AWS

Configure Hikari Connection Pool when using AWS RDS IAM

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Tom de Vroomen

Amazon Web Services offers a way to connect to a MySQL or PostgreSQL database without having a password, instead an authentication token can be used.
Within AWS this type of authentication is called RDS IAM.
Users don’t need to store an username and password and credentials don’t need to be stored in the database, which makes this a secure authentication method.

So, this makes it interesting to use this in your Spring Boot application. Spring Boot will use a HikariCP connection pool by default, but HikariCP 4.0.3 doesn’t support the use of authentication tokens.

So, how do I make this work within my Spring Boot application?

  1. Enable RDS IAM for your database

  2. Create a custom Hikari DataSource

  3. Update application properties

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Running AWS locally with LocalStack

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Thomas de Groot

More and more companies are switching over to cloud native environments. As a developer this gives me a lot of services to create awesome applications. The challenge that occurred to me right away was how to use all those new components during development, since some companies do not have a testing/development environment in their cloud provider to play with. LocalStack piqued my interest to simulate an AWS environment locally on my laptop, or when running the CI/CD pipeline.

This blog will give a brief introduction in what LocalStack can do and how you can use it for your own projects.

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Using AWS API Gateway as an proxy

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Thomas de Groot

During my last year at JCore I was given the opportunity to do deep-dive in a self-chosen topic in the form of a 'Specialisation'. For this 1-year project I chose to dive deep into AWS how it works and how I, as a developer, make use of it. Some of the topics I covered during this were: DevOps, CI/CD and Security. As a demo and as use case I created a simple pubquiz application in which you can register and have a custom form for your answers. During the development of this application I faced different challenges that I had to overcome. This blog is about how I created a simple API that is exposed to the internet and how I tried to tackle the challenges of security, scalability and adaptability.

The application I created consisted of a container image which hosts a simple API that is made with Java, Spring and AWS SDK. So for this backend application I created a Virtual Private Cloud(VPC) with a Fargate task in a private subnet so the application itself is not exposed to the internet. The goal was to make an API with the API Gateway that defines the API that redirects the correct call to my Fargate instance that is in a private subnet.

Here’s an overview of the infrastructure of my backend application:

Figure 1. My application infrastructure

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AWS accounts & users: Separation of Concerns

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Casper Rooker

Separating concerns is something we as developers are used to thinking about in terms of code. But the same also applies to identity management. If you’ve dabbled in AWS, you can get started right away with a root account. However, when it goes beyond dabbling, it might be a good idea to start splitting up responsibilities.

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