Serverless Archives

Capture and forward correlation IDs through different Lambda event sources

API Gateway, AWS, Kinesis, Lambda, Serverless

Serverless architectures are microservices by default, you need correlation IDs to help debug issues that spans across multiple functions, and possibly different event source types – asynchronous, synchronous and streams. This is the last of a 3-part mini series on managing your AWS Lambda logs. If you haven’t read part 1 yet, please give it a read now. …

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Tips and tricks for logging and monitoring AWS Lambda functions

AWS, CloudWatch, Lambda, Serverless

The common practice of using agents/daemons to buffer and batch send logs and metrics are no longer applicable in the world of serverless. Here are some tips to help you get the most out of your logging and monitoring infrastructure for your functions. This is part 2 of a 3-part mini series on managing your …

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Centralised logging for AWS Lambda

AWS, CloudWatch, Lambda, Serverless

[update 23/07/2018]: The approach outlined in this post works well when you start out, but you can run into concurrency related issues at scale. To see a better approach when running at scale, please see the revised version of this post here. CloudWatch Logs is hardly the ideal fit for all your logging needs, …

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Write recursive AWS Lambda functions the right way

AWS, Lambda, Programming, Serverless

You may not realise that you can write AWS Lambda functions in a recursive manner to perform long-running tasks. Here’s two tips to help you do it right. AWS Lambda limits the maximum execution time of a single invocation to 5 minutes. Whilst this limit might be raised in the future, it’s likely that you’ll still …

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Many-faced threats to Serverless security

AWS, Lambda, Programming, Security, Serverless

Threats to the security of our serverless applications take many forms, some are the same old foes we have faced before; some are new; and some have taken on new forms in the serverless world. As we adopt the serverless paradigm for building cloud-hosted applications, we delegate even more of the operational responsibilities to our …

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Running and debugging AWS Lambda functions locally with the Serverless framework and VS Code

AWS, Lambda, Programming, Serverless

One of the complaints developers often have for AWS Lambda is the inability to run and debug functions locally. For Node.js at least, the Serverless framework and VS Code provides a good solution for doing just that. An often underused feature of the Serverless framework is the invoke local command, which runs your code locally by …

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I’m running a live course on designing serverless architecture with AWS Lambda

AWS, Lambda, Me, Programming, Serverless

Hi everyone, just a quick note to let you know that I’m running a live online course with O’Reilly on designing serverless architectures with AWS Lambda. It’s a 2-day course on September 11-12th with 6 hours in total, and it’s available for free if you have a subscription with SafariBooksOnline. Registration for the course is open till September …

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Slides for my serverless security talk

AWS, Lambda, Programming, Security, Serverless

Security in serverless world from Yan Cui

Applying the Saga pattern with AWS Lambda and Step Functions

AWS, Lambda, Programming, Serverless, Step Functions

The Saga pattern is a pattern for managing failures, where each action has a compensating action for rollback. In Hector Garcia-Molina’s 1987 paper, it is described as an approach to handling system failures in a long-running transactions. It has become increasingly relevant in the world of microservices as application logic often needs to transact across …

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Yubl’s road to Serverless – building better recommendations with Lambda, BigQuery and GrapheneDB

API Gateway, AWS, Lambda, Programming, Serverless

part 1: overview part 2: testing and CI/CD part 3: ops part 4: building a scalable notification system part 5: building a better recommendation system <- you’re here When I joined Yubl in April 2016, it had launched just 2 months earlier, after a long and chaotic development cycle that lasted more than 2 years …

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