CategoriesServerless

Lambda Extension with Golang

For full disclosure, I’ve been writing Lambda function code since 2017 and I completely breezed over the release of Lambda Extensions back in 2020. Here’s the release announcement. At the core of extensions, you have internal and external options. For the balance of this article, I’m going to focus on building a Lambda extension with Golang and lean into the external style approach.

Extensions and Why

Taking a quick step back, why extensions? From an architect level of thinking, extensions give me the ability to have cross-team reuse of code without being tied to a particular language or build process. For something like Node or Python, you could use a standard Layer to package your Lambda reuse. But for something like Golang, where your code is packaged at build time and not run-time, then you sort of have to look at the shared library. I wrote about that here. But what if you wanted to create some shared functionality that was usable regardless of which language you built your Lamabda in? That seems to have some serious appeal for my current projects where teams are using different stacks to build their APIs due to need and comfort.

CategoriesServerlessObservability

SQS Re-Drive with Golang and Step Functions

Earlier this week a new set of APIs were released for working with Dead-Letter-Queues and re-drives back to its primary queue. Messaging-based systems have been around for a long time and they are a critical piece of modern Event-Driven Architecture. As I read more about the APIs, I started thinking about how I could build up a sample that could be used for starting a hardened auto-re-drive State Machine that could put messages back on queues protected behind an API Gateway or Event Bridge Scheduler. Below is my take on how I might start thinking through building an SQS re-drive with Golang and Step Functions

CategoriesServerless

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.

CategoriesServerless

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.

CategoriesInfrastructureServerless

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.

CategoriesServerlessProgramming

Choosing Go when Building Lambdas

So you’ve decided to build your first or your 500th Lambda function with AWS. Congratulations! That in and of itself is a great decision that will set you up on a solid foundation for operational excellence, ease of maintenance, flexibility to extend and a whole host of other positives that come along with Serverless. Now, what language are you going to develop this new Lambda in? I’ve been a tremendous proponent for choosing Go when building Lambdas and I’d like to walk you through why.

CategoriesInfrastructureServerless

Testing Step Function workflows Locally

If you’ve been following along for a bit, you know how much of a fan of Serverless I am. And even more specifically, how much I love Step Functions. If you have the problem of needing a highly available workflow coordinator, you can’t do any better than picking it as your tool of choice. However, I am also unapologetically a fan of local development. And this is one place where I feel that Step Functions falls a little bit. So follow me along on this epic towards being able to test Step Function workflows locally.

CategoriesServerless

Intersection of Technology and People

Admitting my Bias

There is so much buzz in the Serverless world about scalability, reliability, and nano-sized functions with the ability to generate faster speeds to market. These points are no doubt true and there are many other things to consider when picking the tech for your next project. But I’d like to take a look at why choosing Serverless is about more than those attributes. It can be about the intersection of technology and people.

I can admit my bias upfront that I love and often choose Serverless first. And in my current role, my teams are heavily leveraging Lambdas, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, DynamoDB and many other AWS Serverless stalwarts. But what I want to leave you with below is that choosing serverless when building a product can elevate your solutions thinking and center your thoughts around problem-solving which leaves the undifferentiated heavy lifting to be the focus of your partner in AWS.

CategoriesServerless

Cross-Origin Allowlist with API Gateway

Cross-Origin Allowlist with API Gateway

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing is a topic that most developers don’t generally like to talk about it. It is usually a higher-level item that “is just in place” when building and shipping APIs. However, allowing * is not always the best approach. That is a touch outside of this article but I do want to walk through how to build a Allowlist of domains approach with API Gateway and Lambda.

CategoriesDataServerless

Event-Driven Serverless Data Architecture

The Preface

Follow me along on a journey toward data unification. One of the applications that I work on is a modern, distributed, event-driven and serverless-based architecture. What that means is that data is completely isolated from other components and evolves at a different pace from its neighbor. This type of architecture is achievable using Event-Driven Serverless Data Architecture with AWS.

This is great if you are building a transactional system. You’ve got isolation, independent component scaling and feature delivery that goes at the pace of the team working on it. So what could be wrong? What possibly isn’t good about this outside of the fact that modern distributed systems are complex? The big issue is that all of this data is not in the same place.

What’s the point in having everything in the same place you ask? Simple. Source of truth for:

  • Reporting
  • Public APIs
  • Versioning
  • Audits
  • Data Sandbox

These are just the tip of the iceberg. When you are working on a big system with lots of data, having a single ingress and egress point is important when you are talking about the above.