Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

July 2019

AWS Step Functions - A User's Guide

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.

The other half of software: what lurks between business logic

In 2016 I was the tech lead for a greenfield project completely devoid of legacy–I held the engineer’s promised land in front of me! I bit off as much new stuff as I could – serverless, event sourcing, functional programming, the whole gambit of cool. This is normally a very bad idea, but I had a team of strong engineers who had prior experience in this stuff, and we were ready to be technology pilots for the broader organization.

Development workflow for serverless applications

Serverless applications require a whole new approach to development workflow. In this article, Lumigo Director of Engineering Efi Merdler-Kravitz details the guiding principles and tools used at a 100% serverless company to ensure the most efficient workflow possible. We are not going to talk about product development flow (no product managers were harmed during the making of this post!).

Serverless Web Apps with AWS and Kotlin

This post takes a look at Kotlin, a relatively new programming language that runs on the JVM, and explores how it can be used to build serverless web apps on AWS using Lambda and API Gateway. In programming language terms Kotlin is a relative newcomer. It was first announced in 2011 by JetBrains, the makers of IntelliJ IDEA, and was designed as a modern successor to Java.

How to monitor Lambda with CloudWatch Metrics

With AWS Lambda, you have basic observability built into the platform with CloudWatch. CloudWatch offers support for both metrics and logging. CloudWatch Metrics gives you basic metrics, visualization and alerting while CloudWatch Logs captures everything that is written to stdout and stderr. In this post, we will take a deep dive into CloudWatch Metrics to see how you can use it to monitor your Lambda functions and its limitations.