#serverless | Serverless (1)

Develop cloud-native applications based on Lambda, API Gateway, AppSync, DynamoDB, Step Functions, and more.

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...

Using DynamoDB Entity Store for cleaner TypeScript code

DynamoDB is a cloud-hosted NoSQL database from Amazon Web Services (AWS). DynamoDB is popular for two main reasons: It scales extremely effectively with little operational effort Since it is a serverless service it is also cheap, simple, and quick to r...

Self-hosted GitHub runners on AWS

GitHub Actions became my tool of choice for automating tasks around software development. To execute jobs, GitHub Actions relies on runners. By default, jobs run on GitHub-hosted runners. But there are good reasons to use self-hosted runners. Reducing ...

Builder's Diary Vol. 4: Serverless Software Engineering

Get insights into the day-to-day challenges of builders. In this issue, Florian Dröge and Lars Hüper from our partner tecRacer share insights into crafting Serverless applications that last. If you prefer a video or podcast instead of reading, here you...

Review: Aurora Serverless v2

I was excited when AWS announced Aurora Serverless at re:Invent 2017. Disappointment followed shortly after. Even after Aurora Serverless became a generally available service in August 2018, it missed important features like multi-AZ deployments and rea...

Serverless in the Enterprise

Is Serverless ready for the Enterprise? I coached developers building their first Serverless applications for a large company recently and want to share my learnings and observations with you. Do you prefer listening to a podcast episode over reading ...

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...

Comparing API Gateways on AWS

Of the different API gateways offered by AWS, which option fits your needs? An API Gateway is “a server that acts as an API front-end, receives API requests, enforces throttling and security policies, passes requests to the back-end service, and then pa...

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...

Resilient event-driven Serverless architectures: Isolate your dependencies

Most systems grow over time. Dependencies are added, and availability suffers. How can we design an event-driven serverless architecture that stays resilient if we add dependencies? In this blog post, I walk you through a real-world application that iso...

Containers vs. Serverless: Thoughts About Your Cloud Strategy

There are many ways to build on AWS. When shaping the strategy for your organization, the following two options should be on your shortlist. Containers: Package your source code into containers and leverage AWS’s fully-managed services, providing the c...

Review: API Gateway HTTP APIs - Cheaper and Faster REST APIs?

An API gateway acts as an API front-end that receives API requests from clients and forwards them to back-end services. Typically, an API gateway offers the following features: Throttling Billing Authentication and authorization Request validation Requ...

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 ...

How we run our blog cloudonaut.io

Now and then you ask us: How do you run cloudonaut.io? Today, I want to share some insights with you about the work and technology behind the scenes of our blog. How do we come up with new topics? How do we host this website? How do we survive to be li...

Review: Amazon Aurora Serverless - A cloud-native and production-ready relational database?

It was never easier to scale your compute layer. EC2 Auto Scaling, Fargate, and Lambda enable horizontal scaling. But how do you scale your database? Use a NoSQL database like DynamoDB, one could say. But what if you don’t want to miss all the advantage...

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 ...

Beginner-friendly mobile backend based on AWS AppSync

Are you looking for a way to build a backend for a mobile or web application on AWS? You should check out the newcomer announced by AWS last year: AWS AppSync which provides a GraphQL based API endpoint. AppSync is serverless and very beginner friendly....

Serverless WebSocket API: API Gateway, Kinesis, Lambda

Nowadays, it is a common approach to use a RESTful API following the synchronous request/response model. But what about asynchronous communication? Or communication that is synchronous but could be modeled asynchronous as well? A WebSocket API based on ...

AWS SLA: Are you able to keep your availability promise?

Are you offering availability of 99.99% or more to your clients? Bad news, you might not be able to keep your promise! Recently AWS announced a bunch of new Service Level Agreements (SLA). Therefore, it is now possible to calculate the expected availabi...

Eat your own dog food: how AWS leverages Serverless

Tim Bray from Amazon gave a great talk at re:Invent 2018 where he shows us how AWS uses Serverless technologies. Did you know that some of the newer services such as API Gateway and EKS are using API Gateway and Lambda to implement the control plane? In...