I’ve been hitting the gas pretty hard on Rust lately and doubling down on my desire to see more Rust in Serverless. I feel strongly though that balance is important in anything in life. For every period of intense push, there needs to be time to pause and reflect. So for this article, I want to take a step back and hit some brake on my Rust content by looking at what’s really important when building Serverless applications.
Category: Serverless
CategoriesServerless
Blazing Fast Change Data Capture with DynamoDB Streams and Rust
Propagating changes in an event-driven system can be accomplished in many different ways with many different tools. Do I work with transaction logs, put events on an event bus or do something else? Fortunately, when storing data in AWS’ DynamoDB I can take advantage of the DynamoDB streams feature. DynamoDB Streams gives me an iterator that I can read from to publish or process item-level changes outside of the transaction of persisting the data from the originating client. I’ve written about streams before, here, here and here but in this article I want to look at DynamoDB Streams and Rust.
My Personal Serverless Rust Developer Experience. It’s Better Than You Think
One of the things that can be difficult when starting with a new technology, framework or tool is where to get started. That “get started” can mean a great many things to many people. Over the past 6 months or so, I’ve been learning and deploying Rust into production in AWS. I’ve gone back and forth on my workflow and wanted to put together a Serverless Rust Developer Experience article. As you begin with Rust and Serverless, this should give you some good places to get started.
CategoriesServerless
Cognito Starter Kit with Rust and Lambda
Welcome to the Cognito Starter Kit with a large helping of Rust seasoned with some CDK. I’m a big believer in Cognito and the power it gives builders to customize the various signup and authentication workflows. With Cognito, you get a managed service that has flexible usage-based pricing, numerous hooks and configurations and the ability to use OAuth and OIDC in your workflows. Let’s dig in on the Cognito starter kit.
CategoriesServerless
Rust and Lambda Performance
I made a statement on LinkedIn that if you have enough traffic hitting your Lambdas you might want to consider a different programming language. And if you’ve been reading my content lately, you won’t be surprised that I suggested Rust as that alternative. Some great conversation and questions ensued with one of them suggesting that it would be less elbow grease to stand up Kubernetes with some pods than to improve performance on Lambda. The number thrown out was 250ms at the p75 mark. Fortunately, I had just the workload to test this out. Yes, I already know the answer and you should too at this point. But let’s dig in to Rust and Lambda Performance.
CategoriesServerless
Leveraging the SDK to Publish an Event to EventBridge with Lambda and Rust
Following up on my popular Rust and Lambda article, I wanted to explore how to put an event on an AWS EventBridge Bus. If you aren’t familiar with AWS’ EventBridge, think of it as a highly scalable Event Router with built-in scheduling and data transformation. Let’s take a deeper look at putting events on EventBridge with Lambda and Rust.
Serverless and Agile
Agile and Serverless go together like peanut butter and jelly. Ham and eggs. Coffee and creamer. Tea and milk. Name your favorite combination that resonates best in your head. But the truth is this, Agile and Serverless are a great pair when it comes to delivering value quickly to your customers and sets a foundation for adapting to change. And isn’t that the point?
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Customize a Cognito Access Token with Rust
Identity and Access Management is a critical part of any application. And having a solution that provides customization can also be super important. Take for instance the ability to customize a Cognito Access token to extend functionality.
So many times developers and architects try and roll their own solution and while they do their best to meet OAuth and OIDC specifications, they just tend to fall short. Not to mention they end up with more maintenance and scaling issues than they planned. By leveraging a Serverless Identity Platform like Cognito, developers and architects gain a piece that takes care of the heavy lifting of identity and access for a user base of 1 to essentially as many as needed.
However, until very recently a gap in functionality that honestly allowed some insecure usage existed. Developers were using ID tokens as Access tokens because only those tokens could be customized within a Cognito sign-in workflow. That is no longer the case, as Access tokens can now be customized. I want to take a look at how to customize a Cognito Access Token with Rust.
AWS’ Cognito allows you to implement frictionless customer identity and access management that scales
AWS
CategoriesServerless
Web API with Rust and Fargate
I’ve been spending more and more time with Rust which is perfectly in line with my end-of-year planning. So far, my collection of articles is growing and so are my Rust skills. I can’t profess to be more than a novice at this point, but when has that stopped me from crafting something meaningful around a piece of technology? I hope you find this entry helpful and insightful as I dive into building a Web API with Rust and Fargate.
CategoriesServerless
API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB and Rust
It’s been a few weeks since I last wrote an article on using Rust with AWS. In the span of then and now, AWS officially released their Rust SDK for interacting with many of their services. If there was a barrier before this in my mind about using something in production that wasn’t generally available, that barrier is now gone. I also made a public commitment to building more examples in Rust in 2024 and while I’m a few weeks early, I just can’t contain my enthusiasm for learning this language that feels nothing like anything I’ve worked with before. Let’s take a look at building an API with API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB and Rust.