#lambda | Amazon Lambda (1)

No need for servers. Run your code serverless with AWS Lambda.

How to monetize an API on AWS?

Did you develop an API and want to sell access? Here is how I combined Amazon’s API Gateway (REST APIs) and FastSpring, a payment and subscription platform, to monetize our API for malware scanning. Luckily, you can apply the pattern to any REST API. T...

The Lambda monitoring blind spot

After a customer complained that a feature of marbot, our monitoring solution for AWS was not working as expected, I started debugging the issue. First, I checked the CloudWatch alarms we use to monitor all Lambda functions. All CloudWatch alarms were i...

Migrating to AWS JavaScript SDK v3: Lessons Learned

There’s work coming your way! Node.js 16 reached end-of-life on September 11th, 2023. Also, the AWS Lambda runtime environment for Node.js 18 upgraded to v3 of the AWS SDK for JavaScript. So to upgrade Lambda functions from Node.js 16 to 18, you have to...

Hot off the Cloud: October 2022

What happened at AWS in October 2022? This is our summary and analysis of the announcements that interested us. In November, re:Invent, AWS’ major conference, will take place in Las Vegas. During re:Invent, AWS will announce many new features and servic...

Authentication at the edge with Lambda@Edge and Cognito

For many years, we used a hosting partner for serving the Rapid Docker on AWS Video Course. When someone bought the video course, we created a user account with our partner. The hosting partner provided a website to watch the videos and a login form. Fo...

Unboxing S3 Object Lambda

Amazon S3 Object Lambda offers a way to execute a Lambda function when someone wants to download a file (GetObject) from an S3 bucket. You can implement whatever logic you wish and return any data as the response via the WriteGetObjectResponse API. Keep...

Serving content only to logged-in users with CloudFront Signed Cookies

This blog can be accessed by anyone with access to the free Internet. It’s a public website. But many websites offer a members-only area. You have to log in to get access to parts of the website. In this blog post, I demonstrate how CloudFront can be us...

Programming your CDN: CloudFront and Lambda@Edge

Minimizing the load time of your websites and applications is essential for two reasons. First, search engines rank websites based on page load times. Second, users are impatient and might cancel loading your application to jump to a competitor instead....

Serverless Hybrid Cloud: Accessing an API Gateway via VPN or Direct Connect

Recently, I’ve been coaching a team building a Serverless application. The extraordinary thing about it? We had to create a solution fitting into the hybrid cloud approach of the organization. An essential requirement was that the Serverless application...

How to enable CORS on API Gateway with Lambda proxy integration?

When building single-page applications (SPA), you will sooner or later stumble upon Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS). In short, a browser does only allow requests to the same same origin (domain, protocol and port), that was used for the initial req...

What's the best AWS Compute option for your project?

There are many good reasons why you should move to the cloud and AWS in particular. Benefit from the latest innovations or consume sophisticated technology as a commodity (relational databases, Hadoop clusters, data warehouses, …) to lower your time to ...

Calling AppSync GraphQL from Lambda

AWS AppSync provides an easy way to run a GraphQL API that triggers AWS Lambda functions and other AWS services. If you start with AppSync, you likely have existing systems running next to it. Sooner or later, you want to call the GraphQL API from your ...

Download YouTube videos with AWS Lambda and store them on S3

Recently, I was faced with the challenge to download videos from YouTube and store them on S3. Sounds easy? Remember than Lambda comes with a few limitations: 512 MB of disk space available at /tmp 3008 MB of memory 15 minutes maximum execution time ...

Customized rate limiting for API Gateway by path parameter, query parameter, and more

API Gateway provides a feature to limit the number of requests a client can make per second (rate) and per day/week/month (quota). Rate limiting is very useful to protect your system from resource starvation caused by a client flooding your system with ...

Rich Social Sharing with single page applications hosted on S3 and delivered via CloudFront

You undoubtedly heard about single page applications (SPA) written with frameworks like Angular or React. One of the benefits of this approach is the possibility to host the static files (HTML, js, CSS, etc.) on a simple storage solution like S3 and put...

Introducing AWS Lambda

You don’t need a virtual machine to run your own source code any more as AWS Lambda offers execution environments for Java, JavaScript (Node.js), C#, Go, and Python. All you need to do is to implement a function, upload your source code and configure th...

Your Lambda function might execute twice. Be prepared!

Are you confused when scheduled Lambdas execute twice, SNS messages trigger an invocation three times, your handmade S3 inventory is out of date because events occurred twice? Bad news: Sooner or later, your Lambda function will be invoked multiple time...

Send CloudWatch Alarms to Slack with AWS Lambda

As we all know, things go wrong. That’s why monitoring and alerting are essential topics. Wouldn’t it be nice, if problems in your AWS account would show up in Slack? So you can react quickly while using your favorite messaging tool. In this blog post, ...

Passwordless database authentication for AWS Lambda

Does your serverless application need to access an RDS database? Where do you store the username and the password required to authenticate with the database? Storing the password in plain text within your source code should not be an option. Same is tru...

Engaging your users with AWS Step Functions

Imagine a new user signs up for your service. You send an automated welcome message to your new user explaining how the service works. But what if your user struggles with the first steps? You want to send a second email with additional information. To ...