Welcome to the Serverless Transformation Newsletter! Every two weeks, we share our favourite resources to help you up your Serverless game and keep on top of the latest developments and best practices.
(Want to start building out your own Serverless architecture but don’t know where to start? We can help.)
Lambda Extensions are a handy way to run ‘operational’ code around your lambda functions – such as monitoring and observability – without changing your core function code. And with this general release, your lambdas can return a response without waiting for the extensions to finish – which means, for example, you can tell your users something’s gone wrong even faster before pushing the error to Sentry. (Not that our code has any bugs…)
Glue Studio is great for quickly building ETL jobs that move and transform data using a drag-and-drop editor. However, when you need more control, dropping down to the level of source code was previously a bit of a pain. Thankfully, with the new code editor, you can add custom code without having to download and modify the scripts.
If you’re never sure which AWS service to use for decoupling your code, check out this handy guide by Anna Geller. Top tip: use SNS over SQS if multiple services should listen to the same event. (Or if you want to go for a fully event-driven architecture, there’s always EventBridge…)
Ever had to build a highly-scalable chat app in just four weeks? Our own Sarah Hamilton did, and here she writes about how AWS AppSync with DynamoDB helped her do so. Relatedly: Yan Cui writes about how to handle client errors with AppSync gracefully.
One of the most interesting revelations from last week’s widespread internet outage was that Amazon uses Fastly as the CDN for their retail website, rather than CloudFront. We were curious to find out why, and this short read by Dan Rayburn (from May 2020) provides some interesting suggestions that are worth considering when choosing your own CDN…
Tweet
Share