Weekly update 30

Hi, welcome to another weekly update :-)

Let’s welcome Blue Matador as this month’s sponsor!

Blue Matador is monitoring alert automation for AWS and Kubernetes environments. Our proactive alerts take the time and toil out of monitoring. Trying to understand baselines and thresholds, and configuring alerts, especially in black boxes like Lambda and K8s, requires significant time and effort. Unlike all the other monitoring tools on the market, Blue Matador eliminates the need to manually configure alerts. After a quick and easy setup, Blue Matador instantly discovers all of your resources, automatically creates hundreds of alerts out-of-the-box and proactively notifies you of critical production issues. We’re so confident you’ll love Blue Matador we’re offering $100 to demo it with our team.

New posts

Amazon EventBridge: a new era of SaaS integration. In this post, I discussed why the newly announced EventBridge service is important. Why it’s just the rebranding CloudWatch Events needs to get the recognization it deserves. And why it can potentially usher a new era of SaaS integration by removing the traditional friction and overhead of integrating with SaaS partners.

CloudFormation Ref and GetAtt cheatsheet. Over the years, I have lost count of the times I had to refer to AWS docs to see if CloudFormation Ref returns an ARN or ID or name or something else! So I put together a quick cheatsheet of the Ref and GetAtt return values by resource type so you can quickly look them up in one place.

How to connect SNS to Kinesis for cross-account delivery via API Gateway. In this post, I illustrated how you can connect SNS directly to Kinesis for cross-account delivery. This was prompted by a question from my friends at DAZN where they experienced concurrency issues with their cross-account delivery mechanism with SNS -> SQS -> Lambda -> Kinesis. As an added bonus, I also illustrated how you can write an execute-once-only Kinesis function by leveraging Lambda’s built-in metaprogramming capability.

Introducing a better way to record custom metrics. I published a new serverless application that makes it easy for you to record custom CloudWatch metrics from Lambda and publish them asynchronously. In a piece of related news, CloudWatch Logs Insight now supports querying multiple log groups!

Twitch

I made a guest appearance on Heitor Lessa‘s excellent Twitch series – Build On Serverless. I joined Heitor on the two most recent episodes to talk about serverless observability. You can watch recordings of the two episodes here:

• S2 E12 – gaining observability part 1
• S2 E13 – gaining observability part 2

Public workshops

I’m running a one-day workshop on how to productionize a serverless application at this year’s Full Stack Fest.

• Creating APIs with API Gateway and Lambda
• Real-time stream processing with Kinesis and Lambda
• Authentication and authorization
• Testing strategies
• Local debugging
• Continuous Integration, Deployment and Delivery
• Project organization
• Managing shared code and shared infrastructure
• Log aggregation and monitoring
• Distributed tracing using X-Ray
• Performance and cost optimization
• Error handling
• Config management
• Working with VPCs
• Canary deployments

You can register for the workshop here, and get a 42% discount if purchased as part of your ticket to the main event.