#serverless | Serverless (2)

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

Comparing Serverless offerings from Alibaba Cloud and AWS

Last weekend, I had the chance to play around with Alibaba Cloud at the DevOps Meetup in my city. An Alibaba Cloud Solution Architect introduced the platform and was well trained on AWS as well, so he could compare both platforms for us. I also spent so...

A neglected serverless data store: Cloud Directory

Lately, I’ve been having much fun with Amazon Cloud Directory. Three months before, Cloud Directory was all new to me. Today, I am convinced that Cloud Directory is a neglected Serverless data store that deserves much more attention. Let me explain what...

Evolutionary Serverless Architecture: JeffConfg Hamburg 2018 talk

I want to share my JeffConf Hamburg talk with you: Evolutionary Serverless Architecture A system architecture often struggles to adapt to new requirements. Serverless architectures can evolve because the small building blocks are easier to replace. I d...

Serverless pattern: accessing public and private resources

Crossing the chasm between the old world - virtual machines isolated within a private network - and the new world - Serverless making use of publicly accessible APIs only - can be tricky. On the one hand, it is possible to configure VPC access for AWS L...

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...

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 ...

Lessons learned: Serverless Chatbot architecture for marbot

marbot forwards alerts from AWS to your DevOps team via Slack. marbot was one of the winners of the AWS Serverless Chatbot Competition in 2016. Today I want to show you how marbot works and what we learned so far. Let’s start with the architecture diagr...

AWS Velocity Series: Serverless app

The API Gateway provides an HTTPS endpoint that invokes a Lambda function when a request arrives. The diagram was created with Cloudcraft - Visualize your cloud architecture like a pro. As you can see, there is not much infrastructure to set up. To mak...

AWS Velocity Series: Running your application

There are many options when it comes to running an application on AWS. EC2 based, containerized, or serverless. Choosing the best option for your specific use case is important. All options that I present are what I call production-ready: Highly availa...

Designing asynchronous event systems with AWS IoT and Serverless Application Model (SAM)

An event system receives and processes events by following rules that are defined inside the system. All processing happens asynchronously. When an event is sent to the system, it is processed at some point in time, but you will not get an immediate res...

DynamoDB pitfall: limited throughout due to hot partitions

Is your application suffering from throttled or even rejected requests from DynamoDB? Even if you are not consuming all the provisioned read or write throughput of your table? You run into a common pitfall! Read on to learn how Hellen debugged and fixed...

My Opinion on Serverless

I attended Serverlessconf in London to speak with people involved in the Serverless world. Vendors, Framework maintainers, and users like myself. I reflected on the discussed topics and here it is: my opinion. Beta vs StableI can’t believe that busines...

Create a serverless RESTful API with the Serverless Framework powered by API Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDB

This article teaches you how to create a Serverless RESTful API on AWS with the Serverless Framework. DynamoDB is used to store the data. The example’s source code is available on GitHub and can be used to speed up your project. If you are interested i...

API Gateway Custom Authorization with Lambda, DynamoDB and CloudFormation

API Gateway provides an HTTP API endpoint that is fully configurable. You define the HTTP resources (like /user), the HTTP methods on that resources (like POST, GET, DELETE, …) and the integration (e.g. Lambda function) that should be called to process ...

Create a serverless RESTful API with API Gateway, CloudFormation, Lambda, and DynamoDB

This article teaches you how to create a serverless RESTful API on AWS. You will use CloudFormation to define the API Gateway in combination with Lambda to implement the functionality. DynamoDB is used to store the data. The example’s source code is ava...

Serverless Big Data pipeline on AWS

Lambda is a powerful tool when integrating different services on AWS. During the last months, I’ve successfully used serverless architectures to build Big Data pipelines. And I’d like to share my learnings with you. The benefits of serverless pipeline a...

Serverless: Invalidating a DynamoDB Cache

A cache in front of DynamoDB is boosting performance and saving costs. Especially true for read-intensive and spiky workloads. Why? Please have a look at one of my recent articles: Performance boost and cost savings for DynamoDB. Caching itself is easy:...

The Life of a Serverless Microservice on AWS

In this post, I will demonstrate how you can develop, test, deploy and operate a production-ready Serverless Microservice using the AWS ecosystem. The combination of AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway allows us to operate a REST endpoint without the need...