Deploying a basic Serverless application has been made easy with the abundance of frameworks out there. If you’re part of a small team or working on a relatively simple project, setting up a basic serverless CICD process is also pretty straightforward, since there is plenty of information on the subject. But when a Serverless application grows it can get very complex very fast.
One of the basic ingredients of any software is that before you deliver it to the end user you want to make sure that it works properly. The question is how we need to adapt our approach to testing to take account of the cloud-based, highly distributed nature of serverless architecture.
Back in 2017, I wrote a post titled “3 pro tips for Developers working with Kinesis streams”, in which I explained why you should avoid hot streams with many Lambda subscribers. When you have five or more functions subscribed to a Kinesis stream you will start to notice lots of ReadProvisionedThroughputExceeded errors in CloudWatch.
Welcome to the second edition of Serverless from the Trenches, our series of bite-sized blog posts aimed at developers and DevOps working in serverless. Each article will focus on a different technique or tool to solve a real-world problem and – hopefully – help make your work in serverless more productive. This week we look at how to add Cognito to your integration tests flow, making for true black box testing.
Some time ago, the Register published an article titled “Lambda and serverless is one of the worst forms of proprietary lock-in we’ve ever seen in the history of humanity”. It received a lot of attention, and vendor lock-in has become a perennially popular question at conferences. But I’m here to tell you that you are probably thinking about vendor lock-in all wrong when it comes to serverless.
When you’re working with EC2 or containers, VPCs have long been viewed as a must-have. Without them, you will face a constant barrage of attacks aimed at your infrastructure and OS, such as brute force login attacks. But are VPCs still needed when it comes to AWS Lambda? What do you actually get when you put a function inside a VPC? And what are the downsides?
