If you’ve built a serverless application or two, you’re probably familiar with the benefits of serverless architecture. You take advantage of already built, managed cloud services to handle standard application requirements like authentication, storage, compute, API gateways, and a long list of other infrastructure needs. You can spin up these resources in a matter of minutes and add your own specific business logic (usually as AWS Lambda function code).

Deploying a basic Serverless application has been made easy with the abundance of frameworks out there. If you’re part of a small team or working on a relatively simple project, setting up a basic serverless CICD process is also pretty straightforward, since there is plenty of information on the subject. But when a Serverless application grows it can get very complex very fast.

With Serverless, it’s not the technology that’s hard, it’s understanding the language of a new culture and operational model. Serverless architecture has coined some new terms and, more confusingly, re-used a few older terms with new meanings. This glossary will clarify some of them.

One of the basic ingredients of any software is that before you deliver it to the end user you want to make sure that it works properly. The question is how we need to adapt our approach to testing to take account of the cloud-based, highly distributed nature of serverless architecture.

Like many startups, Stackery is a small team. For this reason, employees often need to go beyond their official job title to ensure everything gets done. As the Stackery product matures and gains more exposure, we’ve seen an increase in customer support inquiries and decided to further refine our customer support process through the creation of a customer support rotation that rotates amongst the software engineers on a weekly basis.

Vydia is dedicated to helping creators gain more control over their audio and video content with a centralized tool for distributing, managing, protecting, and optimizing AV files. Vydia’s software team describes themselves as a “DevOps team first and foremost” delivering new features and updates in a tight loop. They are always in search of new ways to improve and modernize the development process.

AWS Lambda has a cool feature that can be both a blessing and a nightmare for a serverless application, depending on whether it’s properly handled by our code: the retry behavior. A retry occurs when an invocation of a Lambda function results in an error and the AWS Lambda platform automatically invokes the function again, with the same event payload. Before we get deeper, make sure you are familiar with the AWS documentation on the subject.

Back in 2017, I wrote a post titled “3 pro tips for Developers working with Kinesis streams”, in which I explained why you should avoid hot streams with many Lambda subscribers. When you have five or more functions subscribed to a Kinesis stream you will start to notice lots of ReadProvisionedThroughputExceeded errors in CloudWatch.

Welcome to the second edition of Serverless from the Trenches, our series of bite-sized blog posts aimed at developers and DevOps working in serverless. Each article will focus on a different technique or tool to solve a real-world problem and – hopefully – help make your work in serverless more productive. This week we look at how to add Cognito to your integration tests flow, making for true black box testing.