Imagine you have a security group that needs to allow all IP addresses of AWS EC2 instances. Or imagine you have to allow IP addresses of Github Actions runners so that only your CI workers connect to your VPC. Both of those IP address ranges change regularly, and need to be updated (usually by hand.)

If we want to automate these security group updates, how could you figure out when these IP address ranges have changed? AWS has an SNS notification sent every time their ip-ranges.json list changes. The SNS notification can be used to initiate an automated procedure to update our security group.

What we’re describing is an event driven architecture. In event driven architectures, an event producer causes an event to be created. A downstream event consumer handles the event and may trigger further events.

A couple years ago I shared a post that detailed various tech industry job search resources. There are a number of more modern sites available today that have remote tech roles and the ability to filter the results more effectively than places like LinkedIn.

Recently the Lambda Go runtime has changed from using the Go 1.x managed runtime to using the provided runtimes which have been historically used for custom runtimes (i.e. Rust.) The former go1.x runtime is being deprecated on January 8, 2024 (quite soon) and the new runtimes provided.al2023 or provided.al2 are expected to be used.

With the introduction of these new runtimes, all of our Go binaries must now be called bootstrap and be located at the root of the zip file used to deploy the function.

You’ve probably heard of AWS Lambda and serverless by now. But what is Lambda all about? The short definition of AWS Lambda is a “Functions as a Service” (FaaS) technology. The longer and more complicated answer is that Lambda is a lightweight runtime that requires no infrastructure to be defined by the developer.

Networking can sometimes be quite complicated. Despite the oft repeated joke that “It’s always DNS”, sometimes your problem is even more difficult to diagnose than DNS.

According to Wikipedia, Classless Inter-Domain Routing (or CIDR) “is the method for allocating IP addresses and for IP routing” on the internet and on private networks. If there are conflicts in two networks’ CIDR ranges, it can cause headaches that make DNS problems look like childs play.

Over the last few years I’ve provided information on how to approach a job search to friends and coworkers. I typically send an email with this information, but I think it’s useful to a broader audience, so I’ll provide it here in a blog post.

This is certainly not meant to be an exhaustive discussion of every aspect of job searching. There are many other resources out there on the internet that have great recommendations. What I’ve written here just happens to be information I thought was useful and not well covered as far as I’ve seen.