One of the most misunderstood aspects of Lambda is how throttling applies to async invocations. Or rather, how it doesn’t!
The TL;DR is that you will never experience throttling when you invoke a function asynchronously.
It also means that despite SNS and EventBridge having longer retry periods than Lambda’s internal queue, these have no practical impact in the case of Lambda throttling.
Read the full post to understand why.
One under-appreciated aspect of designing an Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) is how much information you should include in your events.
Do you send light events or rich events?
Or perhaps you would send both, but in different circumstances?
In this post, let’s talk about the pros & cons of each and how they fit into my mental model of DDD and EDA.
This article is about best practices for building event-driven architectures on AWS, with a focus on wrapping events in custom envelopes when using EventBridge.
While EventBridge provides metadata by default, a custom envelope allows for a standardized, consistent structure across all of your events, making it easier to manage and evolve the system over time.
By providing your own metadata, you can gain better interoperability between different services, end-to-end observability, idempotency control and versioning.
Gregor Hohpe said something that has me mulling over for some time now. Essentially, he asked, “Should we narrow the definition of serverless to mean just function-as-a-service (FaaS)?” “Serviceful” For context, I’m firmly in the “serverless means serviceful” camp: a) Serverless is a mindset: To leverage managed services to deal with undifferentiated heavy lifting so …
Should “serverless” just mean “function-as-a-service”? Read More »
In this post, we look at how you can implement fine-grained access control using Cognito access tokens and scopes. We will discuss the trade-offs of this approach and the cost implications of enabling Cognito’s Advanced Security Features (required for this approach to work).
Personally, I think this is too costly an approach and doesn’t offer enough upside in return.
Unless you’re using Advanced Security Features already, or your application has a high value per user (e.g. a B2B enterprise application), this approach may be difficult to justify in terms of return on investment.
A common narrative is that one should always use access tokens to call your APIs, while ID tokens are strictly for identifying users.
But how much of that actually makes sense when you use Cognito authorizers with your API?
Are ID tokens inherently less secure?
What is the cost of using access tokens instead?
Ultimately, is it safe to use ID tokens, or should you switch to access tokens?
Authentication and authorization are two distinct things.
API Gateway has built-in integration with Cognito, which handles authentication, but no fine-grained authorization.
There are many ways to implement a fine-grained authorization with API Gateway. In this new post, I will show you one of these ways and give you the pros & cons and when to use it.
This is a cost-efficient approach that leverages Cognito, but without needing its more expensive Advanced Security Features.
Back in 2018, I shared several ways to implement fan-out/fan-in with Lambda. A lot has changed since, so let’s explore the solution space in 2024.
Remember, what’s “best” depends on your context. I will do my best to outline the trade-offs you should consider.
Many students and clients have asked me how to implement Map-Reduce workloads serverlessly. In most cases, they are actually asking about Fan-Out/Fan-In!
At a glance, the two patterns look very similar and they are often used interchangeably in conversations. So in this post, let’s compare them and see how they differ.
If you’re using CDK, you should use L3 constructs to encapsulate common patterns and best practices in your architecture.
However, sometimes you’d find a 3rd-party L3 construct that does most of what you want, but you need to customize how it configures some of its resources. That can be tricky because you don’t own the source code, and the construct author might not be willing to make the changes you want.
In this article, let me show you an easy and effective way to do this without having to clone and maintain a copy of the construct yourself.
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