Comparing Api gateway -> lambda -> sns with Api gateway -> sns As always, you can jump to the code for this article by going here The Power of Api Gateway AWS Api Gateway is extremely powerful. You don’t have to manage any infrastructure (i.e. no purchasing, scaling, patching), it is capable of handling tens…

Using lambda, cloudwatch, java, lambda layers, lo4j2 and middleware to maximize the usefulness of your logs As always, you can jump to the code for this article by going here. This is a continuation of a previous article where I demonstrated the utility of structured logging in AWS. In that…

Using cloudwatch queries and cloudwatch logs insights to “dive deep” and increase system reliability — As always, you can jump to the code for this article by going here. Yes, I know I’ve written about observability a lot. I’ve written about using x-ray to it’s fullest extent by leveraging traces, annotations, metadata, and exceptions. I’ve written about using emf to generate custom metrics, while giving…

Using AspectJ to avoid repetitive code — In part one of this series we saw how easy it is to use AspectJ to generate latency metrics for how long it takes a method to execute, as well as creating traces by simply adding an annotation or two to a given method. …

Using AspectJ to avoid repetitive code and ensure the usage of best practices — Business Case Pretend you are in charge of a team that accepts orders and sends them out for fulfillment. When your service receives a request for a new order, it validates the address. Rather than build an address validation service, you decide to use a SaaS solution (such as Smarty). While most…

Using event filtering to selectively process events on dynamodb streams — Background In part one of this series, we saw how to replicate the launch instances functionality of aws ec2 control plane using dynamodb. This design ensured three important things: remember that everything fails all the time, so our requests must be retryable we must launch exactly one instance for a given…

Looking deeper into some of the nuances of ec2 (idempotency, retries, conditional writes, time to live, etc) and extrapolating them to other system designs — Let’s pretend we are building a replica of ec2 (or at least part of it). We are focusing on the run instances functionality. Specifically, we will be considering building this command for use from within an iac orchestrator (such as terraform or cloudformation).

Using AWS x-ray to trace and debug events across distributed systems As always, you can skip to the code used in this example, found here Modern Challenges Require Modern Solutions As competitive markets demand more and more reliable business capabilities with less and less downtime, software systems inevitably move from monolithic applications to distributed microservices…

Using EMF together with cloudwatch logs insights for monitoring and debugging your AWS applications. As always, you can skip to the code used in this example, found here What is EMF Embedded metric format (EMF) is an AWS service that automatically processes logs written to cloudwatch. When it detects logs written in a…