Infrastructure as Code is an emerging practice that encourages the writing of cloud infrastructure as code instead of clicking your way to deployment. I feel like “ClickOps” is where we all started years ago when there weren’t any other options. The lessons learned from the inconsistency in human deployment were the genesis for the automation and power that comes from building your cloud stacks as code. Now, many start from IaC as the patterns and practices are well-defined. But instead of re-hashing those commentaries, I want to give you my opinions on why IaC decisions are more than about the tech. Infrastructure as Code is a shift of responsibilities that brings your teams closer together and will help establish a culture of accountability but it will come at a cost.
Caching with Momento and Golang
Caching. Simple. Useful. This architectural topic applies to a serverless app as well as an app with servers. Some functions never need caching, and some benefit from it right as the first user traffics some data through it. I’ve used a variety of caching tools over the years but recently dropped Momento’s serverless cache in a real-time ETL application and I was astonished at how easy it was and how well it is performing. This article is a walk-through of my experience of Caching with Momento and Golang.
Serverless, a CTO’s Perspective
I’ve been following along the past couple of weeks in the “wake” of the article by the Prime Video Team. I’ve seen a lot of rebuttal-type articles by some folks that I respect so I didn’t want to continue to add more of the same opinions in that direction. I think people that have spoken up in support of Serverless architecture have done a fantastic job of articulating why and when not to. What I wanted to write was something in my more official day-to-day title as CTO and why I support Serverless design choices for my teams and customers. So consider this, Why Serverless, a CTO Perspective.
Golang Private Module with CDK CodeBuild
Even experienced builders run into things from time to time that they haven’t seen before and this causes them some trouble. I’ve been working with CDK, CodePipeline, CodeBuild and Golang for several years now and haven’t needed to construct a private Golang module. That changed a few weeks ago and it threw me, as I needed to also include it in a CodePipeline with a CodeBuild step. This article is more documentation and reference for the future, as I want to share the pattern learned for building Golang private modules with CodeBuild.
Custom API Gateway Authorizer with Golang
One of the nice things about building with Serverless is that you can design things in a way that the pieces are composeable. This means that you can put logic cohesively with other like-minded logic and then keep things loosely coupled from other components so that things are easy to change without being too fragile. When building an API, you often need an Authorizer of sorts to validate the token that is being supplied. In this article, I’m going to walk through building a custom API Gateway Authorizer with Golang.