theburningmonk.com | Page 3 of 91 | Master Serverless Development.

Implementing Magic Links with Amazon Cognito: A Step-by-Step Guide

AWS, Cognito, Lambda, Security, Serverless / March 19, 2023 October 22, 2023

Last week, we looked at implementing passwordless authentication using one-time passwords (OTPs) using Cognito [1]. Another popular passwordless authentication method is magic links where: The user initiates the sign-in process by entering their email in your application. They receive an email with a time-limited URL. The user clicks on the URL and is authenticated into …

Implementing Magic Links with Amazon Cognito: A Step-by-Step Guide Read More »

Passwordless Authentication made easy with Cognito: a step-by-step guide

AWS, Cognito, Security, Serverless / March 13, 2023 October 22, 2023

Password-based authentication has long been the norm for securing user accounts. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that password-based authentication has several drawbacks. Such as the risk of password theft, the need for users to remember complex passwords, and the time and effort required to reset forgotten passwords. Fortunately, more and more websites have started …

Passwordless Authentication made easy with Cognito: a step-by-step guide Read More »

The biggest problem with EventBridge Scheduler and how to fix it

AWS, EventBridge, Lambda, Serverless / February 28, 2023 August 2, 2023

UPDATE 02/08/2023: EventBridge Schedule now supports automated deletion upon completion. So the problem and solution discussed in this post is no longer relevant. Please see the announcement here. The launch of EventBridge Scheduler was one of the highlights for me for re:Invent 2022. Finally, we have a scalable service that lets us schedule ad-hoc, …

The biggest problem with EventBridge Scheduler and how to fix it Read More »

3 ways to manage concurrency in serverless applications

AWS, EventBridge, Kinesis, Lambda, Serverless, Step Functions / February 20, 2023 September 16, 2023

Many software engineering concepts show up in different contexts. Modularity, the single-responsibility principle and separation of concerns are just a few examples that come to mind. They are equally applicable to how we write code, architect our systems and organize our teams. Similarly, there are many parallels between multithreaded programming and event-driven architectures. For example, …

3 ways to manage concurrency in serverless applications Read More »

How to handle serverful resources when using ephemeral environments

AWS, Serverless / February 13, 2023 September 16, 2023

I’m a big fan of using ephemeral (or temporary) environments when I’m building serverless architectures. I have written about this practice before and I believe it’s one of the most important practices that have co-evolved with the rise of serverless technologies. It takes advantage of the pay-per-use pricing model offered by many serverless technologies such …

How to handle serverful resources when using ephemeral environments Read More »

Yes, S3 now encrypts objects by default, but your job is not done yet

AWS, S3, Security / January 12, 2023 April 6, 2023

Update 06/04/2023: AWS announced that S3 now enables the “block public access” and “disable ACL” settings for all new buckets. It’s great to see these being enabled by default. But the points I raised in the post still stand. The default encryption (SSE-S3) only protects against situations when someone has stolen data from AWS servers/disks …

Yes, S3 now encrypts objects by default, but your job is not done yet Read More »

This is why you should keep stateful and stateless resources together

AWS, CloudFormation, Serverless / January 9, 2023 September 16, 2023

Update 24/05/2023: As Lee James Gilmore pointed out on Twitter, the unit of deployment of CDK is the CDK app. A CDK app can contain multiple CloudFormation stacks and they can be changed together (in a single commit) and deployed together. And that’s absolutely fine and compatible with what I’m advocating for in this post. …

This is why you should keep stateful and stateless resources together Read More »

Year in review, 2022

Me / December 20, 2022 December 20, 2022

As the curtain draws on 2022, here’s my year in numbers: 1 book 2 on-demand video courses 1023 students enrolled in my video courses 4 public workshops 118 workshop students 21 blog posts 4 YouTube videos 14 podcast episodes 16 public speaking engagements Serverless Architectures on AWS In February 2022, after nearly two years of hard …

Year in review, 2022 Read More »

A practical guide to testing AWS Step Functions

AWS, Serverless, Step Functions, Testing / December 3, 2022 September 6, 2023

Testing Step Functions can be a daunting task. However, with a little preparation and effort, the testing process can be simplified and streamlined. In this article, we will provide a practical strategy on how to test Step Functions. So let’s start by setting the stage and introducing the players. What makes Step Functions hard to test? …

A practical guide to testing AWS Step Functions Read More »

The biggest preinvent serverless announcements you may have missed

AppSync, AWS, EventBridge, Lambda, Serverless, SNS / November 27, 2022 November 27, 2022

re:Invent is almost upon us. Judging by the things that had been announced ahead of re:Invent, one can’t help but be excited about the main event itself! Here is a list of the serverless-related announcements so far that you should know about. Payload-based message filtering for Amazon SNS Here’s the official announcement. This is arguably the …

The biggest preinvent serverless announcements you may have missed Read More »