Week 10/15/2017 - 10/22/2017 AWS: S3, IAM, Lambda

For the past week I've been working on backing up S3 bucket data. A lot of the things I've heard of multiple times but I haven't personally done before. So last week was quite a lot of learning on fundamentals of AWS.

 Started off by setting up data synchronization with AWS CLI, everything seems straightforward except for one undocumented thing, which surfaces with an seemingly somewhat unrelated error message.

 I've spent a lot of time on that and eventually figured out exactly why it happened. And given I wasn't able to find any related answer for that, I've written it down to help people who run into the same issue, which can be found here: http://xingdu.blogspot.com/2017/10/aws-s3-transferring-data-across-accounts.html

 The rest of the week was spent on playing assessing options to drive the synchronize call. Played a bit with AWS Lambda and really liked the idea of being "serverless": no need to worry about deployment, no need to worry about scaling & managing the infrastructure. But nothing is for free, and lambda has it's own limitations: it's currently limited to a few languages only(python, nodejs, C# and Java8) and for the particular goal I want to achieve, there is no good way of doing that easily. Also assessed several other libraries like Cronos, AirFlow and Jobber. Eventually gave up and used the old-school cron. Not the best option in my opinion but definitely the fastest to get things done.

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