Weekly Journal 8 - AWS Well-Architected, Raspberry Pi 4

Synopsis

This was another week that was largely devoid of technical work. Thus is the life on an engineering manager sometimes. At work I did get a chance to setup some profiles in the AWS Well-Architected Tool, and at home my case arrived for my Raspberry Pi 4.

AWS Well-Architected Tool

AWS has something called they call Well-Architected, which is combination of guidance and tools to help you build cloud applications and services on their platform. The Well-Architected Tool is a way to track your progress. It walks you through an interview process for each pillar of the Well-Architected methodology, and allows you to create point-in-time snapshots of your answers. Over time, you can track your improvements as you build new systems and adapt existing systems to the Amazon cloud.

If you are building serious large-scale projects on AWS, I think it is worth looking at. Both the guidance and the tool are available at no extra cost.

Raspberry Pi 4

I have been eagerly awaiting the delivery of the case for my new Raspberry Pi 4. I have seen several reviews and blog posts talking about how the Pi 4 produces a fair amount of heat, so it is best to get a case or a heat sink or something to keep it cool. I bought one of the 8GB models, so I wanted something that resembled a tiny desktop case. I purchased an Argon One V2 case, and so far I have been very happy with it.

The case is made of aluminum, and comes with silicone pads that connect the heat-producing chips to the case. The case itself acts as a heat sink, and does a really nice job of dissipating heat from the Raspberry Pi. It also has a connector for the micro-HDMI ports and the audio jack that routes them to the rear of the case, and converts the micro-HDMI ports to standard HDMI ports. There is even a nifty magnetic lid on the top of the case to provide easy access to the GPIO pins. Installing the Raspberry PI into the case was easy. There was a total of eight small screws needed to put everything together.

I have not had a chance to do a whole lot with my new Raspberry Pi beyond getting it into the case and booting Ubuntu 20.10 ARM64 edition. Hopefully I will find some time to do something fun with it and write about in the near future.

What’s Next?

Honestly, I think this week is going to be more of the same. Right now I have fair amount of management work on my plate, so that needs to get done before I can justify spending my time doing technical work.