A Pyle of Stories

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.

Observability

Tracing HTTP Requests with Go and Datadog

Posted on December 13, 2022by Benjamen Pyle

Small follow up on the last post regarding tracing. I’m a huge fan of Event Driven systems or EDA (Event Driven Architecture) but sometimes you do need to make that synchronous HTTP request in order to fetch more data. Perhaps you are building a “saga” or sometimes events just published what happened and to whom it happened but not specifics about the actual event. For that you need to return back out and fetch more info.

When that happens, you’ll need to use a HTTP Client for making that request. And when doing so, it often sort of turns into a black hole, especially if you have multiple calls to make and you need to distinguish them. Enter again the Datadog libraries. With a simple wrapping of the client, when you make requests WithContext you will get a nicer and prettier display of what the span is. In the case below, I usually like to set the VERB that was requested in addition to the URL. Feel free to use/show whatever makes sense to you

Observability

Observing Lambda with Datadog and Golang

Posted on December 12, 2022by Benjamen Pyle

Instrumenting code for observability upfront is one of the most important things that a developer can do for his/her “future” self. And instrumenting for observing AWS Lambda with Datadog and Golang is actually much simpler than you could imagine So what does that mean?

Conference

re:Invent 2022 re:View

Posted on December 5, 2022by Benjamen Pyle

AWS’ re:Invent ’22 wrapped up last week and I had the awesome opportunity to attend with a colleague. First off we had a fantastic time at all of the sessions, enjoyed the catered breakfast and lunch and then enjoyed nightly meals at all of the Vegas restaurants. I wanted to spend a bit of time in this week’s post to not only recap what we experienced but also share some thoughts that hopefully encourage more people to attend in ’23.

Infrastructure

AWS CDK Pipeline

Posted on November 28, 2022by Benjamen Pyle

Deploying code (assets) into AWS has never been easier than it is right now. A few months back our engineering team made the decision to go all in on AWS CDK and with that included the need/desire for full pipeline automation. We’d been using a smattering of Python/Node, CloudFormation and CodeCommit plus CodePipeline code for all of our services and honestly it works fine once it’s set but getting it set per service became a pain. And honestly making modifications for idiosyncrasies for some of the services just was plain awful. So off we went and during that exploration phase we found the opinionated little construct called AWS CDK Pipelines. Below our walk through what it all meant for us.