Introduction

Even though most of my data (mostly code and a few personal documents) is already in online repositories, cloud services or external hard drives, I still think that having a backup that can be quickly restored is important.

However I’ve always had a difficult relationship with backups tools. They were either hard to use, too slow or cluttered with unnecessary functions therefore I’ve never found a backup program that fully clicked for me.

That changed when …

Introduction

The synonyms feature in ElasticSearch is very powerful, but just like most of the ElasticSearch features, it hides complexities and subtleties that might be hard to understand at a first glance.

Synonyms bridge the gap between relating concepts and ideas (i.e. “England”, “UK”) or between slightly different vocabulary usage (like British English “colour” vs. American English “color”) in the documents and queries, which …

Introduction

At work we started to use Next.js for a new project. So far the experience has been nothing but positive, however recently we hit one of the limitations of the framework. We wanted to inject data, fetched from an API, in all the pages during build time. Specifically we wanted to fetch Feature Flags from our dedicated service into Next.js, in order to conditionally render new features.

You would think that this requirement would be easily covered by Next.js, but …

Introduction

By default, all objects in an S3 bucket are private, meaning only the bucket account owner initially has access to the objects. However, the object owner can optionally share objects with others by creating a presigned URL, using their own security credentials, to grant time-limited permission to download the objects. This is particularly useful because it means that you don’t have to provide bucket access to other users and restrict their access with IAM …

Introduction

What is CDK

The AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK in short) is a relatively new framework for defining cloud Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

CDK offers a high-level object-oriented abstraction to define AWS resources imperatively using the power of modern programming languages. CDK addresses the same type of problems that tools like Terraform or CloudFormation aim to solve. What’s …

Introduction

Recently I stumbled upon this excellent article by Damon Janis about how to deploy a Phoenix web app to a single Linux server, optimizing for cost effectiveness, control, and simplicity.

If you haven’t already, then you should read it immediately. It contains a ton of useful information, not only Elixir-related.

In this post I want to integrate the previous article with the approach that I used during the deployment of one of my latest Elixir side-projects. Keep …