Step Function added support for testing individual states [1] with the new TestState API [2]. Which lets you execute individual states with the following: the state definition an input an IAM role And returns the following: the output of the state the status — whether it succeeded, errored, or caught an error the next state in the execution the error and cause (where applicable) With the TestState API, you can thoroughly test every state and achieve close to 100% coverage of a state machine. So, does this eliminate the need for Step Functions Local [3]? Can we do away with end-to-end tests ..read more

This is the third and final blog post in a series about shifting Observability left. If you have not yet read the first two, you can find the first post here and the second post here. Observability is fundamental to modern software development, enabling developers to gain deep insights into their application’s behavior and performance. Developers can quickly and easily detect and resolve issues by adopting observability tools, ensuring a faster troubleshooting resolution plus more reliable user experiences for end users. However, the plethora of observability tools available can make the selec ..read more

This is the second post in a 3-part series about shifting Observability left. If you have not had a chance to read the first, you can find it here.   In today’s complex microservices deployments, gaining visibility into deployments is vital for optimal system performance and scalability. This has become even more important as the tech industry has moved toward microservice architecture reliance. Navigating through logs has become increasingly complex as requirements have grown. This complexity has presented significant obstacles for developers and development teams in effectively ide ..read more

This is the first post in a 3-part series about shifting Observability left.  When it comes to the reliability and performance of your applications, compromise is not an option in the world of software development. This is where observability can help developers achieve a more robust and scalable infrastructure. To achieve this, developers must embrace an approach to observability, which at its core involves gaining deep insights into the application’s behavior, performance, and, ultimately, the user experience. Unfortunately, most Observability tools were designed and built for Operation ..read more

One announcement that caught my attention in the EKS space during this year’s AWS re:Invent conference was the addition of the Amazon EKS Pod Identities feature. This new addition helps simplify the complexities of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) within Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). EKS Pod Identities simplify IAM credential management in EKS clusters, addressing a problematic area over the past few years as Microservice adoption has risen across the industry.  EKS Pod Identities integrates Kubernetes service accounts with AWS IAM roles, thereby eliminating the cumbersome cre ..read more

At Lumigo, building developer-first tools has always been at the forefront of our approach to troubleshooting and debugging. As developers ourselves, we have experienced firsthand the frustration and intricacies of sifting through logs looking for answers. We’ve also felt the pressure of the clock ticking, with production issues waiting to be resolved and the need for timely answers to surfaced application issues. We understand all too well the need for clarity and the wish for tools that don’t just identify problems but also demystify the ‘why’ behind them. Building on our extensive knowledge ..read more

Lumigo is excited to announce its microservice troubleshooting platform now provides developers and DevOps with the power of OpenTelemetry (OTel) with a single click. Lumigo has long been the leading troubleshooting platform for serverless, but now, users can harness its best-in-class debugging and observability platform for all microservices-based environments. Whether you’re using a serverless, containerized, or Kubernetes-based environment, Lumigo automatically captures and contextualizes all of the data needed to troubleshoot issues in production. The expanded support into containers allow ..read more

Werner Vogel’s keynote is usually the highlight of re:Invent and 2023 is no different. Although there were no noteworthy service announcements, Werner gave a timely reminder that cost is an important non-functional requirement and that we should all strive to be a frugal architect. App Composer comes to VS Code Here’s the official announcement. You can now use App Composer to visualize and design your SAM or CloudFormation templates inside VS Code. This is great if you use SAM or work with raw CloudFormation templates. CloudWatch Application Signals Here’s the official announcement ..read more

AI-related announcements dominate once more. New models for Bedrock. Vector search everywhere, and DynamoDB does a bait-and-switch. Welcome to day 3 of re:Invent 2023. Bedrock FMs goes brrr… Several foundational models are now available on Bedrock, including: Anthropic Claude 2.1 Amazon Titan Text models (Lite & Express) Amazon Titan Multimodal Embeddings model Amazon Titan Image Generator model Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 Meta Llama 2 70B With the recently discovered vulnerability in ChatGPT and rumours of its coding ability being nerfed. All these new models have arrived at a good ti ..read more

We had the opening keynote by Adam Selipsky. If you missed the live stream, you can watch it on YouTube here. Unsurprisingly, so much of the keynote was about AI. Amazon Q Here’s the official announcement. Amazon Q was the biggest announcement from the keynote. It’s AWS’s answer to ChatGPT and it comes in the AWS console, AWS documentation pages as well as in your IDE (through the VS Code plugin, AWS Toolkit). It’s trained on AWS documentation, which ChatGPT is no longer able to crawl thanks to Amazon’s ai.txt. So it should be able to give more up-to-date answers than ChatGPT. It doesn’t have ..read more