API gateways are part of every modern microservice architecture. As their name already suggests, they are the gateway into your system; everyone who wants to access your service has to go through a gateway. In 2019, AWS announced HTTP APIs for its API Gateway (APIG) service. This was a big step to add more flexibility…
Originally posted to Dashbird blog. Traditionally in white-box monitoring, error reporting has been achieved with third party libraries, that catch and communicate failures to external services and notify developers whenever a problem occurrs. I’m here to argue that for managed services this can be achieved with less effort, no agents and without performance overhead. In…
Amazon Kinesis is the real-time stream processing service of AWS. Whether you got video, audio, or IoT streaming data to handle, Kinesis is the way to go. Kinesis is a serverless managed service that integrates nicely with other services like Lambda or S3. Often, you will use it when SQS or SNS is too low-level. But as…
Originally posted to Dashbird blog. The simple query service (SQS) was one of the first services AWS offered. It’s a managed queuing service that lets you take pressure from your downstream services. You put your items on the queue, and other services can pull them whenever they have the capacity to work on them. It’s…
Step Functions, the serverless finite state machine service from AWS. With DynamoDB, Lambda, and API Gateway, it forms the core of serverless AWS services. If you have tasks with multiple steps and you want to ensure they will get executed in the proper order, Step Functions is your service of choice. It offers direct integrations with…
DynamoDB, the primary NoSQL database service offered by AWS, is a versatile tool. It’s fast, scales without much effort, and best of all, it’s billed on-demand! These things make DynamoDB the first choice when a datastore is needed for a new project. But as with all technology, it’s not all roses. You can feel a little…