serverless Archives - Page 6 of 6

Querying AWS Healthlake from Go

Posted on January 9, 2023by Benjamen Pyle

When working with Healthcare data when of the things that’s often mentioned or discussed is “Is your data interoperable?” As a developer and an architect, that’s a really loaded word to me because if I can expose my data over files, APIs or some consistent channel like TCP, then by definition my system is interoperable. Per my Mac dictionary “interoperable” is an adjective defined like this :: (of computer systems or software) able to exchange and make use of information ::

However where things get a little more nuanced is when the definition includes some common healthcare specific formats and more specifically HL7’s FHIR. So when you have this problem, there are certain tools that you need to use. There are several opensource solutions that you could select but when you are an AWS’ customer, you start with AWS first. And they just so happy to have a set of capabilities wrapped around a product called Healthlake.

Infrastructure

Handling “Poison Pill” Messages with AWS Kinesis and Lambdas

Posted on December 29, 2022by Benjamen Pyle

Queues and streams are fundamentally different in how they handle readers consuming their information.

With an SQS Queue you can have many consumers but generally one consumer will win reading the message and in the event of success the message is purged from the queue or upon failure that message is returned back to the queue. It technically doesn’t get deleted, yet the its visibility property is changed. Hence why the VisibilityTimeout on the queue matters. If your code processes messages in more time than that property then you are going to get messages that constantly get put back on the queue for retry.

Serverless

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.