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.
Category: Infrastructure
AWS Step Function Versions and Aliases
Up until last week, when you deployed a new version of your State Machine in AWS Step Functions, the old version was gone and the ability to test or rollback was limited by your ability to re-push a previous commit. However, AWS has rolled out Step Function Versions and Aliases so that you can accomplish just those tasks. Creating a unique combination of a version and ASL gives you the ability to use things like Deployment Preferences to accomplish Canary or Linear-type deployments. In the below article, I’m going to walk you through Step Function Versions and Aliases.
Disclaimer
First up, I’m going to be using SAM to build the infrastructure. I think this is the first SAM-based deployment article I’ve written. I know this makes Allen Helton super happy. Second, I know the article from AWS says support for SAM and CDK, but they haven’t rolled this in as of the writing of this article. However, I’m using the SAM Nightly Builds and it does include the Transforms to make this happen. I could spend another few articles describing SAM and perhaps I will dig deeper later, but for now, here’s the AWS Docs on transforms.
Infrastructure as Code
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.
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.