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Akhan Zhakiyanov
Lead engineer

A software engineer focusing on backend development, platform engineering and DevOps

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Became AWS Community Builder 2024

· One min read
Akhan Zhakiyanov
Lead engineer

Today my application for AWS Community Builders 2024 program has been approved.

AWS Community Builder 2024 logo

Currently, the program covers the following technology areas: Containers, Data (databases, analytics), Developer Tools, Front-End Web and Mobile, Cloud Ops, Machine Learning, Network Content & Delivery, Security & Identity, and Serverless.

I've been selected in category - Containers. Looking forward to the journey ahead of me, and all the new experiences.

A big thanks to Maksim Skutin who motivated me to work on blog posts and submit this application.

Serverless OAuth2 server with OpenIddict 5 and AWS DynamoDB - Part 0

· 6 min read
Akhan Zhakiyanov
Lead engineer

After succesfully running ASP.NET 8 Minimal API with Lambda Container image it's time to run something real.

And just in December 2023 Kévin Chalet announced new version of OpenIddict, the library to build your own OAuth2 / OpenID Connect server in .NET.

Officially OpenIddict supports two implementations for persistance layer:

This time we will explore how to implement fully serverless OAuth2 server using OpenIddict 5 with Lambda Container image and persistance layer backed by AWS DynamoDB

note

Due to the large scope this will be series of posts covering the following aspects:

  • OpenIddict custom stores implementation with DynamoDB
  • Fully serverless OAuth2 server sample and setup for local testing
  • CDK custom component lib for OpenIddict
  • Cost analysis and comparison with Cognito, Auth0, etc
tip

You can find source code available at https://github.com/ahanoff/OpenIddict.DynamoDb

First let's review OpenIddict concepts and components.

Running ASP.NET 8 Minimal API on AWS Lambda with Container Image

· 14 min read
Akhan Zhakiyanov
Lead engineer
warning

Code samples were updated to run with x86_64 architecture

.NET 8 is finally here, since its release over a month ago.

Probably one of the much anticipated feature was Native AOT and its support for ASP.NET Core. Benefits coming along with it (such as minimized disk footprint, reduced startup time, and reduced memory demand) will lead to exploration how to run ASP.NET Core 8 apps in AWS Lambda.

Last year AWS gave us only two options to run .NET 7 Lambda functions: either container image or custom runtime. Now, in a twist for 2024, AWS is throwing its full support behind .NET 8 runtime, set to drop officially sometime in January. I think it's due to the fact that .NET 8 is an LTS release with a solid 3-year support plan.

And today I will show you the simplest way to run ASP.NET Core 8 in AWS Lambda without tearing everything apart!

info

This article targets experienced ASP.NET Core developers who considering to run their apps in serverless environment without major changes in existing programming model

TL;DR expected changes:

  • use Amazon.Lambda.AspNetCoreServer.Hosting package with .AddAWSLambdaHosting extension method
  • use AWS managed base image for .NET 8. Currently only public.ecr.aws/lambda/dotnet:8-preview is available
  • use CMD with assembly name instead of function handler string in Dockerfile

All codebase is available at: https://github.com/ahanoff/how-to/tree/main/aspnet8-minimal-api-lambda-container-image

First let's see what kind of objectives ASP.NET Core developers might have prior to investing their time and efforts into AWS serverless technology.

Docusaurus v3 deployment with AWS S3 and Cloudfront

· 6 min read
Akhan Zhakiyanov
Lead engineer

Docusaurus v3 is out, but official docs are still lacking deployment to AWS as option.

Let me fix this and guide you how to create most secure and up to date approach with AWS S3 and Cloudfront.

tip

TL;DR final approach:

  • private S3 bucket without website static hosting enabled
  • Cloudfront distribution with Origin Access Control (OAC)
  • Cloudfront Function to handle redirects to index.html

You can skip development instructions and go to full samples source code available at https://github.com/ahanoff/how-to/tree/main/docusaurus-3-deployment-with-s3-and-cloudfront

Docusaurus is static website generator, so let's review options AWS offers us to serve it.

Worry-free AWS ACM certificate DNS validation with Pulumi

· 4 min read
Akhan Zhakiyanov
Lead engineer

Quite often I need to create AWS ACM certificate and do DNS validation using Pulumi.

Pulumi aws.acm.CertificateValidation DNS example only show basic and naive implementation:

  • hardcoded single domain validation ¯_(ツ)_/¯
  • will fail if you try to validated wildcard and apex domain simultaneously
* creating Route 53 Record: InvalidChangeBatch: [Tried to create resource record set [name='_f22110437fea5500aa0f8bf286aed7c7.howto.ahanoff.dev.', type='CNAME'] but it already exists]

Today I'll show how to create validation that works for any domain

note
  • I will use howto.ahanoff.dev domain as example
  • I will use Pulumi with Typescript

I will create AWS ACM certificate with the following conditions:

  • multi domain certificate
  • validates wildcard domain: *.howto.ahanoff.dev
  • validates apex domain: howto.ahanoff.dev

CI/CD Misconfigurations validation with Allero

· 3 min read
Akhan Zhakiyanov
Lead engineer
warning

https://github.com/allero-io/allero has been archived by its owner on July 19 2023

Recently with team members we discovered https://www.allero.io/ that does CI/CD security validation:

  • identify plain text passwords
  • identify potentially malicious code execution
  • etc

Despite me being quite sceptical about it initially it found one issue using default rules

ECS Task healtheck for Alpine-based containers

· 3 min read
Akhan Zhakiyanov
Lead engineer

If you are working with AWS ECS, you might know about ECS task healthcheck. AWS documentation suggests to use curl in command:

[ "CMD-SHELL", "curl -f http://localhost/ || exit 1" ]

I usually try to minimize container image size, thus my first choice for base image is Alpine.

Unfortunately, it doesn't come with curl installed out of the box. It only includes wget.