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.
Category: Infrastructure
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.
EventBus Mesh
I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot lately when bringing EventBridge’s EventBus into some applications. On the current projects I’m working on with existing code, I’ve said 100 times, if EventBridge existed when I started them, I wouldn’t have so much SNS->SQS based code lying around. But such is life when working in evolving tech. Enter the EventBus Mesh
CategoriesInfrastructure
Canary Deployment for AWS Lambda
In life, when working on anything, small and iterative changes give us the best opportunity for feedback and learning. And it’s through that feedback and failure even that we get better. The same thing can be applied to building software. Small, iterative and independent deploys help us as builders understand if we’ve built the right thing and architected it correctly to handle the conditions asked of it. A technique called Canary Deployment is a popular model and the article below will demonstrate how to perform Canary Deployment for AWS Lambda
However, when deploying more frequently, we also need to do it safely. Shipping unfinished or potentially risky changes can have a big impact on our user base. No one wants to be in the middle of using your software only to be interrupted by a bad change. While we can’t be perfect in our ability to predict the impact or blast radius of a change, we can make it so that if the deploy shows signs of not being good, we can roll that change back without the need for human intervention.
CategoriesInfrastructure
Handling “Poison Pill” Messages with AWS Kinesis and Lambdas
Queues and streams are fundamentally different in how they handle readers consuming their information.
With an SQS Queue you can have many consumers but generally one consumer will win reading the message and in the event of success the message is purged from the queue or upon failure that message is returned back to the queue. It technically doesn’t get deleted, yet the its visibility property is changed. Hence why the VisibilityTimeout on the queue matters. If your code processes messages in more time than that property then you are going to get messages that constantly get put back on the queue for retry.