CategoriesObservability

Tracing HTTP Requests with Go and Datadog

Small follow up on the last post regarding tracing. I’m a huge fan of Event Driven systems or EDA (Event Driven Architecture) but sometimes you do need to make that synchronous HTTP request in order to fetch more data. Perhaps you are building a “saga” or sometimes events just published what happened and to whom it happened but not specifics about the actual event. For that you need to return back out and fetch more info.

When that happens, you’ll need to use a HTTP Client for making that request. And when doing so, it often sort of turns into a black hole, especially if you have multiple calls to make and you need to distinguish them. Enter again the Datadog libraries. With a simple wrapping of the client, when you make requests WithContext you will get a nicer and prettier display of what the span is. In the case below, I usually like to set the VERB that was requested in addition to the URL. Feel free to use/show whatever makes sense to you

CategoriesConference

re:Invent 2022 re:View

AWS’ re:Invent ’22 wrapped up last week and I had the awesome opportunity to attend with a colleague. First off we had a fantastic time at all of the sessions, enjoyed the catered breakfast and lunch and then enjoyed nightly meals at all of the Vegas restaurants. I wanted to spend a bit of time in this week’s post to not only recap what we experienced but also share some thoughts that hopefully encourage more people to attend in ’23.

CategoriesInfrastructure

AWS CDK Pipeline

Deploying code (assets) into AWS has never been easier than it is right now. A few months back our engineering team made the decision to go all in on AWS CDK and with that included the need/desire for full pipeline automation. We’d been using a smattering of Python/Node, CloudFormation and CodeCommit plus CodePipeline code for all of our services and honestly it works fine once it’s set but getting it set per service became a pain. And honestly making modifications for idiosyncrasies for some of the services just was plain awful. So off we went and during that exploration phase we found the opinionated little construct called AWS CDK Pipelines. Below our walk through what it all meant for us.

CategoriesInfrastructure

Intro to CDK

AWS CDK (Cloud Developer Kit) is a new way to develop cloud infrastructure as it relates to AWS by brining your favorite programming language to apply abstractions on top of CloudFormation. This won’t be a super in-depth post on the tech and how to apply it (I’ll follow up with more articles later) but I’d like outline some of the benefits and reasons that you might consider your next feature’s infrastructure be coded up with it.