Python - Tag - IT Guy Journals

Structured Logging in Python

Luka Krapić — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 17:50:06 +0200

In modern DevOps workflows, observability plays an important role. Operating distributed systems often depends on telemetry data, including metrics, traces, and logs. Logs are frequently a detailed source of information during troubleshooting. Traditional unstructured log messages, written as free-form text, can make it difficult to extract useful information automatically.

Structured logging organizes log data into a consistent, machine-readable format. For a primer on telemetry systems and observability fundamentals, see the blog post Introduction to Telemetry Systems.

Building a Portable FastAPI Backend for AWS Lambda and ECS Using Terraform

Luka Krapić — Fri, 02 May 2025 20:59:24 +0100

In the previous post, we explored how to deploy a FastAPI application on AWS Lambda using an ASGI adapter. This is a great option for early-stage projects: it requires zero infrastructure management, supports rapid iteration, and scales automatically.

But as your application matures, Lambda’s trade-offs can become limiting:

Cost scaling with consistent traffic
Compute/memory coupling and lack of vertical scaling
Package size limits and cold starts

That’s why many teams adopt a container-based workflow that can run on both Lambda (via container images) and ECS Fargate. With a little planning, you can build once and deploy to either platform with minimal friction.

Building Backend APIs with FastAPI on AWS Lambda

Luka Krapić — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 19:24:32 +0100

One of the trade-offs of working in the cloud is the risk of vendor lock-in. While cloud platforms offer powerful tools and scalability, they can also tie you into their ecosystem, making it harder to pivot or migrate down the road.

When it comes to building backend APIs in Python, you have a few great frameworks at your disposal—Django, FastAPI, and Flask—each with its own level of complexity and opinionation. Django is feature-rich and great for full-stack apps, Flask is minimal and flexible, but FastAPI stands out as a modern, async-first framework that makes it incredibly easy to build fast, clean, and production-ready APIs.

Tiered Access To CloudFront Content With Self-Signed Cookies

Luka Krapić — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 16:56:47 +0100

This blog post is a follow-up to our previous post, where we implemented tiered access to S3 data using presigned URLs.

In most production applications, CloudFront is used to serve static content to users. In this post, we will explore how to implement restricted access when serving content through CloudFront.

You can find the complete example here.

What is CloudFront?

In simple terms, CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) managed by AWS. A CDN is a network of servers deployed close to end users, serving as a caching layer to improve content delivery speed and reliability.

Tiered Access To S3 Data With Presigned URLs

Luka Krapić — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 16:56:47 +0100

Managing access to your Amazon S3 data is crucial for ensuring security and efficiency in your cloud architecture. You typically have three options for managing access to S3 data for client applications: using Amazon CloudFront distribution, leveraging S3 presigned URLs, or routing through backend APIs.

In this blog post, we will delve into S3 presigned URLs as an effective method for implementing tiered access to your S3 data. We’ll discuss their benefits, limitations, and provide a straightforward example to illustrate their use.