During the last cohort of my Production-Ready Serverless [1] workshop, a student asked: If I have to query an ERP system and wait for its response, and it sometimes takes more than 15 minutes to respond, is there a serverless way to do this? This is a surprisingly hard question to answer because: A. It’s …
What’s the most serverless way to wait for a slow HTTP response? Read More »
It’s been a few years since I launched the “Complete Guide to AWS Step Functions” and “Learn you some Lambda best practice for great good!“. And given the diminishing value of these early courses I feel it’s only right that I stop charging for them. So from now on, you can sign up for these …
FREE online courses to learn Lambda and Step Functions Read More »
I had a really good question from one of my students at the Production-Ready Serverless workshop the other day: “I’m reacting to S3 events received via an SNS topic and debating the merits of having the Lambda triggered directly by the SNS or having an SQS queue. I can see the advantage of the queue …
SNS to Lambda or SNS to SQS to Lambda, what are the trade-offs? Read More »
In my last conversation with Ben Kehoe on the real-world serverless podcast, he said something profound and it’s been bugging me ever since. And now I’m ready to infect you with this brain bug! You’re welcome ;-) On the infrastructure-from-code trend, Ben said: “I think infrastructure-from-code is wrong on all counts. I don’t think we should …
Are we getting infrastructure all wrong in the Serverless era? Read More »
When I previously wrote about testing Step Functions, I gave you a general strategy that consists of: Component tests that target the Lambda functions (specifically, the custom code you wrote in those functions). End-to-end tests that execute the state machine in the cloud. Local tests using Step Functions Local where you can use mocks to …
Testing Step Functions: how to skip time when testing Timeout and Wait states Read More »
Several people have asked me about unit testing CDK applications recently. The questions often go something like this: “Because it can be in Python or TS, people bring up unit testing for CDK, whereas it’s not even thought about with Serverless Framework, SAM or Terraform. What are your thoughts on this?” “I have so many …
No, you don’t need to test every line of your CDK application Read More »
Last week, PrimeVideo posted a headline-grabbing article that broke tech Twitter. The article is a case study of how a PrimeVideo team cut the running cost of its service by 90% by moving away from a microservice architecture running on Lambda and Step Functions. The team didn’t expect the service to run at a high …
Is serverless overpriced? What can we learn from the PrimeVideo team? Read More »
Ask most developers why they like the CDK and they will say “It lets me write infrastructure in my favourite programming language”. That’s nice, but why should that be a consideration for an Infra-as-Code (IaC) tool? That’s like saying “I like Strepsils because it tastes like candy”. ps. if you mention candy, pharmacy staff would …
Are You Ready for This? Top 5 Earth-Shattering Pros and Cons of AWS CDK Read More »
Yesterday, I posted a tweet with an imaginary conversation that is sadly based on many real conversations I have had. The tweet received some interesting replies, and the point about spending limits came up multiple times. So as a thought experiment, let’s think about the pros and cons of a spending limit and if it …
The Sky’s the Limit: Debating the Benefits of AWS Spending Restrictions Read More »
Managing and securing application secrets is a crucial part of any cloud-native application. AWS offers two primary services: the Systems Manager (SSM) Parameter Store and the more recent Secrets Manager. You might think Secrets Manager is the better choice for managing secrets because it’s a newer service and offers more advanced features such as cross-region …
The Old Faithful: Why SSM Parameter Store still reigns over Secrets Manager Read More »
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