Event-Driven architecture paired with Serverless technologies are a powerful combo to build applications. But failure does happen and you should expect it to happen. Dealing with that failure is often done by dead-lettering messages into a Dead-Letter-Queue. But what do you do in order to monitor those queues? Most people start manually checking them or perhaps adding a CloudWatch Alarm that triggers an SNS topic. What I’d like to show you is a more advanced version of this monitoring through some code, constructs and AWS CodeSuite of tools. Say hello to monitoring SQS with Datadog.
Tag: serverless
DynamoDB Streams EventBridge Pipes Multiple Items
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.
DynamoDB Streams EventBridge Pipes Enrichment
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.
CategoriesData
AWS HealthLake Exports
In my previous article I wrote about a Callback Pattern with AWS Step Functions built upon the backbone of HealthLake’s export. As much as I went deep with code on the Callback portion, I felt that I didn’t give the HealthLake side of the equation enough run. So this article is that adjustment. Managing exports with AWS HealthLake.
What is HealthLake
AWS HealthLake is a HIPAA-eligible service that provides FHIR APIs that help healthcare and life sciences companies securely store, transform, transact, and analyze health data in minutes to give a chronological view at the patient and population-level. – AWS
My words on that are that HealthLake is a FHIR-compliant database that gives a developer a robust set of APIs to build patient-centered applications. You can use HealthLake for building transactional applications, analyze large volumes of data, store structured and semi-structured information and build analytics and reports.
When building with HealthLake I find it fits in one of two places.
- As the transactional center for your Healthcare application. It is highly patient centered, very scalable and contains APIs for working with each resource. In addition, it provides SMART on FHIR capabilities that make it nice choice for building an application on top of.
- As the aggregation point for many external and internal systems in a LakeHouse style architecture for interopability and reporting. When you’ve got a distributed system with various datababases and you need your data reunited in one location. HealthLake does that. Or if you are pulling in data from various external sources, HealthLake can do that too. I wrote about doing this with Serverless a while back.
AWS Step Functions Callback Pattern
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.
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