon ECS Anywhere, and I gave a demo of my Raspberry Pi homelab running Amazon ECS tasks.| nathanpeck.com
Note: There is now an updated version of this presentation available on Containers on AWS: “Amazon ECS Scalability Best Practices” On May 26th I gave a talk on best practices for scaling with Amazon ECS.| nathanpeck.com
See the full article here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/building-an-amazon-ecs-anywhere-home-lab-with-amazon-vpc-network-connectivity/| nathanpeck.com
I contributed a best practices guide on networking for containerized services orchestrated by Amazon ECS. You can find an embedded version of the guide as I originally wrote it at release, or look at the latest live version on the AWS documentation site.| nathanpeck.com
Over the years I’ve seen developer enthusiasm for microservices rise and fall. Some developers become staunch advocates of microservice architecture, while others become disillusioned with distributed systems and now favor monolithic architecture.| nathanpeck.com
Senior Developer Advocate for Container Services at Amazon Web Services| nathanpeck.com
I delivered this session as part of AWS re:Invent 2020. You can find the recording, PowerPoint deck, and transcript below. Download the presentation: Improving Observability with AWS App Mesh and Amazon ECS.| nathanpeck.com
Back in 2017 I wrote an article about choosing your container environment on AWS. AWS Fargate and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service had just launched at AWS re:Invent, joining the preexisting Amazon Elastic Container Service.| nathanpeck.com
Today is officially the four year anniversary of my start date at AWS as a developer advocate. I thought I’d take a moment to write up my thoughts on the past four years working in this incredibly interesting role, at one of the most interesting companies in the world, on some incredibly interesting technology.| nathanpeck.com
One of the AWS re:Invent 2020 announcements was the launch of ECS Anywhere, and EKS anywhere. In this Containers From The Couch episode we discussed what on-prem means, and the many options that you have for bridging your on-premise needs with the AWS cloud environment.| nathanpeck.com
At AWS re:Invent 2020 we launched a ton of new things for containers on AWS! I joined Brent Langston, Adam Keller, Justin Garrison, and Jesse Butler to recap the launches and what they mean for AWS customers:| nathanpeck.com
A few days ago I wrote an article about common misconceptions on AWS Cloud Development Kit. In that article I made the following statement: “YAML is definitely a real programming language.| nathanpeck.com
Senior Developer Advocate for Container Services at Amazon Web Services| nathanpeck.com
You might know me as a strong advocate for AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK). I feel that CDK is one of the best ways to create your infrastructure on AWS so I spend a fair amount of time talking about CDK and writing and sharing example code.| nathanpeck.com
I presented at the Cloud Field Day 9 to show the recent progress in developer experience for Amazon ECS. I built a basic hit counter application, written in Node.| nathanpeck.com
I joined Brent Langston and Adam Keller for a live Containers from the Couch episode about @aws-containers/ecs-service-extensions. I spent a little time explaining how AWS Cloud Development Kit can help you build architecture better, and faster.| nathanpeck.com
Container orchestration is a complex problem. There are many different components communicating with each other in support of your application container deployment. First the orchestrator starts your application.| nathanpeck.com
I joined Containers from the Couch for a live show with Adam Keller and Paavan Mistry to talk about using AWS Copilot to setup a deploy pipeline that builds and releases a Docker container to AWS Fargate on git push.| nathanpeck.com
This is a public request for comments (RFC) that I wrote for the open source AWS Cloud Development Kit project. At the time of posting the implementation for this RFC is a pull request I opened on the project.| nathanpeck.com
Taking an application from idea to working implementation that people can interact with is a multistep process. Once the design is locked in and the code is written, the next challenge is how to deploy and deliver the application to users.| nathanpeck.com
This livestream was part of season one, episode 8 of AWS What’s Next, live on Twitch. I did a show takeover to talk about AWS Copilot with Efe Karakus from the ECS developer experience team.| nathanpeck.com
For the AWS Cloud Containers Conference I did a live Q&A session on Twitch with Brent Langston, Adam Keller, and Nathan Taber. We covered the launch of CDK8s and CDK8s+ as well as AWS Copilot.| nathanpeck.com
Senior Developer Advocate for Container Services at Amazon Web Services| nathanpeck.com
I presented for a meetup with the AWS User Group in Colombo, Sri Lanka to talk about building a modern containerized application using the AWS native container stack.| nathanpeck.com
I presented in a panel on building a cloud center of excellence at CloudLive 2020, organized by CloudHealth by VMware. The panel was led by Deb MacCallum, and the other panelists were Riley Jenkins, and Brent Strong.| nathanpeck.com
This deck was part of a builder session at AWS re:Invent 2019. It introduces some of the container scheduling strategies, then covers GPU scheduling, and container dependency ordering.| nathanpeck.com
This deck was part of a builder session at AWS re:Invent 2019. It introduces the basics of AWS CDK, what it is and why you might consider using it.| nathanpeck.com
Amazon ECS released version 1 of the Amazon ECS CLI in 2015. The Amazon ECS CLI simplified the management of your Amazon ECS clusters, tasks, services, and ECR repositories by enabling you to create profiles and cluster configurations with default settings.| nathanpeck.com
See the Github project at: https://github.com/nathanpeck/greeter-app-mesh-cdk| nathanpeck.com
I presented an AWS Tech Talk on the benefits of building with AWS Cloud Development Kit, then showed some of the higher level constructs and tooling that AWS CDK offers for containerized applications, and finished off with a live demo.| nathanpeck.com
This super fun AWS Launchpad session streamed live on Twitch at the New York AWS Summit. I got to talk about the new AWS Cloud Development Kit with Uttara Sridar, Nicki Stone, and Brandon West:| nathanpeck.com
This was a fun AWS launchpad with Uttara Sridar, about new local development features for Amazon ECS. I did a live demo of a local development process for vending IAM roles to the AWS SDK in your local containers, similarly to how the ECS task IAM roles get vended to containers running in production.| nathanpeck.com
In this episode I build a CI/CD pipeline that builds and updates my live containerized application, with just a Git push. I ran into a few issues during this episode, but that just makes it all the more fun!| nathanpeck.com
In this episode Brent Langston and I sit down and walk through building a first Docker container image, including optimizing it! Enjoy!| nathanpeck.com
Containers are a powerful tool for packaging your application and running it in the cloud. In this session I took a look at the Amazon Cloud Development Kit and used it to build and deploy a container application:| nathanpeck.com
Recently I built and open sourced a sample application called changelogs.md. The application watches for open source packages on NPM, RubyGems, and PyPI. When a package is added or updated it crawls any changelog found in the package source code.| nathanpeck.com
Amazon ECS and Amazon ECR now have support for AWS PrivateLink. AWS PrivateLink is a networking technology designed to enable access to AWS services in a highly available and scalable manner.| nathanpeck.com
A webinar about integrations between AWS and HashiCorp Consul. I got to join Anubhav Mishra and do a live demo of deploying a Consul Connect service mesh on an Amazon ECS cluster!| nathanpeck.com
Senior Developer Advocate for Container Services at Amazon Web Services| nathanpeck.com
The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is an open-source software development framework to define cloud infrastructure in code and provision it through AWS CloudFormation. The AWS CDK integrates fully with AWS services and offers a higher-level object-oriented abstraction to define AWS resources imperatively.| nathanpeck.com
I chatted with Abby Fuller about how to get started with containers on AWS, and showed how to deploy a simple Nyan cat sample application using easy prebuilt CloudFormation templates.| nathanpeck.com
I gave this talk at re:Invent 2018, about tips and tricks for running high performance workloads in a Kubernetes cluster: I was joined by Yekesa Yosuru of State Street, who did a live demo of an Amazon EKS Kubernetes cluster running Vitess at an impressive 1.| nathanpeck.com
I gave this presentation on operations for containerized application with Tiffany Jernigan: Downloads operations-for-containerized-applications.pdf (1729 kb)| nathanpeck.com
Starting today you can opt in to a new Amazon Resource Name (ARN) and resource ID format for Amazon ECS tasks, container instances, and services. The new format enables the enhanced ability to tag resources in your cluster, as well as tracking the cost of services and tasks running in your cluster.| nathanpeck.com
An AWS Tech Talk to introduce AWS Fargate. I start with a simple introduction to container orchestration concepts. Then I dive deeper into the resource types and configuration options available to you when using AWS Fargate, including a deep dive into the networking aspects.| nathanpeck.com
Amazon ECS is a container management service. This guide will demonstrate routing and monitoring your services using Linkerd in ECS. All commands and config files referenced in this guide may be found in the linkerd-examples repo.| nathanpeck.com
At the New York AWS Summit, I was live on Twitch at the AWS Launchpad with Abby Fuller, and Arun Gupta, talking about running Kubernetes on AWS:| nathanpeck.com
This is part four in an ongoing series on developing an application that runs in AWS Fargate: Deploying the initial application skeleton to AWS Fargate Making the application horizontally autoscale in AWS Fargate Building a continuous integration / deployment pipeline In this article I’ll explore how to create a local development environment that lets me write code and test it in a container prior to using my CI/CD pipeline to deploy to the container to my production AWS Fargate environment.| nathanpeck.com
At the London AWS Summit, I was live on Twitch at the AWS Launchpad with Abby Fuller, and Adrian Hornsby, talking about running Kubernetes on AWS:| nathanpeck.com
This is part three of a series on developing a Socket.io and AWS Fargate powered realtime chat application on AWS. Building a Socket.io chat app and deploying it using AWS Fargate (In part one I just packaged up an open source chat application from socket.| nathanpeck.com
In this AWS tech talk I discussed the new service discovery feature integration with Amazon ECS, and did a live demo showing how to setup an ECS service with a DNS based service discovery, then make some requests to the service using its DNS address:| nathanpeck.com
One of the core benefits of containers is that they enable dynamic deployments. In the old days an application server might stay hosted on the same EC2 server for weeks, months, or even years.| nathanpeck.com
