Cloud Architecture
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AWS Public Safety and Disaster Response Competency
Hanging just above the reception desk at our office in Alexandria are three framed posters–one for each of our company values. Now you may think that’s a bit cheesy–in a sort of team-rowing-motivational poster kind of way–but they truly drive our work, decision making and business outlook at Element 84. For me, our most important […]
IAM What IAM And That’s All That IAM
Testing Your IAM Policies As the complexity of your AWS environment grows, the need for more specific Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles, and policies increases. These IAM policies govern not only the users that are logging in to the AWS environment, but also the permissions that are granted to services, Lambda functions, EC2 instances, and […]
Serverless Devise with Jets
Over the past few years, serverless design has taken the cloud community by storm. It is hard to ignore–with promises like “pay only for what you use”, “no security patching”, and “infinite scalability”. Being on the cutting edge can have drawbacks too, which in this case is what I would describe as an absence of […]
Rising From The Ashes, Untangling the Mysteries of DevOps
There are many books that have influenced me as a software engineer. From the computer science textbooks I used in college, to the animal covered books from O’Reilly I used to pick up new languages and tools, to the Clean Code books from Uncle Bob Martin that helped shape the way I approach software development. However, […]
E84 @ 2019 ESIP Summer Meeting
We’re passionate about Earth Science Data and helping to solve the challenges in that field. At this year’s ESIP Summer Meeting, we have five E84 team members speaking and moderating across six different sessions, with an additional four of us out there to chat and support the event. Here’s where you can find us if […]
Cloud-native Apps Force Developers to Put Security First
Data stored in the cloud is an attractive target for hackers. High profile breaches like the recent exposure of images of license plates at a U.S. port of entry have become commonplace. These events justifiably alarm consumers. Every incident cements distrust toward the tech industry, causing technology users to demand better security from software creators. […]
E84 @ AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington DC
We’ve been heads down, hard at work tackling challenges in Earth Science and Disaster Response and are ready to share what we’re doing with all of you. June 11-12, we’ll be joining AWS at their Public Sector Summit in Washington, DC to talk about some of these challenges and how we’re working to solve them. […]
Exploring Serverless Portability
With Functions as a Service (FaaS), cloud providers promise us the ability to deploy, run, and scale small pieces of application code without worrying about the underlying hardware or virtual machines. This comes with certain advantages, such as a pricing model that only charges for the amount of time the code is running, quick deployments, […]
Fast, Secure, Reliable Uploads to Amazon Web Services from a Web Browser
The Problem Recently, I needed to implement large file uploads to Amazon Web Services (AWS) from a web browser. We had some requirements with possible solutions: S3 is the ideal place to upload files but there are issues with uploading from a web browser to S3. You don’t want to give users free reign to […]
Decision Making @ The Edge
In July 2017 Amazon Web Services (AWS) made Lambda@Edge available for all customers, giving organizations the ability to run code on the over 100 CloudFront edge locations around the world at the point that is closest to the user. While Lambda@Edge functions are more limited than regular lambda functions, they give developers the ability to […]