AWS Step Functions is a powerful orchestration service that lets you model even the most complex business workflows. It packs a great visualization tool (which you can also use to design your workflows visually now!) and can integrate with many AWS services directly, including Lambda, DynamoDB, and API Gateway. It’s one of my favorite AWS services and I often use it to model complex or business-critical workflows.
Ideally, observability should help you understand the state of your application and how it performs under different circumstances. However, while serverless observability may seem similar to serverless monitoring and testing, the three achieve different goals. Testing helps you check your application for known issues, and monitoring helps you evaluate system health according to known metrics. Observability helps you search and discover unknown issues, providing end-to-end visibility.
AWS announced AWS Lambda Extensions back in October 2020 and I wrote extensively about it at the time – what it is, how it works, and why you should care. In short, Lambda Extensions allow operational tools to integrate with your Lambda functions and run either in-process alongside your code or in a separate process. To better understand the problems they solve and their use cases, please read my previous article.
This piece was originally three different blogs but is now one. In this piece, we lay out three ways you can improve your AWS Lambda performance. So much has been written about Lambda cold starts. It’s easily one of the most talked-about and yet, misunderstood topics when it comes to Lambda. Depending on who you talk to, you will likely get different advice on how best to reduce cold starts.
Here at Lumigo, we are focused on helping customers succeed with serverless and make it easier for them to build and run serverless applications in production. We love serverless and operate one of the largest serverless systems out there as we ingest and process billions of events from our customers. One thing many customers have asked us for help with is to identify misconfigured resources or places where they can improve by following best practices.
We recently released the Lumigo Dynamic Dashboard to help our customers visualize metrics to monitor their environment the way they want.
“Serverless computing is a cloud-computing execution model in which the cloud provider runs the server, and dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application.” — “Serverless Computing”, Wikipedia This mundane description of serverless is perhaps an understatement of one of the major shifts in recent years.
Here at Lumigo, our mission is to help customers succeed with serverless by solving the observability problem and letting them focus on adding business value with serverless technologies. And to do that, we love to eat our own dogfood – be it using the same serverless technologies that our customers use and even using Lumigo to monitor Lumigo itself! That way, we feel your pain and we find solutions to problems that you care about.
AWS AppSync is a fully managed GraphQL service that makes it easy for you to build scalable and performant GraphQL APIs without having to manage any infrastructure! With AppSync, you get a lot of capabilities out of the box. Such as the ability to integrate directly with DynamoDB, ElasticSearch, Aurora Serverless, and Lambda. AppSync also supports both per-request as well as per-resolver caching and has built-in integration with CloudWatch and X-Ray.
Serverless is synonymous with Event-Driven Architecture, where Events are a fundamental block of information that is passed around to execute certain application logic. It is very important that events are delivered to the right destination with expected behavior to make sure the whole serverless application works as one. Events are relayed from one place to another through communication services, either in sequence or in parallel.
