AWS Lambda has gained good traction for building applications on AWS. But, is it really the best fit for all use cases? Since its introduction in 2014, Lambda has seen enthusiastic adoption – by startups and enterprises alike. There is no doubt that it marks a significant evolution in cloud computing, leveraging the possibilities of the cloud to offer distinct advantages over a more traditional model such as EC2.
Many clients have asked me, “When do I use DynamoDB streams vs Kinesis?” It’s a great question, since both services are very similar, especially when you process their records with Lambda functions. So let’s break it down and look at the key differences between Kinesis and DynamoDB streams. When it comes to streaming and processing real-time events on AWS, Kinesis is the de facto solution in AWS.
Seed is a fully managed CI/CD pipeline for Serverless Framework applications. In one of our previous posts we looked at how to build a CI/CD pipeline for Serverless apps on AWS with CircleCI. Today, we’ll look at how to do the same with Travis CI. The purpose of these posts is to dive deep into real-world CI/CD setups, something which most of the tutorials out there skip. We’ll try to illustrate how to set up something similar to Seed but using Travis CI instead.
Did you know that CloudFormation tags don’t automatically propagate to some resource types? Chief among these are CloudWatch log groups, which means you can’t include them in your cost monitoring (via cost allocation tags) among other things. The only way to tag CloudWatch log groups right now is via API calls. You can do this with the AWS SDK, or using the AWS CLI. This is hugely inconvenient!
Observability is a common challenge for serverless applications and we believe Lumigo is perfectly positioned to help you tackle this problem. As such, I’m pleased to announce that we have published a new Serverless framework plugin to make it even easier for you to get started.
Since Lambda added SQS as an event source, there has been a misconception that SQS is now a “push-based” service. This seems true from the perspective of your function because you no longer have to poll SQS yourself. However, SQS itself hasn’t changed – it is still very much a “poll-based” service. The difference is that the Lambda service is managing the pollers (and paying for them!) on your behalf.
In our last post, we covered CloudWatch Metrics in a great deal of detail. We looked at how we can use it to monitor the health of our Lambda functions, including setting up service dashboards as well as alerts. In this post, we will focus on its sister service – CloudWatch Logs. We’ll see how it works and how to get the most out of it.
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!
