Imagine the situation. It’s 3 AM, and PagerDuty alerts you that the number of 5XX errors has spiked. Something’s wrong. Strange, there are no error logs… Fortunately, we have enabled X-Ray tracing and I’m able to quickly find one of the traces for these 5XX errors. Sadly, the traces don’t offer any explanation for the …
Over the last 6 months, we have made the Serverless Step Functions plugin better and more useful. Here are the most impactful changes, in case you missed it! Support for intrinsic function One of the main pain points of using the plugin has long been that you needed to use fully-formed ARNs. As of v1.18.0 …
ICYMI: five updates you’ve missed about Serverless Step Functions Read More »
I spent time with a client this week to solve an interesting problem – to adjust the number of concurrent requests to a downstream service dynamically based on response time and error rate. This is a common challenge when integrating with third parties, so we decided to share our approach so others might benefit from …
A self-healing Lambda function that adapts its throughput based on performance Read More »
Over the last few weeks I have been working with a very ambitious client – Solve, who is building a new murder mystery game. They are doing some really cool things technically, and are building an entirely serverless stack. While working with Solve I have spent a lot of time with AWS SAM. That experience …
AWS SAM + Cloudformation macros, a patch made in heaven Read More »
Over the past year, the Serverless Application Repository (SAR) service has improved a lot. I have grown to enjoy it more and more, and have contributed a few applications myself: lambda-janitor: cron job to delete old, unused versions of all Lambda functions in the region to free up storage space. auto-subscribe-log-group-to-arn: subscribes new and existing …
How to include Serverless Repository apps in serverless.yml Read More »
CloudFormation supports a number of intrinsic functions and Fn::Join (or !Join) is often used to construct parameterised names and paths. The Serverless framework, for instance, uses it extensively. A quick look in a CloudFormation it generates I can see Fn::Join used for: IAM policy names IAM role names IAM principals API Gateway URIs Resource ARNs and …
CloudFormation protip: use !Sub instead of !Join Read More »
A while back I wrote about using DynamoDB TTL to implement ad-hoc scheduling. It generated some healthy debate and a few of you have mentioned alternatives including using Step Functions. So let’s take a look at some of these alternatives, starting with the simplest – using a cron job. We will assess this approach using the …
Using CloudWatch and Lambda to implement ad-hoc scheduling Read More »
Ok, ok, AWS hasn’t announced a whole new class of intrinsic functions for you to use in CloudFormation. But if you’re using the Serverless framework then I have a treat for you :-) I created a plugin for the Serverless framework that lets you use a number of custom Fn:: functions in your serverless.yml. The …
Introducing… CloudFormation extrinsic functions ;-) Read More »
It’s been a while coming, but I’m excited to announce that my new course – Complete guide to AWS Step Functions – is now live! You can browse the curriculum and purchase the course here. The first two chapters are free to everyone. The course is approximately 2 hours in length and covers everything you need …
With serverless, you delegate the responsibility of running your infrastructure to a platform provider as much as possible. This frees your engineers to focus on building what your customers want from you—the features that differentiate your business from your competitors’. For this philosophy to work, however, the platform needs to not only give you the …
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