Programming

The Old Faithful: Why SSM Parameter Store still reigns over Secrets Manager

AWS, Security, Serverless

Managing and securing application secrets is a crucial part of any cloud-native application. AWS offers two primary services: the Systems Manager (SSM) Parameter Store and the more recent Secrets Manager. You might think Secrets Manager is the better choice for managing secrets because it’s a newer service and offers more advanced features such as cross-region …

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Implementing Magic Links with Amazon Cognito: A Step-by-Step Guide

AWS, Cognito, Lambda, Security, Serverless

Last week, we looked at implementing passwordless authentication using one-time passwords (OTPs) using Cognito [1]. Another popular passwordless authentication method is magic links where: The user initiates the sign-in process by entering their email in your application. They receive an email with a time-limited URL. The user clicks on the URL and is authenticated into …

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Passwordless Authentication made easy with Cognito: a step-by-step guide

AWS, Cognito, Security, Serverless

Password-based authentication has long been the norm for securing user accounts. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that password-based authentication has several drawbacks. Such as the risk of password theft, the need for users to remember complex passwords, and the time and effort required to reset forgotten passwords. Fortunately, more and more websites have started …

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The biggest problem with EventBridge Scheduler and how to fix it

AWS, EventBridge, Lambda, Serverless

~~~~~~~~~ UPDATE 02/08/2023: EventBridge Schedule now supports automated deletion upon completion. So the problem and solution discussed in this post is no longer relevant. Please see the announcement here. ~~~~~~~~~   The launch of EventBridge Scheduler was one of the highlights for me for re:Invent 2022. Finally, we have a scalable service that lets us …

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3 ways to control concurrency in serverless applications

AWS, EventBridge, Kinesis, Lambda, Serverless, Step Functions

Many software engineering concepts appear in different contexts. Modularity, the single-responsibility principle and separation of concerns are just a few examples that come to mind. They apply equally to how we write code, architect our systems and organize our teams. In this post, let’s discuss three ways we can control the concurrency of a serverless …

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How to handle serverful resources when using ephemeral environments

AWS, Serverless

I’m a big fan of using ephemeral (or temporary) environments when I’m building serverless architectures. I have written about this practice before and I believe it’s one of the most important practices that have co-evolved with the rise of serverless technologies. It takes advantage of the pay-per-use pricing model offered by many serverless technologies such …

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Yes, S3 now encrypts objects by default, but your job is not done yet

AWS, S3, Security

Update 06/04/2023: AWS announced that S3 now enables the “block public access” and “disable ACL” settings for all new buckets. It’s great to see these being enabled by default. But the points I raised in the post still stand. The default encryption (SSE-S3) only protects against situations when someone has stolen data from AWS servers/disks …

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This is why you should keep stateful and stateless resources together

AWS, CloudFormation, Serverless

Update 24/05/2023: As Lee James Gilmore pointed out on Twitter, the unit of deployment of CDK is the CDK app. A CDK app can contain multiple CloudFormation stacks and they can be changed together (in a single commit) and deployed together. And that’s absolutely fine and compatible with what I’m advocating for in this post. …

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The biggest preinvent serverless announcements you may have missed

AppSync, AWS, EventBridge, Lambda, Serverless, SNS

re:Invent is almost upon us. Judging by the things that had been announced ahead of re:Invent, one can’t help but be excited about the main event itself! Here is a list of the serverless-related announcements so far that you should know about. Payload-based message filtering for Amazon SNS Here’s the official announcement. This is arguably the …

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