Jamie's Blog

Tips for Passing Amazon’s New AWS Certified Solutions Architect Exam

jamie — Thu, 23 May 2013 17:14:15 +0000

Today I decided to take Amazon’s new AWS Certified Solutions Architect certification exam. The exam is 55 multiple choice questions with a time limit of 80 minutes and a minimum passing score of 65%. I completed it in about 35 minutes with 85% of questions answered correctly. I went into the exam cold, without any [...]

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Serving compressed (gzipped) static files from Amazon S3 or CloudFront

jamie — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 17:55:57 +0000

It’s generally a good idea to serve gzipped versions of plain-text static assets (primarily CSS and JavaScript files) to web browsers. This can significantly reduce file size, which increases perceived website speed. All modern web browsers can transparently decompress gzipped files, thus the only real downside is a bit of additional CPU overhead. Most default [...]

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Why an EC2 Instance Isn’t a Server

jamie — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 01:12:29 +0000

At Re:Invent, the AWS conference in Vegas last November, Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels, made an interesting observation during his keynote address: “An EC2 instance is not a server—it’s a building block.” This sounded suspiciously like a tagline a car manufacturer might use to convince me that their car “isn’t just another car.” But something about [...]

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List of Current Amazon Linux AMI IDs

jamie — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 16:50:13 +0000

Added a new static page to my blog today: A comprehensive, updated list of Amazon Linux AMI’s (the default images are that are used when launching an instance.) About the author Jamie Begin (@rbn_jamie) is founder and systems architect at RightBrain Networks, a software consultancy and managed services provider that specializes in Amazon Web Services. [...]

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The most successful change I’ve ever made to my company website.

jamie — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 07:06:28 +0000

My blog here is the stock WordPress theme because it suits my purpose. It’s not pretty, but it doesn’t have to be. However, I have put quite a bit more thought into my company website because appearances do matter there. The single most successful change I’ve ever made to the site was investing in professional [...]

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Something Every Freelancer Needs to Learn (as Soon as Possible).

jamie — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 15:46:31 +0000

There’s a great scene in Netflix’s new “House of Cards” series that illustrates an important lesson for freelancers. Kevin Spacey’s character, a US congressman named Frank Underwood, is meeting with a Warren Buffet-like billionaire. Frank is asking this business tycoon for a large favor and, after a bit of back-and-forth, the billionaire insists that he [...]

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Managing Multiple Amazon Web Services Accounts from the Command Line

jamie — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 15:08:53 +0000

I work with a lot of different AWS accounts and am constantly switching between them. I recently hacked together a really simple Bash script to ease a bit of the pain of juggling multiple AWS_ACCESS_KEY and AWS_SECRET_KEY environment variables. This allows me to do something like: [jjbegin@bane ~]$ aws rbn RBN is active. [jjbegin@bane ~]$ [...]

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How To Become a Successful Freelance Web Developer (and Not Kill Your Career)

jamie — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 17:47:38 +0000

Almost all freelance web developers are doing it wrong. And it’s a miserable existence to endure. If you awake one day and say “I’d like to be a freelance web developer. Now how do I get clients?” you’re already setting yourself up for failure. Yet nearly everyone who chooses this career path makes this mistake. [...]

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Entrepreneurship and Pain Tolerance

jamie — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 07:44:51 +0000

A couple of years ago, as part of a health kick, I took up weight training. I quickly realized that this was something I had a genetic gift for doing well. As my desire to lift heavy things increased, it drove me to begin seriously training for competitive powerlifting. It felt more purposeful and interesting [...]

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Migrating an Application to Amazon Web Services: a Developer’s Checklist.

jamie — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 16:23:10 +0000

Don’t store persistent data on EC2 instances functioning as application servers. In nearly every n-tier application architecture (not just those in a cloud deployment), the application tier should be treated as stateless, meaning containing nothing other than the application code. Databases, files, and even logs should be shipped to another location. Each application server (or [...]

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