Weekly update 07

Hi, welcome to another weekly update!

MEAP update for Production-Ready Serverless

We have released 2 new videos on my video course Production-Ready Serverless, this time around cold starts, which is easily the most frequently asked question I get!

• Life cycle of a Lambda function
• Strategies to minimize cold starts

Remember, whilst the course is still in the MEAP, you can get 40% off the face price using the code ytcui.

I have also turned this course into a classroom setting, so if you’re interested in having me run this as a workshop in your company, then drop me a line via the Contact page.

DAZN is hiring in both London and Amsterdam

Fresh off our groundbreaking new deals for the Italian league and US boxing, we are also expanding our engineering team to new locations. We will be opening a new office in Amsterdam, and we are looking for talented engineers at all levels, and from different disciplines to join our team!

Whether you want to specialise in backend or frontend, or leaning towards fullstack development, or devops/SRE, we want to hear from you! We will provide visa sponsorship, and offer you the chance to work on some interesting and challenging projects, and provide you with the help and opportunity to learn and improve yourself.

ServerlessDays Milan

Also, I want to share some good news with you :-)

I’m honoured to be invited as a keynote speaker at ServerlessDays Milan, which is happening on the 19th October. The call for paper is still open so don’t miss your chance to speak at another exciting serverless event in Europe! The other keynote speaker is the one and only Gojko Adzic, creator of claudia.js and author of one of my favourite books on testing – Specification by Example.

Oh, and DAZN is going to be one of the sponsors for the event, and we’ll be at the job fair the day after the main event. If you wanna chat to me and other DAZN engineers about what it’s like to work there, or to find out opportunities we have, then that’s the perfect opportunity for you to do so.

New Survey by CloudZero

CloudZero (www.cloudzero.com) today announces the launch of a significant market research effort focused exclusively on the Cloud and Serverless EcoSystem. Beyond the many informative surveys in market that have focused on the size of the market, key applications and the rate of adoption of cloud and serverless systems, this online survey is focused on better understanding the yet unsolved problems and challenges that arise when organizations commit to develop and run in serverless environments.

It challenges those taking the survey to think about a new paradigm to understand the interrelationships between Activity, Cost, Performance and Relationships that occur in cloud and serverless environments. The survey will also probe on the technologies currently used to understand, manage and resolve these problems and challenges, and to interpret the relative importance of each.

Please go and complete the survey, it’ll only take 5-10 minutes. Your effort will really help us understand the pain points people have, and the biggest unsolved problems in the tooling space.

New Posts

Step Functions: how to implement semaphores for state machines. I have used AWS Step Functions a lot at DAZN and sometimes we need to control the number of concurrent executions that can access a shared resource. For that we needed to implement semaphore semantics for our state machines.

In this post I discussed two approaches to solving this problem and compared them on scalability, simplicity and cost.

Centralised logging for AWS Lambda, REVISED (2018). A follow-up on my original post on centralised logging for AWS Lambda.

In this post I discussed the problem with using Lambda functions to ship logs from CloudWatch Logs in terms of concurrency control, or lack there of. And why, when you’re operating at scale it is better to stream your logs to a Kinesis stream first.

If you recall from the last weekly update, I also wrote a post for Binaris on my wish list for AWS Lambda. And no. 1 on that list is the ability to ship logs to Kinesis without going through CloudWatch Logs first. If my wish is to be granted then it’ll dovetail perfectly with this approach (using Kinesis) and streamline our logging pipeline even further!.

How to create IP-protected endpoints with API Gateway and Lambda. Finally, I wrote a short post on how to use the new resource policies feature in API Gateway to implement endpoints that are only accessible from whitelisted IP ranges.

AWS Announcements

SSM Parameter Store is now integrated with the new AWS Secrets Manager.

ELB now supports redirects and fixed error responses for the ALB.

Fargate is now available in Singapore, Sydney and Frankfurt.

Good reads

Patterns for Resilient Architectures – Part 1 by Adrien Hornsby

The million dollar engineering problem by Segment

25 Serverless peeps you need to follow by Jeremy Daly

Is AWS Lambda the Most Secure Application Platform? Probably. by Tsion Gonen