Ricardo Cino

a software engineer with a passion for infrastructure and high availability applications. With years of experience in building business critical applications, a passion for infrastructure as code and building on Amazon Web Services.

Private API Gateway with DNS

At PostNL we are building most of our applications with Serverless in mind, let me rephrase that, we build all our applications within our own landing zone with Serverless only. There is no option to deploy any kind of EC2 and if you need containers you’d be running them on Fargate only.

Given …

AWS CloudShell in your own vpc

Until recently, I was completely unaware of AWS CloudShell, and I’m glad I finally decided to give it a try. CloudShell provides a shell environment right in your browser, and to my surprise, you can start an instance within your own VPC!

Avoiding CloudFormation Stack Outputs

Recently I’ve been working on a new project where we created many resources in a lot of different stacks. A feature of CloudFormation is that you can output values from your stack, which is great for referencing resources in other stacks. However, while there is a use-case for this, I’ve …

Multiple ways to retrieve SSM parameters in AWS CDK

When working with AWS CDK and using SSM Parameters to store information in between stacks there are multiple ways to retrieve the value, with both advantages and disadvantages. In this post, I’ll go over the different ways to retrieve SSM parameters in AWS CDK and when to use them.

AWS Parameter Store vs AWS Secrets

Recently I’ve been using AWS Secrets to retrieve API keys which are needed to access external API’s, however, this turned out to be a more expensive service than we initially thought when starting.

Using password(les)s in 2023

It’s been almost a year since I’ve started using my YubiKey, even though I only recently bought a backup key (yes, you can shame me) I decided it is time to have big write up on why you should be using a hardware key with Fido2(WebAuthn) support too.

AWS Learning badge assignments

Besides the AWS Certification program, there are also the newer AWS Learning skill badges. A new-ish way of learning the skills necessary to work on the aws platform and illustrate your knowledge. These are like the certifications except they are not certifications of some kind and you can take …

Every repository should contain a DevContainer

Almost a year ago I visited an AWS User Group (Amsterdam) meetup where someone gave a presentation on using Microsoft Dev Containers in your projects. Even though I tried it before, this gave me the momentum to actually commit to it and have never looked back. And I want you to do the same.

Limiting AWS Lambda's access to Log Groups

About a year ago I asked the question on Reddit what people thought of the default Lambda role called “AWSLambdaBasicExecutionRole” and why I thought it was way too open to be a default.

To this day I still think this role shouldn’t be used at all, but rather be deleted by Amazon …

Building a Serverless Kanban Board

Update 18/01/2023: Let’s assume this is not gonna happen anymore

As the title suggests I’m planning on building a Serverless Kanban Board to improve my personal Typescript skills in both the front and back end. Furthermore, the whole project will be set up while using Amazon Web Services …