Understanding the differences between the various event types and their retries is important, because it will change how you design and code your application. If you're developing a serverless application in Lambda, you will have to deal with retries. They ...
Read More

UPDATE: AWS announced over the weekend that they're enhancing protections against this kind of scenario. A few weeks ago a security researcher shared it was possible to hijack domains that were misconfigured in Amazon CloudFront, Amazon's CDN-as-a-service. Being able to ...
Read More

I was getting my hands dirty with AWS SAM Local and Golang based functions the other day (since golang function support was added in 0.2.7), and ran it to a basic - but cryptic - error that took ...
Read More

CodeCommit access via federated credentials is the way to go. You're not using long-lived Access Keys are you? Bad engineer! Stop that! For better or worse, federated IAM access requires you to use the HTTPS endpoint with a git credential ...
Read More

Last week I presented to the Sydney AWS Lambda User Group about serverless operations aka. LessOps. Here are the slides I used to talk about the good - and less good - things about operating a serverless application: Serverless Operations ...
Read More

With so much buzz around serverless at re:Invent 2017, I thought it would be a good time to highlight the best places and resources to find AWS-specific serverless information: AWS re:Invent 2017 Serverless Breakout Sessions on YouTube This ...
Read More

You can now visualise your own EC2 security groups using edge bundling - No scripts, no downloads! This small web application takes an AWS access key id and secret access key to make requests against your AWS account. The application ...
Read More

I'm fortunate enough to be heading back to AWS re:Invent this year. If tickets aren't sold out by the time you read this, they will be soon. Here's a few things I learnt from last year that would've helped: ...
Read More

The AWS blog gave me a very pleasant surprise the other day: AWS SAM Local is in public beta. It's a golang CLI project that's distributed via NPM. SAM Local leverages Docker to run you code in local containers, and ...
Read More

UPDATED: Added examples from submissions. I love seeing real-world serverless applications. This post is a collection of the best examples, break-downs, and deep-dive articles and videos I've come across recently: TubeAlert An epic deconstruction of a serverless application with lots ...
Read More

I really enjoy my weekly newsletters and I didn't get to go to ServerlessConf in Austin last week, so instead I started the Severless Weekly News! I'll go in to how I build it in a future post (serverless, of ...
Read More

I see a lot of questions being asked around the sticks about which AWS certification to get. It seems like even those who work with AWS regularly aren't sure about the various different certifications and which one they should get, ...
Read More

Now that the Lambda Proxy Integration is a thing for API GW, performing redirects is a much simpler - and more sane - thing to do in your Serverless service. In my own case I was wanting to do a ...
Read More

A few months ago I was approached to write a book about AWS for Packt Publishing. I'm pleased to announce that the AWS Administration Cookbook is mostly written, and the final few chapters will be done soon. It will be ...
Read More

We were having a discussion over on the Serverless Forum about CloudFormation resources, and I came up with this AWS CLI command that I could see myself using later, so I'm going to put it here so I don't forget. ...
Read More

Over the weekend I discovered a cool repo on GitHub: ryanmcdermott/clean-code-javascript. It's a great summary of Uncle Bob's timeless programming classic Clean Code, in JavaScript. Clean Code has definitely been one of the most impactful books on my programming, ...
Read More

While watching the Building Complex Serverless Applications talk from re:Invent 2016 I discovered The Serverless Compute Manifesto. I couldn't find it reproduced in an easy to use format, so here it is for future reference - yours and mine: ...
Read More

I've just finished my first Serverless screencast. Check it out and let me know what you think: It's my first screencast, so there's lots of things that I'd like to fix in it. Even so, it was a great learning ...
Read More

I hang out a lot in the Serverless forum and Gitter - I just like talking about this new-fangled FaaS (Functions-as-a-Service) thing. A common misconception that keeps coming up is that it's not an appropriate choice for things that use ...
Read More

I've been really enjoying playing with the Serverless framework recently. The FaaS (Function-as-a-Service) model really appeals to me, and I think it's going to be A Big Deal in the future. The Serverless framework makes interacting with AWS Lambda, API ...
Read More

I've been playing a lot with the Serverless framework since they moved from v0.x to v1 (which is currently in beta). I really like the direction they've taken it, and have been using it for my own projects. One ...
Read More

DevOps is the new Big Data. People aren't really sure what it means exactly, but that isn't going to stop them putting it down as a requirement for a job... I have been doing development and operations since before it ...
Read More

When I first used CloudWatch Events I knew just enough to get the job done. As I've played with it more, I've realised that the official docs don't do a great job of explaining the underlying concepts involved, even though ...
Read More

Just before the AWS Summit last month I attended the Inaugural Sydney Serverless Meetup. I gave a lightning talk introducing Apex for managing Lambda functions. I must admit I thought it was going to be a meetup about the Serverless ...
Read More

Paying for idle is so 2015 I had some Lambda Functions that scraped data from the Internet, and stored them in a database. Locking-down the RDS Security Group to only Lambda Functions turned out to be more complicated than I ...
Read More

Here's my first attempt at visualising AWS EC2 Security Groups in something other than a boring table: You can mouse over a SG name to see it's inbound (green) and outbound (red) connections to other groups/IP ranges. What is ...
Read More

I had read about Apex and knew I wanted to try it out. The new announcement about v0.5.0 gave me the motivation to do it. The newly announced features are: Client-side hooks for building, linting, testing, etc Ignore ...
Read More

While it was really cool when AWS Lambda scheduled functions were announced, it was a bit of a let-down to find out they could only be done via the web console. The benefit of having scheduled custom jobs without having ...
Read More

I've seen a lot of questions about how to best approach the various AWS certifications while hanging out on r/aws. Since I recently got my SysOps Administrator - Associate certification after working with AWS for six months, I'm in ...
Read More