golang Archives

DynamoDB Streams EventBridge Pipes Multiple Items

Posted on September 10, 2023by Benjamen Pyle

I’ve written a few articles lately on EventBridge Pipes and specifically around using them with DynamoDB Streams. I’ve written about Enrichment. And I’ve written about just straight Streaming. I believe that using EventBridge Pipes plays a nice part in a Serverless, Event-Driven approach. So in this article, I want to explore Streaming DynamoDB to EventBridge Pipes with multiple items in one table.

Several of the comments I received about Streaming DynamoDB to EventBridge Pipes were around, “What if I have multiple item collections in the same table?”. I intend to show a pattern for handling that exact problem in this article. At the bottom, you’ll find a working code sample that you can deploy and build on top of. I’ve used this exact setup in production, so rest assured that this is a great base to start from.

Data Serverless

DynamoDB Streams EventBridge Pipes Enrichment

Posted on August 30, 2023by Benjamen Pyle

I’ve been wanting to spend more time lately talking about AWS HealthLake. And then more specifically, Fast Healthcare Interoperable Resources (FHIR) which is the foundation for interoperability in healthcare information systems. I believe very strongly that Serverless is for more than just client and user-driven workflows. I wrote extensively about it here but I wanted to take a deeper dive into building out streams of dataflows. I’ve been using this pattern for quite some time in production, so let’s have a look at EventBridge Pipes enriching DynamoDB Streams.

Data Programming Serverless

AWS Step Functions Callback Pattern

Posted on August 24, 2023by Benjamen Pyle

Some operations in a system function asynchronously. Many times, those same operations must also happen to be responsible for coordinating external workflows to provide an overall status on the execution of the main workflow. A natural fit for this problem with AWS is to use Step Functions and make use of the Callback pattern. In this article, I’m going to walk through an example of the Callback pattern while using AWS’ HealthLake and its export capabilities as the backbone for the async job. Welcome to the AWS Step Functions Callback Pattern.

Callback Workflow Solution Architecture

Let’s first start with the overarching architecture diagram. The general premise of the solution is that AWS’ HealthLake allows the export of all resources “since the last time”. By using Step Functions, Lambdas, SQS, DynamoDB, S3, Distributed Maps and EventBridge I’m going to build the ultimate Serverless Callback workflow. I feel like outside of Kinesis and SNS, I’ve touched them all in this one.

AWS Step Functions Callback Pattern Architecture

There’s quite a bit going on in here so I’m going to break it down into segments which will be:

Triggering the State Machine
Record Keeping and Run Status
Running the Export and initiating the Callback
Polling the Export and Restarting the State Machine
Working the results
Wrapping Up
Dealing with Failure

Hang tight, there’s going to be a bunch of code and lots of detail. If you want to jump to code, it’s down at the bottom here

Serverless

Lambda Extension with Golang

Posted on June 18, 2023by Benjamen Pyle

For full disclosure, I’ve been writing Lambda function code since 2017 and I completely breezed over the release of Lambda Extensions back in 2020. Here’s the release announcement. At the core of extensions, you have internal and external options. For the balance of this article, I’m going to focus on building a Lambda extension with Golang and lean into the external style approach.

Extensions and Why

Taking a quick step back, why extensions? From an architect level of thinking, extensions give me the ability to have cross-team reuse of code without being tied to a particular language or build process. For something like Node or Python, you could use a standard Layer to package your Lambda reuse. But for something like Golang, where your code is packaged at build time and not run-time, then you sort of have to look at the shared library. I wrote about that here. But what if you wanted to create some shared functionality that was usable regardless of which language you built your Lamabda in? That seems to have some serious appeal for my current projects where teams are using different stacks to build their APIs due to need and comfort.

Observability Serverless

SQS Re-Drive with Golang and Step Functions

Posted on June 10, 2023by Benjamen Pyle

Earlier this week a new set of APIs were released for working with Dead-Letter-Queues and re-drives back to its primary queue. Messaging-based systems have been around for a long time and they are a critical piece of modern Event-Driven Architecture. As I read more about the APIs, I started thinking about how I could build up a sample that could be used for starting a hardened auto-re-drive State Machine that could put messages back on queues protected behind an API Gateway or Event Bridge Scheduler. Below is my take on how I might start thinking through building an SQS re-drive with Golang and Step Functions