Serverless Archives

Handling Change with AWS Healthlake

Posted on January 30, 2023by Benjamen Pyle

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

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Mapping AWS State Machine output to API Gateway response with VTL

Posted on January 27, 2023by Benjamen Pyle

This is a continuation of a previous article I wrote regarding zero code workflows creating Cognito users with Step Functions. Part of using State Machines with API Gateway is the dealing with the response and potentially VTL mapping

Goals of this article are to document some of the tips and things that I picked up along the way.

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Creating an AWS Cognito User with an Auto-Incrementing ID using AWS Step Functions

Posted on January 25, 2023by Benjamen Pyle

So there are a couple of interesting topics in here.

I’ve been really leaning into code-less workflows with AWS Step Functions and this State Machine has nothing but native SDK integrations which include
- DynamoDB (Put, Delete, Get)
- Cognito/User Pools (AdminCreateUser)
I’ve run into some legacy code that requires a Username to be a bigint and I don’t want to use an RDBMS so I’m using DynamoDB to generate one for me while also being “race condition” proof

As always, if you want to jump straight to the code, here is the Github repository

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API Gateway Base Path Mapping

Posted on January 16, 2023by Benjamen Pyle

AWS API Gateway is fantastic for sitting in front of AWS resources like load balancers and lambda functions and it’s also really great for setting nice domain boundaries around you application code. Let’s enhance the API Gateway experience a little more by levering Base Path Mapping

For instance, if you have boundary A with a set of REST operations and a boundary B with another set of REST operations you now end up with 2 API Gateways with their own FQDN to access those resources. But what if you want to have those separate, but also roll them up under a common domain name? This is where using API Gateway Custom Domains and Base Path mapping while turning off the default endpoints is so helpful. Article below is going to be pretty concise but also very specific to this problem and show how to use API Gateway Base Path Mapping with CDK

If you want to jump to the code, here is the Github repos

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Creating an Async Integration with AWS Step Functions from API Gateway via CDK

Posted on December 17, 2022by Benjamen Pyle

I often have the scenario where there is a client which makes a request to an endpoint and they just want to make sure that payload was delivered but not necessarily concerned about the outcome. A pretty simple Async operation that happens over a quick Sync channel.

In the past, I’ve done my best either with a Lambda function to make sure it was so simple that it was incapable of failure. As I progressed further into that solution, I started using AWS Integrations to drop the payload off in an SQS Queue and then having a Lambda read that queue and then decide what to do.