A platform-agnostic way of accessing credentials in Python. Even though AWS enables fine-grained access control via IAM roles, sometimes in our scripts we need to use credentials to external resources, not related to AWS, such as API keys, database credentials, or passwords of any kind. There are a myriad of ways of handling such sensitive data. In this article, I’ll show you an incredibly simple and effective way to manage that using AWS and Python.

Serverless provides benefits far beyond the ease of management…it strongly encourages “useful” engineering practices. Here’s how. It’s hard to determine what can be considered a “good” or “bad” engineering practice. We often hear about best practices, but everything really boils down to a specific use case. Therefore, I deliberately chose the word “useful” rather than “good” in the title.

In this article, I’m trying to shine some light on the AWS Lambda Layers, Lambda Extensions, and Docker image for Lambda, in order to add third-party code to Lambda. When and how to use which method, and when to mix and match? Due to the circumstances in 2020, many software releases were postponed, and so the industry slowed its development speed quite a bit. But at least at AWS, some teams got updates out of the door at the end of the year. AWS Lambda got two significant improvements.

In this article, we will build a CI/CD pipeline with the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) and debug a test it using Dashbird’s observability tool. In 2021, continuous integration and continuous delivery, or short CI/CD, should be part of every modern software development process. It helps deliver new features and bug fixes much faster.

Serverless has been gaining more and more traction over the last few years. The global serverless architecture market was estimated at $3.01 billion in 2017 and is expected to hit $21.99 billion by 2025. The number is reflected in the increasing amount of enterprises starting to look for ways of decoupling their current monolithic architectures and migrating their stack to serverless. Read more about the popular enterprise use cases for AWS Lambda.

Monitoring vs observability – is there even a difference and is your monitoring system observable? Observability has gained a lot of popularity in recent years. Modern DevOps paradigms encourage building robust applications by incorporating automation, Infrastructure as Code, and agile development. To assess the health and “robustness” of IT systems, engineering teams typically use logs, metrics, and traces, which are used by various developer tools to facilitate observability.

In this handbook, we’ll explain the AWS Step Functions Input and Output manipulation. There’s plenty to talk about AWS Step Functions. There are numerous articles available online talking about AWS Step Functions ever since Step Functions were introduced in 2016. Most of these articles might make you think that Step Functions are actually an extension of the Lambda function, allowing you to combine several Lambda functions to call each other.

Although AWS Lambda is a blessing from the infrastructure perspective, while using it, we still have to face perhaps the least-wanted part of software development: debugging. In order to fix issues, we need to know what is causing them. In AWS Lambda that can be a curse. But we have a solution that could save you dozens of hours of time. TL;DR: Dashbird offers a shortcut to everything presented in this article.

Recently, I saw a video from a really great developer and YouTuber, Ben Awad, where he discussed Serverless not make any sense. Even though I really enjoyed the video, I am not sure if the author’s points about serverless are entirely valid, and I want to discuss them in this article.