Beyond Silos — Achieving Observability Excellence in Multi-Team Serverless Environments Log aggregation and analysis are critical in multi-team serverless environments. These capabilities enable identifying domain issues, monitoring application performance across collaborative projects, and extracting insights for data-driven decisions. However, distributed systems with eventual consistency pose challenges like tracking asynchronous events, ensuring data integrity, and maintaining real-time visibility due to their decentralised and stateless nature. To illustrate the utilisation of observabil ..read more

When building large distributed systems, interacting successfully with external systems can introduce large amounts of complexity into your system design. Consider a company’s software system that interacts with a third-party provider. A plan is made to move to a new provider which is faster and cheaper. An issue is identified that the protocol to interact with the old third-party provider is not compatible with the new one. The company will need to modify multiple sections of its software to interact with this new provider. They want to implement a design principle to account for this an ..read more

EventBridge Pipes is a powerful new tool from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that makes it easy to move data between sources and targets while filtering, enriching and even transforming the data en route. EventBridge used to be a singular product, the EventBridge Bus. However, in the last few months, AWS has expanded it into a complete product suite for building event-driven applications, including; EventBuses, Pipes and Schedulers. High-scale messaging systems are traditionally complex to build. They must be able to handle a high volume of messages concurrently whilst ensuring that messages are n ..read more

Meaningful logging is a must for Serverless architectures, and of course, there are a lot of third-party tools that can help with observability. However, there is a lot of untapped potential in using Cloudwatch Dashboards and Alarms. This article will show you how to have powerful observability, natively, across your project. Current observability solutions in Serverless Serverless (and almost all cloud) projects comprise multiple services carrying out different functions to form your product. This modularity is incredibly powerful, but by its very nature makes it hard to track any issue ..read more

Enabling the Optimal Serverless Platform Team — CDK and Team Topologies We want our Cloud teams to be secure, fast, stable, reactive, autonomous and of course… happy & fulfilled! However, this isn’t always the case… Serverless, and related technologies, have enabled teams to move faster, reduce total cost of ownership and overall empowered developers to have greater ownership of the systems they build. However, Serverless is not a silver bullet — there is an organisational side that’s key to unlock the full benefits of Cloud. When it comes to team structure as we adopt more Clou ..read more

Using Amazon Rekognition to rapidly build an image object detection feature at a high-scale social media startup. The ability to gather information from images has profound business potential. And, well, it can also just be fun. In this article I’ll outline how we used Amazon Rekognition to rapidly build an image object detection feature for a social media startup. What is Image Object Detection? Simply put, image object detection is the process of detecting and extracting information about entities in a given image. This involves detecting objects, activities, places, animals, prod ..read more

The AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) is a framework that lets you define your Cloud Application resources using familiar programming languages such as TypeScript or Python. This allows developers familiar with these languages to apply their existing knowledge and get to grips with building Cloud infrastructure rapidly. By using provided high-level components, built with best practices as default, we can abstract much of the complexity away from the developer, and by encapsulating resources into constructs we can continue this practice as our resources scale in size and complexity. What is Infr ..read more

When building serverless applications, many people choose to use Step Functions to orchestrate work flows within their system. They are popular for their ability to configure direct service integrations, as well as manage failures, retries, parallelisation, and other features. The states which make up a Step Function A Step Function is a state machine, where states have types, namely: Task state: for performing an operation Choice state: for choosing which branch of the state machine to execute next Fail/Succeed state: for ending the execution of a state machine Pass stat ..read more

Announcing the Alpha Release of sls-test-tools — Bringing Simplicity to Serverless Integration Testing Today we’re very pleased to announce the alpha release of sls-test-tools — providing a range of utilities, setup, teardown and assertions to make it easier to write effective and high quality integration tests for Serverless architectures on AWS. We have a strong view that, where possible, testing of Serverless architectures should happen on the real underlying services, avoid mocks wherever possible. Although Serverless allows for ephemeral (short-lived) architectures to be deployed, m ..read more

Serverless webhooks — Designing Lift This article is part of a series on Lift, an open-source project that simplifies deploying serverless applications. As introduced in previous articles, Lift is a Serverless Framework plugin that simplifies deploying serverless applications. At some point, every application needs to interact with an ecosystem of 3rd party SaaS providers. Implementing a webhook HTTP endpoint in your application allows this ecosystem of external applications to notify you. Your application can then react to those notifications and perform tasks accordingly. As we approach the ..read more