Serverless real-time machine learning inference with AWS

For a machine learning project, usually it is divided into two main categories: research and production. For research ML project, the model would be created and used locally on a researcher’s machine. For a production ML project, a deployment would be involved. Usual pattern is to create a service to load a model, accept input, then return a prediction. Production ML is also divided into two main patterns: batch or real-time....

November 28, 2023 · 3 min · Karn Wong

DevX starts at your local machine

Platform engineering is all the rage these days. Often, you’ll often hear this term with the keyword DevX. How are they related? Imagine you are working on a microservice backend. You are just starting out, so you don’t have much features to work on yet. But as a PoC, you only need to [fetch data] and [return aggregated price]. You can do microservices on Kubernetes, but you are not familiar with DevOps so you turn to a cloud provider - AWS....

April 22, 2023 · 4 min · Karn Wong

The mythical ChatOps in action

Imagine having multiple services running, each has its own logs. Most people don’t read them, and they shouldn’t, because services emit a lot of logs! But we need them, because it’s the only way to diagnose and troubleshoot system errors. But you might say “my service is not a system! It’s only doing tiny stuff!” Gotta break it to you, your small part is a piece in a large system networks stitched together!...

April 18, 2023 · 3 min · Karn Wong

Bare metal works, until it doesn't. Hello, cloud.

Background Ever wonder how websites (and everything in between) work? Chances are you can create a project running on your local machine. It works as you expected, but to let other people access it, you have to “deploy” it. For many years, to support a lot of request volumes you need to run your applications in a data center. These days this setup is known as on-premise. Architecture Let’s take a look at a simple e-commerce website architecture....

March 24, 2023 · 4 min · Karn Wong

Terraform RDS module with DNS setup

I love not having to manage databases. Hosting it on your compute is guaranteed to be cheaper, but I don’t want to be constantly worrying about backups and database upgrade / maintenance. AWS offers managed databases, known as RDS. Mostly I use postgres, which works well for most use cases. (It’s also a given that - if you don’t really need NoSQL database, then don’t use it). If I spin up RDS postgres, I can reach it assuming I have set up the correct networking pathways....

March 17, 2023 · 2 min · Karn Wong