Category: Developer Tools

Anticipating events that can cause a disruption to your system’s service is critical to building highly available, reliable systems.  Hazard analysis gives you a method to identify such events.  Chaos engineering gives you a method to confirm that a system behaves as expected in adverse conditions.  By combining these methods, Vanguard is building reliability into […]

The objective of this post is to walk you through how to set up a completely serverless Jenkins environment on AWS Fargate using AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK). Jenkins is a popular open-source automation server that provides hundreds of plugins to support building, testing, deploying, and automation. Jenkins uses a controller-agent architecture in which […]

Security is a shared responsibility between AWS and the customer. When we use infrastructure as code (IaC) we want to describe workloads wholistically, and that includes the configuration of firewalls alongside the entrypoints to web applications. As we evolve the infrastructure that our application is built upon, we can adjust firewall rules in the same […]

Introduction AWS CodeArtifact is a fully managed artifact repository service that makes it easy for organizations to securely store and share software packages used for application development. On Jul14 2022 we introduced a new feature called Package Origin Controls which allows customers to protect themselves against “dependency substitution“ or “dependency confusion” attacks. This class of […]

We often hear from customers about their challenges architecting Jenkins for scale and high availability (HA). Jenkins was originally built as a continuous integration (CI) system to test software before it was committed to a repository. Since its beginning, Jenkins has grown out of necessity versus grand master plan. Developers who extended Jenkins favored speed […]

As of February 2022, the AWS Cloud spans 84 Availability Zones within 26 geographic Regions, with announced plans for more Availability Zones and Regions. Customers can leverage this global infrastructure to expand their presence to their primary target of users, satisfying data residency requirements, and implementing disaster recovery strategy to make sure of business continuity. […]

Everything fails all the time — Werner Vogels, AWS CTO At the moment of imminent failure, you want to avoid an unlucky deployment. I’ll start here with a short story that demonstrates the purpose of this post. The DevOps team has just started a database upgrade with a planned outage of 30 minutes. The team […]

Watts S. Humphrey, the father of Software Quality, had famously quipped, “Every business is a software business”. Software is indeed integral to any industry. The engineers who create software are also responsible for making sure that the underlying code adheres to industry and organizational standards, are performant, and are absolved of any security vulnerabilities that […]

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an important part of Cloud Applications. Developers rely on various Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools to identify security/compliance issues and mitigate these issues early on, before releasing their applications to production. Additionally, SAST tools often provide reporting mechanisms that can help developers verify compliance during security reviews. cdk-nag integrates […]

Many developers today seek to improve productivity by finding better ways to collaborate, enhance code quality and automate repetitive tasks. We hear from some of our customers that they would like to leverage services such as AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodeBuild and other AWS Developer Tools to manage their AWS resources while continuing to use their […]