AWS released the Aurora Serverless Data API and Textract, and Hashicorp now offers a way to manage your Terraform remote state in the cloud.

Aurora Serverless Data API

HTTP based access for the Aurora Serverless database came out in beta at re:Invent, but has now been become generally available. It’s still limited regarding the regions its deployed to, but once it rolls out to your region¹ this will allow you to make API based calls to your database.

The biggest advantage here is when you use it as a backend for your Lambda functions as it means you no longer need that function to run inside a VPC. And as that has a big impact on the speed of your Lambda function, that means you have an easy² win. Based on a quick look, it seems that the API is well integrated in the various SDKs so in theory it should be easy to implement.

That said, the queries take longer than when using a native SQL connection, as this article³ shows. Depending on your use case that might be an issue. I suspect we’ll see this query time go down over time though.

Amazon Textract

One of the new machine learning services announced at re:Invent, I’ve been looking forward to seeing the OCR service Textract come out. Even if it’s just so I can play with it⁴. I haven’t done so yet, but luckily there are other people who have.

A quick summary of what it does⁵, Textract is an OCR service like many others and is quite good at dealing with typed text. Where it stands out from other similar services however is its ability to deal with tables and forms. Most OCR services have trouble with this, and while the results here aren’t always perfect, it does a pretty impressive job. When you try this out however, keep in mind that the costs scale here with the difficulty so you probably shouldn’t turn out the form detection on 10.000 pages just to try it out.

Terraform Remote State Management

Several weeks ago Hashicorp announced that they’re now offering a way to manage state for your Terraform projects. This is part of their new Terraform Cloud service, which is free for small teams. While this may have been part of their Terraform Enterprise offering before, making it free for many use cases means that it becomes far more usable.

Ok, time to go back to an important question. What is this and why should you care? If you’re not familiar with Terraform that is a very valid question. Terraform is an infrastructure management tool, similar to CloudFormation in AWS or ARM in Azure. It has its own syntax however⁶, and is often ahead of what CloudFormation offers in terms of services. That brings us to the matter of state. Remote state for a tool like this is the way of seeing where the resources defined in your code are actually deployed. For native solutions, like CloudFormation, this is handled by the cloud provider. However, obviously Terraform can’t do this and therefore needs to handle it differently.

Traditionally this is done using a so-called state file, which is created when you deploy your infrastructure. This works well, if you’re the only person doing deployments. If that’s not the case however⁷, you need a way to manage this state file, which is a hassle and can cause issues unless you have a single source of truth that is carefully managed. And that is exactly what Hashicorp offers here, which makes it useful.