Author: admin

Give Some REST to Cryptocurrencies

2017 is the year of the API economy, according to Forbes. I truly believe in this. Not only because all my recent projects included integration with other third-party providers, but also because of the need for rapid implementation of an idea into a product. Today it is more suitable and cost-effective for the business to use services or products of other vendors instead of developing them in-house in order to achieve a specific goal. 

Another thing which will mark the current year is the blockchain and more specifically its tremendous adoption. According to some blockchain evangelists, cryptocurrencies and smart contracts are in their way of transforming how we are going to trade goods and services in the future. Still, for the vast majority of people, the whole thing is another bubble which sooner or later will burst. With the current price of the bitcoin, which exceeds $7,000, I don’t blame them at all. https://goo.gl/5ALF4p #DataIntegration #ML

ICYMI: I’ve been on the AWS train since day one. I’ve been integrating Amazon S3 and EC2 into my business(es) since they first launched a decade ago. While the platform has faithfully provided my storage and compute for over a decade, I’ve always been wary of vendor lock-in. After a decade-long ride on Microsoft (1998-2008), I felt pretty burned. Then, recently, after a similar decade-long ride on Google (2005-2015), I felt burned, but in a different way. After a decade on AWS, I’m nervous, but I don’t feel as burned; however, I’d say there is one aspect of doing business online that is making me put aside some of my concerns regarding vendor lock-in on AWS, and even on Google, and Azure–SECURITY. I’m just not convinced I can do this alone, and I need the help of the platforms I operate on to help make sure my operations are secure.

I spent the weekend setting up a set of APIs using AWS RDS as the backend database, AWS Lambda as the code layer, and AWS API Gateway as the API front-end. As part of this work, I established an identity and access management (IAM) role with policies tailored for brokering the exchanges between RDS, Lambda, and the API Gateway. I’m leaning on AWS for two key API security pieces here: 1) API key management with AWS API Gateway, and 2) backend security using AWS IAM. The key management stuff is pretty straightforward and something I can easily replicate, but the AWS IAM stuff is a little more involved, and I’m grateful for how easy AWS IAM makes it for me to setup roles, cherry pick from common policies, and lock down the infrastructure I a using to drive the backend of my APIs and other applications. https://goo.gl/TSN7M5 #DataIntegration #ML