Many articles have been written about AWS Step Functions since it was first introduced in 2016. Most of them create the impression that the service is simply an extension of the Lambda function that allows us to stitch together multiple Lambda functions to call each other. But actually, it is much more than that. Step Functions allows us to design and build the flow of execution of modules in our application in a simplified manner.
In the second part of his series comparing CICD services for serverless applications, Erez Rokah, developer of the open source aws-testing-library, focuses on the popular commercial tool, CircleCI.
Amazon recently announced EventBridge to much fanfare. Although, in truth, it’s a rebranding of the existing CloudWatch Events service, along with some new features. But rebranding might be exactly what this old dog needs!
In 2016 I was the tech lead for a greenfield project completely devoid of legacy–I held the engineer’s promised land in front of me! I bit off as much new stuff as I could – serverless, event sourcing, functional programming, the whole gambit of cool. This is normally a very bad idea, but I had a team of strong engineers who had prior experience in this stuff, and we were ready to be technology pilots for the broader organization.
Serverless applications require a whole new approach to development workflow. In this article, Lumigo Director of Engineering Efi Merdler-Kravitz details the guiding principles and tools used at a 100% serverless company to ensure the most efficient workflow possible. We are not going to talk about product development flow (no product managers were harmed during the making of this post!).
This post takes a look at Kotlin, a relatively new programming language that runs on the JVM, and explores how it can be used to build serverless web apps on AWS using Lambda and API Gateway. In programming language terms Kotlin is a relative newcomer. It was first announced in 2011 by JetBrains, the makers of IntelliJ IDEA, and was designed as a modern successor to Java.
With AWS Lambda, you have basic observability built into the platform with CloudWatch. CloudWatch offers support for both metrics and logging. CloudWatch Metrics gives you basic metrics, visualization and alerting while CloudWatch Logs captures everything that is written to stdout and stderr. In this post, we will take a deep dive into CloudWatch Metrics to see how you can use it to monitor your Lambda functions and its limitations.
