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Information contained in the articles on this site may not be representative of actual use cases. The views expressed in the articles are personal views of the author and are not necessarily those of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company, its subsidiaries and affiliates (collectively “State Farm”). Nothing in the articles should be construed as an endorsement by State Farm of any non-State Farm product or service.
Identify repeated events and prevent duplicated data with AWS services by Satya Ravinuthala - Staff Technology Engineer
Avoid data duplication

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Recently I experienced something that you usually hear about when going through resources around cloud and distributed systems, which is everything fails, and you need to plan for it. This doesn’t just mean infrastructure failure but also software failure. Now, if you ever went through any of the AWS messaging services documentation like SNS and SQS, I am sure you have read somewhere in the documentation that they ‘promise’ at least one message delivery and they don’t guarantee exactly one.…

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Schema Validations by Dave Svatora - Lead Software Engineer
Schema Validations in AWS API Gateway

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Validating inputs is a common problem that must be addressed in application software. Like many problems in information technology, there are many patterns available that provide a solution. This article will focus on one available solution for Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) deployed to AWS’s API Gateway. We will walk through setting up JSON Schema Validations, which is a good pattern for any applications leveraging API Gateways and serverless architectures. It follows…

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Breaking the Limits by Chad Prentice
Leveraging Cloud Architecture at Massive Scale

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As an insurance company, you’re bound to have a lot of documents to store and maintain. As a 100 year-old insurance company with over 87 million policies and accounts, State Farm REALLY has a lot of documents…to the tune of 12 billion documents weighing in at almost 3 petabytes of data. Those totals grow by more than 3 million documents (3 terabytes) a day. Think about an insurance claim for an auto accident. You have the photos of the damage, the estimate of the repair and the payment for…

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Orchestrating Event-Driven Analytics with Ease by Evan Stalter & Tim Nickel

At State Farm our mission is to help more customers in more ways. To achieve that goal, a vast network of components across multiple platforms (PaaS, AWS, Salesforce, and Legacy to name a few) must flawlessly operate behind the scenes to help our agents and call center associates help new and existing customers. Much of this architecture today relies on synchronous point-to-point calls across these platforms, bringing potential challenges such as an outage that could negatively impact our daily…

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AWS Multi-Account Management using Cloud Custodian and Serverless Compute by Ryan Ash
A simple and scalable approach to using Cloud Custodian for AWS governance, security and cost controls.

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Whether administering three or 300 AWS accounts, it is essential to implement consistent security and governance policies. Enabling users to leverage all the AWS services while remaining within the guardrails defined by your company is the goal. Polices should be relatively easy to create and implement. Having a stable deployment and runtime for these policies allows administrators to focus their valuable time elsewhere. Cloud Custodian policies provide flexibility to write governance rules in…

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DynamoDB Ingestion to an Enterprise Data Lake by Clete Blackwell II
A journey in discovering architectural patterns

DynamoDB Ingestion to Data Lake Design

Companies manage a lot of data – often having application data in many different data stores and in a variety of formats (e.g., File storage, DB2, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, and more). That data can also live on many different physical data centers ranging from on-premises to vendor data centers to public cloud data centers. Each data store is created for a specific purpose, such as customer contact information, conversation logs, policy data, or purchase history.

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Comparison of AWS Services for Event Driven Architecture by Jeff Himmell

Complicated highway interchange denotes the many possible paths

At State Farm® we’re about helping people. Helping people manage the risks of everyday life and recover from the unexpected is at the core of what we do. As it applies to technology, the Event Driven Architecture (EDA) pattern is especially useful for orchestrating multiple services in unforeseen situations. However, deciding on the best AWS product to use as the event bus can be daunting. This article will cover common considerations (such as scalability), as well as those that can make a bad…

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Using Terraform for S3 Storage with MIME Type Association by Dillon Henn
Confidently deploy your content to S3 using Terraform - here's how we did it.

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Today, many product teams may utilize the Amazon Simple Storage Service to store Single Page Application (SPA) resources. Oftentimes they do this by packaging infrastructure code with the application code. However, this tends to add complexity to the pipeline because the content for S3 must be uploaded and synched in a separate step.

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