James Renaud — Senior Staff Engineer in Platform Architecture & Developer Enablement, Systems Thinker, and technical writer.https://jamesrenaud.ca/https://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/welcome-to-the-new-site/https://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/welcome-to-the-new-site/Why and how I migrated my personal site from a Lightsail WordPress instance to a static Astro site backed by AWS S3, CloudFront, and OpenTofu.Wed, 11 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/where-theres-a-will-theres-a-way-adding-listeners-to-an-aws-cdk-applicationloadbalancedfargateservice/https://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/where-theres-a-will-theres-a-way-adding-listeners-to-an-aws-cdk-applicationloadbalancedfargateservice/I recently needed to do a quick implementation of a third-party containerized tool for consumption by a development team who was using an old, unmaintained, and publicly hosted…Tue, 28 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/mr-worldwide-going-global-with-dynamodb/https://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/mr-worldwide-going-global-with-dynamodb/If you’re working with DynamoDB and CloudFormation, there’s little chance you haven’t been eagerly awaiting CloudFormation support for Global Tables. If you were like me, you were…Wed, 27 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/if-at-first-you-dont-succeed-try-try-again/https://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/if-at-first-you-dont-succeed-try-try-again/I’m back! It’s been literally years since my last blog post and I’ve been buried in work, and home life – oh, and of course that whole pandemic thing going on. Got married?…Mon, 07 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/the-wrath-of-kahn-introducing-known-issues-into-the-public-cloud/https://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/the-wrath-of-kahn-introducing-known-issues-into-the-public-cloud/I’ve spent the last few months going into some technical aspects of DevOps here, and I’m going to pivot a little bit this week and go back to a more philosophical DevOps topic. A…Tue, 03 Jul 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/safety-nets-cloudformation-custom-resources-for-regional-api-gateways/https://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/safety-nets-cloudformation-custom-resources-for-regional-api-gateways/Up until this week we’ve been utilizing edge optimized custom domains within our API Gateways. This has been really easy to set up using CloudFormation and has been a great way…Fri, 22 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/playing-in-the-sandbox-subject-alternate-names-on-acm-certificates-in-cloudformation/https://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/playing-in-the-sandbox-subject-alternate-names-on-acm-certificates-in-cloudformation/Depending on your view, the speed at which AWS updates and changes can either be a complete nightmare or something that keeps you coming into work every day. Luckily for me, I see…Fri, 15 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/carefully-poking-holes-using-cross-account-custom-authorizers-in-api-gateway/https://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/carefully-poking-holes-using-cross-account-custom-authorizers-in-api-gateway/First off, apologies for the brief hiatus. I hit a bit of a busy period with work and fell off the posting wagon. AWS recently introduced support for API Gateway to use a Lambda…Wed, 13 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/proactively-plug-leaks-securing-cloudformation-stacks-in-aws-codepipeline/https://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/proactively-plug-leaks-securing-cloudformation-stacks-in-aws-codepipeline/In a recent chat with our AWS Solutions Architect, he pointed me in the direction of some really cool open source DevOps tools from the guys over at Stelligent. They have a bunch…Fri, 18 May 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/making-snowflakes-avoiding-collisions-in-cloudformation-stack-outputs/https://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/making-snowflakes-avoiding-collisions-in-cloudformation-stack-outputs/Generally speaking I’m pretty lucky because all our micro services operate in their own accounts (check out AWS Super Glue: The Lambda Function for why we do this) and I don’t…Tue, 15 May 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/crash-test-dummy-building-and-testing-angular-apps-in-aws-codebuild/https://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/crash-test-dummy-building-and-testing-angular-apps-in-aws-codebuild/As part of an upcoming post around how we achieved Blue/Green functionality within AWS for I wanted to cover off a bit of a technical hurdle we overcame this week around how to…Fri, 11 May 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/aws-super-glue-the-lambda-function/https://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/aws-super-glue-the-lambda-function/About halfway through our development cycle, in a meeting with our AWS Solutions Architect we received what we affectionately refer to as the “AWS Bomb”. Up until that point we…Fri, 04 May 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/this-is-how-we-devops/https://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/this-is-how-we-devops/I realized that in writing this blog, I assumed that everyone knew why the DevOps model is so important, and what CI/CD means, and why we do it. That’s probably a bad assumption…Fri, 27 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/word-of-the-day-outage/https://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/word-of-the-day-outage/Captains log, April 20th 2018. It’s day ??? of winter. I’ve packed my entire desk up and decided to move to Sunnyvale. There’s no way there’s winter in a place that has “Sunny” in…Fri, 20 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/automagically-secure-powershell-remote-sessions/https://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/automagically-secure-powershell-remote-sessions/In my previous post, PowerShell for Good and Sometimes for Evil, I detailed a few steps that you can take to help secure your systems from malicious use of remote PowerShell…Fri, 27 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMThttps://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/powershell-for-good-and-sometimes-for-evil/https://jamesrenaud.ca/blog/powershell-for-good-and-sometimes-for-evil/I read an interesting article on a flight back home yesterday which detailed a brazen bank heist in Russia in which the bank robbers used remote PowerShell commands to instruct an…Tue, 04 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT