Recent content on Nathan Peck
Context I am running a small homelab powered by Raspberry Pi devices. By default, a Raspberry Pi advertises itself on your local network using mDNS. This allows you to reach it by using it’s hostname.
“Ten decisions shape your life, you’ll be aware of five, about.”
It’s a lyric from The Strokes. It’s also a surprisingly deep description of the relationship between choice, circumstance, and luck.
Over the past two years I’ve begun writing more and more code with the assistance of AI. I started out, like many people, by using the early versions of ChatGPT to generate little snippets of code.
In the beginning, we searched for God in the stars.
Our ancestors huddled around fires beneath vast night skies, tracing constellations between the shimmering stars, finding divine patterns in the heavens.
This evening, I was thinking about AI when one of my favorite songs came up on the playlist: Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”.
The next revolutionary programming framework might be dead before you even discover it. AI coding assistants are reshaping software development practices in some unexpected ways.
Recently I was watching my toddler son play with a copy of “Computer Engineering for Babies”. This interactive book has two buttons and a light bulb.
The day after the election, my toddler son wakes up at 6:00am. He’s bright and awake. He is happy. Mom and Dad stayed up late, doomscrolling the election news, but he doesn’t know any of this.
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about artificial intelligence, the nature of human consciousness, and the challenging problem of alignment, both for artificial and human intelligences.
For the past seven years I’ve been working with builders who want to deploy containers on AWS. You may know me from personal assistance I’ve given you in direct messages, from reading my social media posts and blog posts about Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate, or from using my reference architecture patterns on Containers on AWS.
It has been well over a decade since I embarked on my journey with the cloud. I spent the first five years of my career as a customer of Amazon Web Services (AWS).
I delivered this talk about chaos engineering at CIVO Navigate North America. It felt great to deliver this talk back in my hometown, at the alumni center of The University of Texas at Austin.
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about infrastructure complexity, and the current state of infrastructure as code.
This is problem space that many talented people are tackling.
I’m about to reach six years as a developer advocate at Amazon Web Services. Two years ago I shared a retrospective look at my first four years as a developer advocate and many people have told me that article was helpful for them.
I delivered this talk at AWS re:Invent 2022, as part of the serverless containers track. It compares the ease and efficiency of AWS Lambda, AWS App Runner, and AWS Fargate, with a particular focus on the built-in features of each compute model, and how it scales as you receive large amounts of concurrent web traffic.
I delivered this talk at AWS re:Invent 2022, alongside Cam Mac, Head of Product at Ocado Technology. This talk does a deep dive into the concept of hybrid cloud, and explains how Amazon ECS Anywhere works to help you orchestrate your own hardware using a cloud control plane.
I gave this talk and demo for AWS Innovate. I introduce the basics of infrastructure automation with infrastructure as code, and then introduce and demo to different abstraction tools for working with infrastructure: AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), and AWS Copilot
Workshop link: https://catalog.workshops.aws/exploring-foundations-of-aws-containers
See also:
Downloads Explore the foundations of AWS containers.pptx (0 kb)
You are a Node.js developer. You have written Node code and can run your application on your local developer machine, but you aren’t really that familiar with containers and container orchestration.
At the AWS Summit 2022 Farrah Campbell and I did an interview for AWS on Air, about AWS Cloud WAN, and new capabilities for AWS to define wide area networks with the help of the AWS backbone!
At the AWS Summit 2022 Dani Traphagen and I did an interview about new capabilities in AWS DeepRacer to better enable educators and other organizations to share an AWS account with students and other event participants.
At the AWS Summit 2022 Dani Traphagen and I did an interview for AWS on Air, about new learning badges available in AWS Skill Builder to prove that you know your AWS stuff!
Official article link: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/migrating-fargate-service-quotas-to-vcpu-based-quotas/
Note: The dates in the migration timeline have been updated as of August 30, 2022
Since the launch of AWS Fargate in 2017, we have steadily increased the quota on various concurrent Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) tasks and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service…
Container orchestrators like Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) are constantly watching over your application, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, more attentively than any human operator ever could.
For this Containers from the Couch episode I joined Adam Keller, Justin Garrison, and Vlad Ionescu to talk about scaling container workloads on AWS.
We discussed recent improvements to task launch rate with Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate and Vlad’s detailed benchmarks which compare the task launch rates across Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS, with both EC2 and Fargate capacity.
Read the full article here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/under-the-hood-amazon-elastic-container-service-and-aws-fargate-increase-task-launch-rates/
Or download the assets:
Downloads ecs-under-the-hood.pptx (0 kb)
If you are a developer who is building a client/server application, then you are probably interested in building a server architecture that can handle high traffic from a large number of concurrent users.
For this segment of AWS on Air I joined Tasha Luksa, to interview Jordan Sullivan, Tech Evangelist for Amazon Braket, about the recent launch of 80 qubit superconducting quantum computers on Braket.
For this segment of AWS on Air I joined Tasha Luksa, to interview Alan Erdley, about the recent launch of a free tier for Amazon Cloudfront.
For this segment of AWS on Air I joined Tasha Luksa, to interview Avinash Upadhyaya, Sr. PMT for AWS Backup, about the recent launch of snapshots and point in time recovery for S3.
If you work in software development for the cloud you have probably heard of infrastructure orchestrators such as Kubernetes, Amazon Elastic Container Service, or Hashicorp Nomad.
Concurrency is one of the core principles of modern computing. When concurrency is combined with the cloud, it becomes even more powerful. In this article you’ll learn about how concurrency works across three of the compute options available on Amazon Web Services.
At AWS re:Invent 2021, I joined Shashank Prasana to interview Bhavin Patel and Shubhodeep Sengupta about AWS Backup launching support for VMware workloads. This enables customers to centrally manage data protection of on-premises VMware and VMware Cloud on AWS resources, to meet their business and regulatory compliance needs.
At AWS re:Invent 2021, I joined Shashank Prasana to interview Manish Goel about the launch of Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth Plus. Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth Plus allows you to easily create high-quality training datasets without having to build labeling applications and manage the labeling workforce on your own.
At AWS re:Invent 2021, I joined Kunal Batra to interview René Brandel about the launch of AWS Amplify Studio. AWS Amplify Studio is a visual development environment that lets developers easily build and ship complete web and mobile apps in hours instead of weeks.
At AWS re:Invent 2021, I joined Boaz Zinniman to interview Jared Heywood about the launch of Amazon SageMaker Canvas. This new service helps analysts and others to import their data, automatically create machine learning models, and introspect the results and qualities of those models in order to make better predictions without requiring deep knowledge about machine leanring.
At AWS re:Invent 2021, I joined Robert Zhu to interview Don Gillet about the launch of AWS IoT TwinMaker. This new service helps you to create a digital twin of a facility, for improved observability of real world things like factory floors, fulfillment centers, or assembly lines.
At AWS re:Invent 2021, I joined Darko Meszaros to interview Nitin Tomar about the launch of AWS re:Post. This new service helps AWS customers to ask questions and get answers from AWS experts.
This session aired during AWS Application Modernization Day. I discuss the benefits of using containers, and container orchestration with Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate. Then I take a small sample application, and show how to write a Dockerfile to containerize the application.
Amazon ECS Anywhere lets you register your own compute devices as AWS managed instances that can be controlled from the AWS API and console. Managed instances can be added to an Elastic Container Service cluster.
I gave a joint talk with Heeki Park for an AWS webinar on application modernization. We discussed how to break down monolithic applications into microservices, with a focus on containers and serverless.
Darko Mesaros and I did an interview for AWS on Air, with Andrey Belik, about the launch of Auto Scaling for Amazon Elasticache.
Darko Mesaros and I did an interview for AWS on Air, with Jon Fritz, about Amazon MemoryDB for Redis.
Darko Mesaros and I did an interview for AWS on Air, with James Jory, about AWS Personalize, and how it unlocks the information trapped in product descriptions, reviews, movie synopses or other unstructured text to generate highly relevant recommendations for users.
If you have played an MMORPG then you know the feeling of starting out in a new game. Your character is level one. You have a vast open world to explore, and there are tons of game systems and gear and skills to learn about.
I joined Nicki Stone on air for Episode #453 of the AWS Podcast, to talk about the launch of Amazon ECS Anywhere. You can also see a video demo of ECS Anywhere that I recorded.
For this episode of AWS What’s Next I talked about the launch of Amazon ECS Anywhere, and I gave a demo of my Raspberry Pi homelab running Amazon ECS tasks.
Note: There is now an updated version of this presentation available on Containers on AWS: “Amazon ECS Scalability Best Practices”
On May 26th I gave a talk on best practices for scaling with Amazon ECS.