Category: Serverless

CategoriesProgrammingServerless

DynamoDB Streams EventBridge Pipes Multiple Items

Posted on September 10, 2023by Benjamen Pyle

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.

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CategoriesDataServerless

DynamoDB Streams EventBridge Pipes Enrichment

Posted on August 30, 2023by Benjamen Pyle

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.

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CategoriesDataProgrammingServerless

AWS Step Functions Callback Pattern

Posted on August 24, 2023by Benjamen Pyle

Some operations in a system function asynchronously. Many times, those same operations must also happen to be responsible for coordinating external workflows to provide an overall status on the execution of the main workflow. A natural fit for this problem with AWS is to use Step Functions and make use of the Callback pattern. In this article, I’m going to walk through an example of the Callback pattern while using AWS’ HealthLake and its export capabilities as the backbone for the async job. Welcome to the AWS Step Functions Callback Pattern.

Callback Workflow Solution Architecture

Let’s first start with the overarching architecture diagram. The general premise of the solution is that AWS’ HealthLake allows the export of all resources “since the last time”. By using Step Functions, Lambdas, SQS, DynamoDB, S3, Distributed Maps and EventBridge I’m going to build the ultimate Serverless Callback workflow. I feel like outside of Kinesis and SNS, I’ve touched them all in this one.

AWS Step Functions Callback Pattern Architecture

There’s quite a bit going on in here so I’m going to break it down into segments which will be:

  1. Triggering the State Machine
  2. Record Keeping and Run Status
  3. Running the Export and initiating the Callback
  4. Polling the Export and Restarting the State Machine
  5. Working the results
  6. Wrapping Up
  7. Dealing with Failure

Hang tight, there’s going to be a bunch of code and lots of detail. If you want to jump to code, it’s down at the bottom here

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CategoriesServerless

Building Serverless Applications with AWS – Observability

Posted on August 19, 2023by Benjamen Pyle

Building Serverless applications can feel a bit overwhelming when you are first getting started. Sure, Event-Driven Systems have been around for many years but this notion of using managed services to “assemble” solutions vs a more traditional “plugin” style architecture might throw you for a loop. Continuing in the series of Building Serverless Applications with AWS, let’s have a look at the “Debugging and Troubleshooting” aspect.

Series Topics

  1. Data Storage Choices
  2. Building the Application (Fargate/Containers vs Lambda)
  3. Handling Events
  4. Exposing the API (if there is one)
  5. Securing it all, including the API
  6. Debugging and Troubleshooting in Production
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CategoriesServerless

Building Serverless Applications with AWS – Security

Posted on August 12, 2023by Benjamen Pyle

Building Serverless applications can feel a bit overwhelming when you are first getting started. Sure, Event-Driven Systems have been around for many years but this notion of using managed services to “assemble” solutions vs a more traditional “plugin” style architecture might throw you for a loop. Continuing in the series of Building Serverless Applications with AWS, let’s have a look at the “Security” aspect.

Series Topics

  1. Data Storage Choices
  2. Building the Application (Fargate/Containers vs Lambda)
  3. Handling Events
  4. Exposing the API (if there is one)
  5. Securing it all, including the API
  6. Debugging and Troubleshooting in Production
Continue reading “Building Serverless Applications with AWS – Security”