CategoriesInfrastructure

Canary Deployment for AWS Lambda

In life, when working on anything, small and iterative changes give us the best opportunity for feedback and learning. And it’s through that feedback and failure even that we get better. The same thing can be applied to building software. Small, iterative and independent deploys help us as builders understand if we’ve built the right thing and architected it correctly to handle the conditions asked of it. A technique called Canary Deployment is a popular model and the article below will demonstrate how to perform Canary Deployment for AWS Lambda

However, when deploying more frequently, we also need to do it safely. Shipping unfinished or potentially risky changes can have a big impact on our user base. No one wants to be in the middle of using your software only to be interrupted by a bad change. While we can’t be perfect in our ability to predict the impact or blast radius of a change, we can make it so that if the deploy shows signs of not being good, we can roll that change back without the need for human intervention.

CategoriesData

Parsing a Parquet file with Golang

I know it’s 2023, but you can’t get away from processing files. In a world of Events, APIs and Sockets, files still exist as a medium for moving data around. And a very common one at that. In recent years I’ve found myself dealing with Apache Parquet format files. And more specifically I often end up dealing with them coming out of AWS S3. If you are a consumer at all of the AWS DMS product when replicating, you will find out that parquet format is a great way to deal with your data as its designed for efficient storage and retrieval. There aren’t too many options for parsing a parquet file with Golang, but I’ve find a library I really enjoy and the article below will describe how to make the best use of it.

As always, here is the link to the Github Repository if you want to skip ahead

CategoriesServerless

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.

CategoriesServerless

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