Jason Rash’s Blog

My first main task for the capstone was learning about AWS serverless technologies. In the past I have used Google Cloud after starting app deployment projects in AWS, but finding IAM service, dealing with assigning Roles, and creating Policies to be confusing. In a way this capstone project is a good kick in the butt to learn some capabilities of AWS.

The first technology we will be working with is AWS Lambda. AWS Lambda is for running code that is not necessarily going to run 24/7 on a dedicated server. Lambda functions allow for automatic scaling up and down how many instances of the function are required to run at any given time. In our use case Lambda functions will be triggered by API calls to run code to transform data from a database and return the result to the front end of a web app. Here is a link to learn a little bit about AWS Lambda by creating a simple Serverless Hello World.

The next technology I researched that we may be working with is Amazon API Gateway. Amazon API Gateway is a service to create APIs. The AWS Lambda functions can be called directly by the Amazon API Gateway after receiving a request from the front end. For our purposes there are two options of the older and more feature laden REST API option, and the newer HTTP API that is has 70% lower costs associated with it but has less features. For now I will jot down that this may be something to discuss with our mentor (the client of our project) on required features for the API. There was a good analysis in the documentation located here.

The final technology I researched was Amazon DynamoDB. Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service where you can create tables to store and create tables. AWS says that you can store and retrieve any amount of data (great for our use case) and is fully managed by AWS, so there will be less administrative duties as the application scales up to use more and more data in the future.

After running through some of the AWS tutorials it has really boosted my confidence that I can learn AWS technologies. Before this project when I would look through the pages and pages of AWS documentation, it was daunting and stress inducing. I would normally have to deploy a project at the end of a class with very little time to learn something new. With having a little more time to learn, it definitely is much less stressful. Bring it on.

Hello! My name is Jason Rash.  My first degree was in Plastics Engineering Technology. After college I started out as a Project Engineer for a very small manufacturing company, but transitioned over to software engineering 2 years ago.  I have been working full-time while taking 1 class per quarter for the past 4 years.  I am finally approaching the finish line!  Final class for my 2nd Bachelor’s!

The CS 467 project that most interests me is the Cloud-based Application for Fire Department 911 Response-Time Analysis.  I use C# with the .NET framework at my workplace.  My dad has been a volunteer firefighter for a small community since before I was born, so this project really interests me.  Now he mostly just drives a firetruck and helps bring out hoses, but when he was younger it was interesting listening to him talk about the fire training he was going through put on by the University of Kansas.

I am also interested in Code3 Strategist – Travel Time Prediction project also involving Levrum Data Technologies as I would like to work under the guidance of experienced engineers.  Both of these projects seem very interesting and worthwhile endeavors.