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Choreography vs Orchestration in the land of serverless

AWS, EventBridge, Lambda, Serverless, SNS, Step Functions / August 7, 2020 August 7, 2020

Choreography and Orchestration are two modes of interaction in a microservices architecture. In orchestration, there is a controller (the ‘orchestrator’) that controls the interaction between services. It dictates the control flow of the business logic and is responsible for making sure that everything happens on cue. This follows the request-response paradigm. In choreography, every service …

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How I scaled an AppSync project to 200+ resolvers

AppSync, AWS, CloudFormation, Programming, Serverless / July 30, 2020 July 30, 2020

I have been working on a large AppSync project for a client these past few months. The initial version of the app was built in just a few weeks, but the client has commissioned additional features and the project has kept growing. At the time of writing, this project has over 200 AppSync resolvers and …

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AppSync: how to inject table names into DynamoDB batch & transact operations

AppSync, AWS, Programming, Serverless / July 19, 2020 July 22, 2020

When working with CloudFormation, AWS recommends not to give explicit names to resources and let CloudFormation name them for you. This has several advantages: It’s harder for attackers to guess resource names such as S3 buckets or DynamoDB tables. You can deploy the same stack multiple times to the same account. This is useful when …

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Weekly update 46

Me, Weekly Update / July 17, 2020 July 17, 2020

Hi, welcome to another weekly update, it’s been a busy few weeks for me so lots of things to catch you up on! Production-Ready Serverless workshop is back! My 4-week Production-Ready Serverless workshop is coming back in September. With an improved and more comprehensive curriculum based on student feedback from the last run in May, when over …

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Are Lambda-to-Lambda calls really so bad?

AWS, Lambda, Programming, Serverless / July 12, 2020 July 16, 2020

If you utter the words “I call a Lambda function from another Lambda function” you might receive a bunch of raised eyebrows. It’s generally frowned up for some good reasons, but as with most things, there are nuances to this discussion. In most cases, a Lambda function is an implementation detail and shouldn’t be exposed …

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Why we didn’t choose QLDB for a healthcare app

AWS, QLDB / July 8, 2020 July 10, 2020

I have been working with a US client to build a first-of-its-kind application to manage your consent to share your data amongst healthcare providers in your state. The project falls within HIPAA, so we need to meet all the HIPAA compliance requirements, including having a full history of the user data. To meet that audit …

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Production-Ready Serverless is back (with improved curriculum)!

AWS, Lambda, Me, Serverless / July 6, 2020 July 6, 2020

My 4-week Production-Ready Serverless workshop is back! With an improved and more comprehensive curriculum based on student feedback from the last run in May, when over 50 students from around the world took part. This is a hands-on workshop where you will learn best practices for building serverless applications by building an e-commerce solution from …

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I left full-time employment, here’s what happened since

Career, Me / July 3, 2020 July 8, 2020

It’s been 12 months since I left full-time employment to fly solo as an independent consultant. After 15 years of full-time employment, I had to learn a lot, very quickly, after making this career change. Honestly, life has been great since. Even a global pandemic hasn’t managed to dampen my mood! In case you’re considering …

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How to choose the right API Gateway auth method

API Gateway, AWS, Programming, Security, Serverless / June 17, 2020 July 3, 2020

Update 21/06/2020: following lots of feedback and questions on Twitter, I have updated the post to include a few more options. Quite a few clients have asked me “Hey Yan, what API Gateway auth method should I use for this REST API?” so I thought I’d share my answer with everyone here. This is the …

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Weekly update 45

Me, Weekly Update / June 9, 2020 June 22, 2020

Hi, welcome to another weekly update. First of all, I want to thank Dynobase for sponsoring this week’s update. Dynobase – Professional GUI Client for DynamoDB Dynobase accelerates your DynamoDB workflow with easier data exploration, code generation, bookmarks, tabs, history, import/export capabilities and much more. Dynobase is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. Download Free 7-Day Trial. …

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