Amazon Web Services *

In today's world, where businesses increasingly rely on effective communication, cloud technologies offer a wide range of solutions to optimize interactions both within the company and with customers. Three of the most popular options are UCaaS, CCaaS, and CPaaS. While they all fall under the umbrella of cloud communications, their functionality and applications differ significantly. Let's delve into the details.

UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service)

UCaaS unifies various communication channels, such as voice calls, video conferencing, messaging, and email, into a single platform. This allows employees to easily communicate and collaborate with each other, regardless of their location.

Benefits of UCaaS:

I came across a script on the Internet that allows you to parse product cards from Amazon. And I just needed a solution to a problem like that.

I wracked my brain while looking for a way to parse product cards from Amazon. The problem is that Amazon uses different design options for different outputs, in particular – if you need to parse the cards with the search query "bags" – the cards will be arranged vertically, as I need it, but if you take, for example, "t-shirts" – then the cards will be arranged horizontally, and in such way the script falls into an error, it works out opening the page, but does not want to scroll.

A small epigraph - if you are making an instruction, then do it to the end, otherwise instructions on how to solve the Amazon captcha for junior developer will be as clear as mud.

What's it all about? When I needed to solve a captcha from Amazon, the notorious Waf Captcha, I started looking for information at a service that I constantly use when I work with Key Collector and some other services (2 captchas - it’s a pity Habr bans articles for referral links).

I found instructions there and posted the link to it above. As you probably understood from the epigraph, I didn’t understand a thing, or rather, I understood that I needed to use the API, but that’s all...

It was much easier with Selenium

The main issue is the short timeout given for a solution from Amazon's side. The time to solve the captcha is limited, and if there's no response, the captcha refreshes (two of its parameters get updated - iv and context)

It turns out the captcha freshness timeout is about 30 seconds, and in that time, you need to find the parameters on the page, copy them, paste them into the script code, and run it. After that, 2captcha should solve it and return the correct answer. I tried to do this for a couple of fruitless hours, developing a routine of actions, but alas, searching for and replacing the changing parameters takes at least 12-15 seconds, leaving only 15 to 18 seconds for the captcha to be solved by the service, which in current realities sounds quite fantastical.

In the DevOps realm, where automation is crucial, the management of resources and updating processes in the cloud is vitally important. Many modern projects, particularly in AWS cloud environments, leverage Auto Scaling Groups (ASG). This mechanism aims to achieve three key objectives: balancing loads, increasing service reliability, and optimizing operational costs for efficiency and effectiveness.

Imagine working at a company where you deploy applications on Amazon's resources. To streamline this process and manage configurations more effectively, you use pre-built AMI images. These are crafted with tools like HashiCorp Packer, ensuring your applications launch swiftly and reliably. For the actual infrastructure deployment, you turn to Terraform. It's widely recognized as the standard in many major companies for managing cloud resources and using the IaC (Infrastructure as Code) approach.

As an IT engineer, you sometimes need to update instance versions to a newer AMI image, either for the latest security patches or to introduce new functionalities. The challenge lies in updating an active ASG without causing downtime. It's crucial to ensure the new AMI performs as reliably as the existing one, balancing the need for updates with system stability and uptime.

ASG's instance refresh is a crucial feature that allows for updating instances within a group while minimizing downtime, thereby maintaining high availability. However, ensuring the success of such updates, especially in large, complex systems, can be a challenge. Terraform resources, such as aws_autoscaling_group, can initiate this process but don't provide progress tracking. This limitation becomes apparent when other infrastructure components, such as certificate renewals or DNS updates, depend on the state and version of the instances. Monitoring the update process is essential to maintain an accurate infrastructure state after Terraform's execution.

To overcome this challenge, Ansible can be utilized...

In this article, I will tell you about a-few-years journey of scaling the Elasticsearch cluster in production environment, which is one of the vital elements of the iPrice technology stack. 
I will describe challenges we encountered and how we approached them.

The developer or owner of a software product often faces the question of choosing a suitable location for hosting server capacity. As you know, software always meets hardware.

Introduction

This post describes the steps needed for setting up automatic SSL certificates creation and renewal, using Let's Encrypt as the automated Certificate Authority, which provides a well-maintained API.
acme-dns-route53 is the tool to obtain SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt using DNS-01 challenge with Route53 and Amazon Certificate Manager by AWS. acme-dns-route53 also has the built-in functionality for using this tool inside AWS Lambda, and this is what we are going to do.

Web application firewall