API Gateway is a serverless service by AWS to expose cloud services through private or public HTTPs endpoints. It is used by many serverless teams to connect frontend applications to backend systems in a secure, scalable and seamless way. API Gateway integrates with Lambda, DynamoDB, S3 and a variety of other AWS services. The main issue with API Gateway, so far, was its cost. At $3.50 per million requests, it can be more expensive than Lambda itself.
We did a compilation of all announcements from the AWS re:Invent 2019 that are relevant for Serverless teams, broken down by services.
Up until now, DynamoDB has been the only option of a truly serverless database battle-tested for production environments. Especially after launching the on-demand throughput capacity optimization, is a perfect-fit database engine for serverless projects.
As our application scales and many services are accessing a multitude of data points for each workload needed, it is difficult to ensure each part of the system has the right set of data access permissions. In today’s world, one of the worse nightmares of a software business is data leaking and data privacy issues. Not only it affects the brand reputation, but could also expose the company to heavy fines and other regulatory sanctions.
Cold Starts have been a massive issue with FaaS. In summary, it makes functions slower to startup in some cases. That’s in the opposite way of every effort to improve web applications performance. Many efforts have been made in the recent years to solve AWS Lambda cold starts or educate on handling them. Many have mitigated the issue, but none really solved it. AWS has just made a great progress on the area with the Provisioned Capacity feature announcement.
