Serverless Archives

CloudFormation: How to set Deletion Policy to Retain for production only?

AWS, CDK, CloudFormation, SAM, Serverless

It’s a good practice to use CloudFormation’s deletion policy to protect stateful resources such as DynamoDB tables or RDS databases from accidental deletions. Such as when someone accidentally deletes a CloudFormation stack! As I discussed previously [1], this is a much better way to guard against these accidental data losses than separating stateful and stateless …

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Static IP for Lambda: ingress, egress and bypassing the dreaded NAT Gateway

AWS, Lambda, Serverless

Many vendors require you to have a static IP address for your application. Such that all requests to their API must originate from an allow-list of IP addresses. This means we need to force egress traffic from our Lambda functions through a static IP address. Sometimes, they even mandate that you use a static IP …

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Step Functions: combine Standard and Express workflows for fun & profit

AWS, Serverless, Step Functions

Step Functions’ state machines come in two flavours. By understanding their strengths and limitations, you can harness the combined power of both to optimize your processes for efficiency and cost. Standard Workflows Optimal for: Business-critical operations like payment processing. Strengths: Suitable for low-throughput scenarios. High maximum duration ensures enough time for retries using exponential backoff. …

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What’s the most serverless way to wait for a slow HTTP response?

AWS, Lambda, Serverless

Every now and then you are faced with an awkward situation where you need to wait for a slow HTTP response and it can take more than 15 mins. Using Lambda is impractical because of the 15 mins timeout, and very cost ineffective because you will be paying for all that idle time by the millisecond.

If not Lambda, what’s the most serverless way for you to wait for a sloooow HTTP response?

FREE online courses to learn Lambda and Step Functions

AWS, Lambda, Serverless, Step Functions

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 …

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SNS to Lambda vs. SNS to SQS to Lambda, what are the trade-offs?

AWS, Lambda, Serverless

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 …

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Are we getting infrastructure all wrong in the Serverless era?

AWS, Serverless

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 …

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Testing Step Functions: how to skip time when testing Timeout and Wait states

AWS, Programming, Serverless, Step Functions, Testing

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 …

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No, you don’t need to test every line of your CDK application

AWS, CDK, Programming, Serverless, Testing

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 …

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Is serverless overpriced? What can we learn from the PrimeVideo team?

AWS, Lambda, Serverless

The PrimeVideo team’s move from serverless caused much stir, but most people got it wrong because they read the article with tinted glasses.

This is what they actually said.