Category: aws

I thought minimizing Lambda function code was a best practice for Lambda optimization - it's even recommended by AWS in a not-so-old blog post. Turns out, I was wrong.

Integration testing for serverless Event-Driven Architecture is as necessary as it is time-consuming. Boilerplate code to write, long waiting for tests completion, tedious debugging. But no more.

AWS re:Invent 2023 ended, so let's look at the most interesting announcements for serverless and more. There are exciting features to try and, maybe more importantly, features to avoid!

With some creativity, we can use Lambda Response Streaming to dynamically show status updates, like the progress of long-running processes. And with proper TypeScript types and generator functions, we can write clean, dynamic content streaming Lambda with composable payload enrichers that will impress your work colleagues (if they are into this stuff).

Lambda Response Streaming allows sending incremental responses, but those response chunks can arrive long after you write them. They are buffered in a rather unexpected way, delaying all messages you stream. But there is a workaround to force the stream to flush.

I recently created a CDK library provisioning a CI/CD pipeline for serverless apps on AWS. Having finished the "regular" JS library, it took me a day to convert it to a "proper" CDK Construct library. Not long, and I learned a lot. Here are my thoughts and tips.

After tabs vs. spaces, vi vs. emacs, let's fight over this: which is better, Node.js or Python for AWS Lambda and serverless in general? I have my opinion on this, and the fact I prefer TypeScript over Python makes me only slightly biased.

CDK generates Logical IDs used by the CloudFormation to track and identify resources. In this post, I'll explain what Logical IDs are, how they're generated, and why they're important. Understanding this will help you avoid unexpected resource deletions and baffling "resource already exists" errors during deployment.

re:Invent 2022, the annual AWS conference in Las Vegas, is now behind us. I did not attend in person, but that gave me time to consolidate this list of top new serverless features while everyone else is sleeping off the intense 5-day conference. And I envy them just a little.

I've never cared too much about certificates, apart from the SSL ones (haha). And yet I passed 7 AWS exams. Why? How to prepare? How to pass? How to pay only 50% for the exam? I answer all this and more in this post.

Yes, you can run Machine Learning models on serverless, directly with AWS Lambda. I know because I built and productionized such solutions. It's not complicated, but there are a few things to be aware of. I explain them in this in-depth tutorial, where we build a serverless ML pipeline.

Security is not convenient. That's probably why the CDK, by default, uses AdministratorAccess Policy to deploy resources. But we can easily change it and increase the security of our AWS account, following the least privilege principle with a minimal additional burden.

Until recently, I was skeptical about the AWS CDK. I believe in Infrastructure as Code (IaC), but with the "code" being YAML. But after using CDK in real projects, the amount of heavy lifting it does and the vast reduction of a boilerplate code changed my view.

Have you ever been stuck deciding between SQS, SNS, Kinesis Streams, and EventBridge? Struggled to pick the right one for your use case? If the answer is "yes", I've got you covered with a simple decision tree to help you make the right decision.

In need to backup my personal files in the cloud, I wrote a script that archives the data into the Amazon S3 bucket. After some fine-tuning and solving a bunch of edge-cases, it's limited mainly by the disk read and my internet upload speed. And it costs me only $3.70 per TiB per month.

The simplicity of setting up a Kinesis trigger for a Lambda function may be deceptive. There are pitfalls that can cause problems we will spot only later, in the production environment. I learned about some of them the hard way, so let's say I speak from the experience.

Can you have a website with a CMS on AWS and not pay just for its existence? I looked at Amazon Lightsail, headless WordPress, and Webiny CMS but found none of those suitable. So I choose Prismic – a SaaS headless CMS, and Gatsby to create the site. Yes, I needed to make a pipeline to build my website after content changes. But when I did it, I got a website with CMS hosted at no cost.

AWS can overwhelm with the number of services. Especially if multiple services seem to do a very similar job. Let's look at the cloud-native AWS messaging services – the SQS, SNS, Kinesis, and EventBridge. What are the differences and when to use which one?

There are two reasons to optimize AWS Lambda functions performance. First is money – you pay for the Lambda execution duration. The quicker you do the job, the less you pay. The second is latency – the quicker you do the job, the shorter your client waits for the result. It's a known fact that the decrease of latency improves sales, user engagement, and client satisfaction – so we could argue it's also the money, in the end.

The new version of AWS SDK for JavaScript / TypeScript / Node.js came with a few significant improvements. But does "General Availability" mean "ready for the production"? How to use it? And how to unit test our code using it? Let's take a look at it.

Logging in AWS Lambda functions is simple. You just print the message, and it's sent to the CloudWatch Logs. And everything is fine until you get a surprisingly big bill for the CloudWatch usage, or you need to actually debug some live system. Here are my tips for logging in AWS Lambda, based on my experience with real-live, big-scale functions running on production.

Here I show three ways to create Amazon Athena tables. More importantly, I show when to use which one (and when don't) depending on the case, with comparison and tips, and a sample data flow architecture implementation. Also, I have a short rant over redundant AWS Glue features. All in a single article. Enjoy.

There are multiple articles on how to host a static website or Single Page Application (SPA) on AWS. But they rarely go into the topic of setting up the environment variables for the frontend application.

Developers, like all specialists, discover and collect their favorite tools over time. Having a good, proven set of tools makes the work easier and more pleasant. We can focus on getting the job done. Sometimes eliminating minor inconveniences or improving a small element of everyday activity makes the greatest impact on the comfort of work.

Amazon API Gateway provides an option to export the API schema as an OpenAPI Specification. With it, we can display our REST API as an interactive website. But we do not get a public URL to that specification file which we could use as a source for an interactive page like Swagger. Instead, we can only get the file from the AWS Console, CLI, or SDK.