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.
Category: Serverless
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.
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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.
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.
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
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Subscribe SNS to EventBridge Pipes
Legacy Serverless to New Serverless
I’ve been thinking and working hard on how I can start to introduce EventBridge and Pipes into some of my existing applications. Unfortunately, I have SNS in front of a lot of my service code and you can’t natively subscribe SNS to EventBridge Pipes. So I’ve started pondering this idea of how to integrate Legacy Serverless Applications into an ecosystem as new features are developed with more modern Serverless concepts. What I really want is a way to connect SNS to EventBridge Pipes.
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BatchGetItem with Golang
I haven’t had to use the Batch API a great deal over the past few years. When thinking more on it, it’s not that I have anything against the API, it is just that I never had a reason to work with it. However, over the past couple of months I saw that I’d used it twice in a project and with good success. My Golang and DynamoDB content has been doing well so I figured there might be some appetite for this one. And with all that said, I wrote this article highlighting how to use DynamoDB’s BatchGetItem with Golang.
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Streaming DynamoDB to EventBridge Pipes
There is a real push and thought process around moving as much of your boilerplate code up into your serverless cloud components as possible. By streaming DynamoDB to EventBridge Pipes, you can move a large chunk of that boilerplate into the cloud. The thinking is that for things that really don’t differentiate your solution, why not let your cloud provider take care of that for you. Their integrations are well tested, highly scalable and highly available and can be more cost effective as you don’t waste CPU cycles on things like
- Polling
- Error handling
- Data transformation
- Filtering
- Enrichment
- Event management
All of those things “could” be done say in a container or in a Lambda but again, why pay the cycles, write all of this code over and over and over when you can push it up as configuration and as a part of your CDK or SAM code that handles the deployments
As usual, if you want to skip straight to a working sample, here’s the Github repository. Feel free to pull it and then run cdk deploy npx ts-node bin/app.ts and off you go.
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Extending and Customizing the JWT from Cognito via AWS Lambda using Go
I’ve been working a lot lately with Cognito and User Pools in AWS as I’ve been wanting to migrate and existing app into a serverless Identity and Access provider. The promise of Cognito is this “Implement secure, frictionless customer identity and access management that scales” – AWS
Honestly there are so many identity providers out there. This article won’t go into the alternatives and other options out there but will specifically touch upon something that I know was a big question for me when I started with Cognito which was, “how can I customize the private claims in a token?”. So let’s discuss that a little further
As usual, if you want to skip straight to code, feel free to jump over to the repository here
CategoriesServerless
Handling Change with AWS Healthlake
One of the features that I am currently missing with AWS Healthlake is a proper “event-ing” framework. With DynamoDB you’ve got streams. With RDS you can use DMS. But with Healthlake there is no native change data capture mechanism.
Being that I’m only working on event driven architectures these days, I needed a way to be able to handle change. What I’m going to show you below is not “sanctioned” but it is 100% AWS native and continues with the Serverless theme. With that said, here’s the Github Repository if you just want to jump ahead. The CDK code will deploy a Healthlake instance @ $.27 / hr so please run cdk destroy npx ts-node bin/app.ts` when you are done