Serverless

Where Serverless plugin stops and platform starts

I’m a long-time user of the Serverless framework and a big fan of its plugin system. It offers tremendous flexibility and there exists a rich ecosystem of community-driven plugins. It’s easily the Serverless framework’s greatest strength and the reason why I keep going back to it. However, I have observed a common pattern where customers …

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The API Gateway security risk you need to pay attention to

When you deploy an API to API Gateway, throttling is enabled by default in the stage configurations. By default, every method inherits its throttling settings from the stage. Having built-in throttling enabled by default is great. However, the default method limits – 10k req/s with a burst of 5000 concurrent requests – matches your account …

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All you need to know about caching for serverless applications

Last week, someone asked me at the AWS User Group in The Hague “Is caching still relevant for serverless applications?”  The assumption here is that Lambda auto-scales by traffic, so do we still need to worry about caching? And if so, where and how do we implement caching? So let’s break it down. Caching is …

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How to include SNS and Kinesis in your e2e tests

Update 17/09/2019: based on feedback, I added a few more alternatives that do not require you to deploy additional Lambda functions to the e2e-test stage. Scroll to the end to find out more. Being event-driven is a key characteristic of a serverless architecture. Often our Lambda functions would publish events to SNS topics or Kinesis …

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Why you should use ephemeral environments when you do serverless

One of the benefits of serverless is the pay-per-use pricing model you get from the platform. That is, if your code doesn’t run, you don’t pay for them! Combined with the simplified deployment flow (compared with applications running in containers or VMs) it has enabled many teams to use ephemeral environments to simplify their workflow …

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How to use the power of CloudFormation custom resources for great good

Disclaimer: if you’re new to CloudFormation custom resources, then I recommend you start by reading this excellent post by Alex Debrie first. Custom resources bring a whole new dimension to CloudFormation and enable some fascinating use cases. For example: provision DataDog dashboards as part of your CloudFormation stack run a load test every time you …

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How to do blue-green deployment for Step Functions

A client asked me the other day: “What happens to the running executions when I update a state machine?” Sadly, the answer is likely that existing executions would break if you have changed the input/output of the Lambda functions they call. The solution is to use specific versions or aliases of the functions instead. But …

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How to make serverless framework boilerplates customizable

The Serverless framework lets you reference external JSON, YML and JS files using the syntax ${file:(fileName):propertyName}. However, you can’t customize these external config files with runtime arguments. A reader asked me: “I have this boilerplate that is repeated many times in my serverless.yml, how do I reuse the boilerplate but override only specific fields?” It’s …

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