By end of part 2 the Design Review Assistant had evolved into a FastAPI service. It could accept a design document, return a structured JSON response, stream results using Server-Sent Events, and expose useful metadata such as latency, token usage, and cost. The reviews worked well but they were generic. For example, given the following […]
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In Part 1, I built a Python script that could review a design document and return a structured JSON response. The natural next step was to to expose this functionality as an API which can be called from other applications. With the initial version, almost everything lived inside a single script. With HTTP API in […]
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This week’s goal was to understand what actually happens when an application talks to an LLM. What does an LLM request look like? What does the response contain? Beyond the generated text, what metadata does the API return that would be useful when building an application? To answer those questions, I built a small Python […]
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As a software engineer, I’ve spent most of my career building backend systems—APIs, distributed systems, and backend services. Over the past year, AI has become an increasingly important part of software development. While I’ve been using tools like ChatGPT and AI-assisted code generation extensively, I realized there’s a big difference between using AI and building […]
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AWS Lambda provides developers with serverless computing resources with built-in scalability and optimises agility, performance, cost, and security. But it comes with its challenges. In this blog, we will examine the current scaling behaviour and avoid unnecessary costs and impact on your downstream systems by using AWS Lambda with AWS SQS as an event source […]
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Over the past few parts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), we’ve learned how to containerize the app, deploy it to ECS Fargate, attach an ALB, and even manage DNS via Route 53 with our Books API setup example. The Books API is running publicly on an Application Load Balancer (ALB). But right now it’s […]
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In Part 2, we deployed ourJava Books API on ECS Fargate behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). Our app was working, but the ALB DNS was long and unfriendly, like: In Part 3, we’ll give our API a more readable name with: Why Use Route 53 for Your Domain? Using Route 53 gives us: Even if you purchased your domain elsewhere (GoDaddy, […]
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In Part 1 we built a simple Java Books API and wrapped it in a Docker container. Running it locally was easy, but the real goal was to host it in AWS so anyone can hit it via a public endpoint. This time, we’ll use the AWS CDK (in TypeScript) to: Let’s dive in. Step 1: Initialize a CDK Project In […]
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As part of my day-to-day work, I spend a lot of time managing service infrastructure in AWS. Mostly, I deal with internal build environments where CDK is already the norm. But I’ve been on a quest to design an AWS-hosted API service outside of work—something I fully control end to end. I’ve worked with systems that […]
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