One of the most common concerns when moving to the cloud is cost. Given that cloud allows you to turn IT costs from CAPEX (long-term investments ex. in hardware equipment and software licenses) into OPEX (day-to-day operating expenses), it’s crucial to choose the right service and estimate it properly. In this article, we’ll look at the common pitfalls and discuss how you can avoid them to truly benefit from the cloud’s elasticity.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Lambda configuration error is one of the most common error messages, and we all know AWS error messages aren’t known for being especially detailed. Oftentimes you will come across other vague error messages like “encoding not enabled,” or “stream is failing,” and depending on the context, this could mean your services could be completely down.

In the 21st century, it’s quite easy to manipulate machines and computers. Our worries are no longer if something is doable, but if something can be perfected. Therefore, we mostly search for new ideas and ways to make our work impeccable. For example, if you’re using a particular software and you realize that the software is excellent, but it could be better in some ways that would allow you to work even faster, you’ll explore the alternatives.

One of the most powerful aspects of AWS is their Identity and Access Management (IAM) service. The obvious aspect of its power is that it controls who can do what with all the resources inside your AWS account. But the non-obvious side is how configurable it is. You can encode permissions that are so finely grained that a Lambda Function could, for example, be given just enough permissions to be able to read one attribute from one record for the current user of a DynamoDB Table.

We recently released the Lumigo Dynamic Dashboard to help our customers visualize metrics to monitor their environment the way they want.

With the volume, velocity, and variety of today’s data, we have all started to acknowledge that there is no one-size-fits-all database for all data needs. Instead, many companies shifted towards choosing the right data store for a specific use case or project. The distribution of data across different data stores brought the challenge of consolidating data for analytics.

I’ve learned a lot about serverless in my first full year at Stackery after joining from the Ops-focused automation company, Puppet. I’ve learned how to deploy rich CMS-backed web applications in a serverless way, how to cast incantations using CloudFormation’s intrinsic functions, but most of all I’ve learned that there’s a lot to learn in order to be successful in AWS.

Mutual of Enumclaw, a 100-year-old insurance company from Washington, modernized their policy processing system in order to reduce TCO and focus on their software and customers - not infrastructure. However, they realized serverless development still presents many DevOps challenges like environments, workflows, documentation and local development.

Last year, we released native tracing for AWS Lambda through Datadog APM to provide deep visibility into serverless functions and surface performance issues such as cold starts and errors, without any added latency. But Lambda functions are only one piece of the puzzle in a rapidly growing serverless ecosystem, which includes message queues, data streams, notification services, and more.

When using services created by other people, it’s often neither obvious what they mean, let alone how to fix them. One of these error messages you might see when using Amazon API Gateway is “encoding not enabled”. The first question here is, what kind of encoding does this error message refer to? The first thought might go into the video or audio encoding direction and lead to a dead-end since you probably didn’t send any audio or video files.

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. It is great if you want to create a cost-effective, on-demand service. You can use it as part of a bigger project where you have multiple services or as a standalone service to do a certain task like controlling Alexa Skill.

How do we get started on monitoring AWS Lambda? Let me first introduce you to the term serverless computing. It doesn't matter if you have been in the tech industry only a few months, or you started writing code when Pascal was still considered cutting edge, you probably would have heard the term serverless computing thrown around in recent times. But what exactly is serverless computing?

One of the serverless best practices is one-purpose functions. You should keep your Lambda functions small and solve exactly one use-case. This way, you can optimize them better and keep potential security problems contained. But creating many small functions can get overwhelming quickly. Even small projects can end up with more than 20 Lambda functions.

What if I told you that a text file could help you tackle the normally tedious and time-consuming task of setting up and managing your AWS infrastructure? Good news. It’s actually easy to do with an AWS CloudFormation template. A typical AWS infrastructure can consist of numerous resources that might need to be managed across different accounts and regions. Setup is often a manual process that can be overwhelming to maintain.