First off, this post is not affiliated with AWS or the re:Invent conference. The content below contains opinions and some tips for navigating your first re:Invent conference. I believe that if you are building on AWS and want to elevate your experience, network and opportunities with the platform, re:Invent is something you need to attend and put on your calendar year over year. Let’s get started and talk about attending your first re:Invent conference.
Monitoring SQS with Datadog
Event-Driven architecture paired with Serverless technologies are a powerful combo to build applications. But failure does happen and you should expect it to happen. Dealing with that failure is often done by dead-lettering messages into a Dead-Letter-Queue. But what do you do in order to monitor those queues? Most people start manually checking them or perhaps adding a CloudWatch Alarm that triggers an SNS topic. What I’d like to show you is a more advanced version of this monitoring through some code, constructs and AWS CodeSuite of tools. Say hello to monitoring SQS with Datadog.
DynamoDB Streams EventBridge Pipes Multiple Items
I’ve written a few articles lately on EventBridge Pipes and specifically around using them with DynamoDB Streams. I’ve written about Enrichment. And I’ve written about just straight Streaming. I believe that using EventBridge Pipes plays a nice part in a Serverless, Event-Driven approach. So in this article, I want to explore Streaming DynamoDB to EventBridge Pipes with multiple items in one table.
Several of the comments I received about Streaming DynamoDB to EventBridge Pipes were around, “What if I have multiple item collections in the same table?”. I intend to show a pattern for handling that exact problem in this article. At the bottom, you’ll find a working code sample that you can deploy and build on top of. I’ve used this exact setup in production, so rest assured that this is a great base to start from.
DynamoDB Streams EventBridge Pipes Enrichment
I’ve been wanting to spend more time lately talking about AWS HealthLake. And then more specifically, Fast Healthcare Interoperable Resources (FHIR) which is the foundation for interoperability in healthcare information systems. I believe very strongly that Serverless is for more than just client and user-driven workflows. I wrote extensively about it here but I wanted to take a deeper dive into building out streams of dataflows. I’ve been using this pattern for quite some time in production, so let’s have a look at EventBridge Pipes enriching DynamoDB Streams.
AWS HealthLake Exports
In my previous article I wrote about a Callback Pattern with AWS Step Functions built upon the backbone of HealthLake’s export. As much as I went deep with code on the Callback portion, I felt that I didn’t give the HealthLake side of the equation enough run. So this article is that adjustment. Managing exports with AWS HealthLake.
What is HealthLake
AWS HealthLake is a HIPAA-eligible service that provides FHIR APIs that help healthcare and life sciences companies securely store, transform, transact, and analyze health data in minutes to give a chronological view at the patient and population-level. – AWS
My words on that are that HealthLake is a FHIR-compliant database that gives a developer a robust set of APIs to build patient-centered applications. You can use HealthLake for building transactional applications, analyze large volumes of data, store structured and semi-structured information and build analytics and reports.
When building with HealthLake I find it fits in one of two places.
- As the transactional center for your Healthcare application. It is highly patient centered, very scalable and contains APIs for working with each resource. In addition, it provides SMART on FHIR capabilities that make it nice choice for building an application on top of.
- As the aggregation point for many external and internal systems in a LakeHouse style architecture for interopability and reporting. When you’ve got a distributed system with various datababases and you need your data reunited in one location. HealthLake does that. Or if you are pulling in data from various external sources, HealthLake can do that too. I wrote about doing this with Serverless a while back.