Founded by twin sisters in San Francisco well before the city became the focal point of tech, Benefit has been a refreshing and innovative answer to cosmetics customers for over 40 years. The company is a major player in this competitive industry, with a presence at over 2,000 counters in more than 30 countries and online. In recent years, Benefit has undergone a swift digital transformation, with a popular eCommerce site in addition to their brick-and-mortar stores.

The whole internet is abuzz over GitHub Actions, if by ‘whole internet’ you mean ‘the part of the internet that is obsessed with serverless ops’ and by ‘abuzz’ you mean ‘aware of‘. But Actions are a bit surprising! GitHub is a company that has famously focused on doing a single thing extremely well. As the ranks of developer-tooling SaaS companies swells by the day, you would think GitHub would have long ago joined the fray.

We have a running joke at Stackery regarding our tiny little gong that’s used to mark the occasion when we get a new customer. And while I’m all about the sales team celebrating their successes (albeit with a far-too-small gong), I felt like the dev team needed its own way to commemorate major product releases and iterations.

Welcome savvy builder. If you’ve made it to our corner of the Internet and headed to re:invent, you are in the right place. We want you to leave Las Vegas with the savvy to choose how and when to apply the growing menu of serverless capabilities to your initiatives. To help you, we’re sending our serverless-first engineers to Las Vegas with three goals.

I was recently doing some work related to AWS Cognito, which I wasn’t previously familiar with, and it turns out to be pretty interesting. Stackery has a cloud-based app for building and deploying serverless applications, and we use Cognito for our own authentication. The thing I was trying to do was hard to figure out but easy once I figured it out, so I’ll include some code snippets related to my specific use case.

If you’ve dealt with Lambda functions you may have run across the RequestEntityTooLargeException - * byte payload is too large for the Event invocation type (limit 131072 bytes) AWS Lambda exception that occurs when a function is invoked with too large of a payload. Current AWS Lambda limits are set at 6 MB for synchronous/RequestResponse invocations, and 128 K for asynchronous/Event invocations.