Recently I've been working with Step Functions in my day-to-day work, as well as in my personal projects, and I decided to write this post as a way of articulating the ins-and-outs of Step Functions I've learnt while using them. ...
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Serverless soultions is can be incredibly cheap due to their event-based nature - if your system isn't working, you pay barely anything for it. But if you're not careful, serverless can still result in some nasty surprises when it comes to costs. ...
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Reserved Instances (RIs) are a great way to save some money if you've got consistent AWS EC2 usage, without needing to make changes to your instances! ...
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Is your CloudWatch Logs console full of old log groups? Got 50 pages of Lambda log groups? Don't worry, I have the solution for you! The issue here is not the cost; While there is a cost associated with keeping ...
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Announced this week, CloudFormation Drift Detection has been a long time coming! That being said, it's great when features like this are added to the platform and I get to use them everywhere without any effort on my part! Combined ...
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Got Twitter? Want serverless?Here are my favourite accounts - in no particular order - to keep up to date with the good serverless news and content out there.AWSObviously the AWS staff and accounts are a good source of ...
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Get started with golang and the AWS SAM CLI for local Lambda development. ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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: ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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, ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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. ...
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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, ...
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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: ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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