#serverless

Deconstructing #serverless Computing Part 1: A new layer of abstraction
▻https://hackernoon.com/deconstructing-serverless-computing-part-1-a-new-layer-of-abstraction-98

“All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection.” — David WheelerIn a series of articles, Lucian Toader explores serverless computing, looking at it from a business perspective as well as from a developer’s point of view.We have come a long way since the 50s; mainframes and time-sharing were replaced by virtual machines and cloud computing, those in turn giving way to containers, with the creation of Docker. Each step until now has added a new layer of abstraction, simplifying provisioning and server management through increased automation, while bringing down costs by exploiting the commoditization of hardware, software and economies of scale.IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and the missing linkAs information and communications technology (ICT) evolves, we are gaining (...)

#serverless-computing #functions-as-a-service #cloud-computing #function-as-a-service

The Definitive Crash Course on #serverless with #aws: Centralized logging with Kinesis and Lambda
▻https://hackernoon.com/the-definitive-crash-course-on-serverless-with-aws-centralized-logging-w

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Don’t you just hate it when APIs are failing and you have absolutely no clue why? Now imagine you don’t have access to the VM, cluster or container where your software is running. Want me to continue with this nightmare?Yes, that’s what debugging AWS Lambda functions tends to seem like. A horrid nightmare of not knowing what is happening nor why things are failing. This article will show you a way of logging function invocations. Letting you track and monitor failures and errors, while also giving you a nice structure for logging info and debug logs for when you need to troubleshoot behavior.The key is to send all logs to a central location where you can later group, filter and make sense of them. Sematext is a full-stack observability solution for your entire software stack. Meaning you (...)

#monitoring #aws-lambda #programming

Observability Without Having to Break the Bank
▻https://hackernoon.com/observability-without-having-to-break-the-bank-7ebbc861245f?source=rss--

To run a #serverless application in production reliably, you need to be able to debug issues quickly. You need to have good observability, and having structured logs is a big part of that. They allow you to capture useful contextual information with each log message.But observability comes with a cost.The ProblemCloudWatch Logs charges $0.50 for per GB of data ingested, and $0.03 per GB per month for storage. As such, it’s common for companies to spend more on CloudWatch Logs than Lambda invocations in their production environment. Best practices such as using structured logs further exasperate the cost associated with logging.Furthermore, with #aws Lambda, it’s no longer possible to rely on agents to collect and publish observability data such as custom metrics and traces. Instead, you have (...)

#aws-lambda #cloud #cloud-computing

Quickly Debug Your #aws #lambda Functions
▻https://hackernoon.com/quickly-debug-your-aws-lambda-functions-b9b0d7cb6096?source=rss----3a814

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Great writers use metaphors to get their point across so let me give that a try real quick. Bugs are nasty little pests, mm’key? It’s hard to get rid of them but apart of just spraying poison everywhere, there are only a few options left. One of those options is using a natural predator to those bugs, a predator like birds. So birds can help you get rid of bugs. I work for a company called Dashbird that help developers debug their AWS Lambda applications. See what I did there? Pests\bugs <-> birds\Dashbirds? Clever, right? Now, who do I need to call for my Pulitzer Prize?Main Reasons For Using AWS Lambda FunctionsOne of the AWS Lambda perks is that as AWS claim “You can forget all about project’s infrastructure and focus solely on launching apps in the cloud while you’ll be able to (...)

#serverless #debugging

How to Add a Cache Layer to #serverless #graphql #appsync API
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-to-add-a-cache-layer-to-appsync-dynamodb-resolver-be924842916b?sourc

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In this post, I show an example of simple application based on the Serverless framework. The application uses Amazon Appsync, Lambda, DynamoDB, Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX), to demonstrate how to use Amazon DAX as caching layer in front of #aws Appsync Resolvers.Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is a fully managed, highly available, in-memory cache for DynamoDB that delivers up to a 10x performance improvement — from milliseconds to microseconds — even at millions of requests per second.A simple serverless CMSThe example application in this post is a simple CMS. I use Serverless framework templates to simplify the setup for Appsync. The sections in template that create the Appsync, Dynamodb, Cognito identity pool and user pool, DAX cluster, roles, security groups, and subnet groups, and (...)

#dynamodb-accelerator

Building a Fully #serverless Realtime CMS using AWS #appsync and #aurora Serverless
▻https://hackernoon.com/building-a-fully-serverless-realtime-cms-using-aws-appsync-and-aurora-se

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AWS made a serverless option of AWS RDS Aurora generally available, It would mean a breakthrough in building fully serverless architectures with relational database. No more managing connection pools with SQL, No more worrying about RDS instances, Cost is based on the compute time services are consumed, and there is no charge when code is not running.In this post , my goal was to build a fully-functional AWS AppSync-driven backend and #react frontend of a post management app. The app will deliver end users a set of features that allow public users view posts, admin users add/delete post, Let’s start!Application ArchitectureThe application architecture uses:Serverless frameworkAWS AppsyncAWS Cognito Userpool and Identity PoolAWS Aurora ServerlessAWS LambdaPrerequisitesThe following must be (...)

#aws-lambda

Building a #serverless Data Pipeline with #aws S3 Lamba and DynamoDB
▻https://hackernoon.com/build-a-serverless-data-pipeline-with-aws-s3-lamba-and-dynamodb-5ecb8c3e

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AWS Lambda plus Layers is one of the best solutions for managing a data pipeline and for implementing a serverless architecture. This post shows how to build a simple data pipeline using AWS Lambda Functions, S3 and DynamoDB.What this pipeline accomplishes?Every day an external datasource exports data to S3 and imports to AWS DynamoDB table.PrerequisitesServerless frameworkPython3.6PandasdockerHow this pipeline worksOn a daily basis, an external data source exports data of the pervious day in csv format to an S3 bucket. S3 event triggers an AWS Lambda Functions that do ETL process and save the data to DynamoDB.Install Serverless FrameworkBefore getting started, Install the Serverless Framework. Open up a terminal and type npm install -g serverless to install Serverless framework.Create (...)

#data-pipeline #python #lambda-layer

Running #selenium and Headless Chrome on #aws Lambda Layers
▻https://hackernoon.com/running-selenium-and-headless-chrome-on-aws-lambda-layers-python-3-6-bd8

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Selenium and Headless Chrome on AWS Lambda LayersAWS has extended the timeout limit for Lambda functions from 5 to 15 minutes, also AWS released new Lambda layers feature at re:Invent 2018, with these new features, we can now move Selenium tests to server-less frameworks without any performance issues!After many attempts of using different version of chrome drivers and binaries — I eventually find a way to get it work — ChromeDriver was able to run and interact with Headless Chrome inside a Lambda Layer.I created #serverless Framework (≥1.34.0) project to publish and use Lambda Layers with Selenium and Headless Chrome, thus team is able to do UI test using Python without running Selenium on server or local machine.Selenium and Headless ChromeIncompatible versions of serverless-chrome, (...)

#lambda-layer #python3

The Future of Cloud Computing with Joshua Strebel from Pagely
▻https://hackernoon.com/the-future-of-cloud-computing-with-joshua-strebel-from-pagely-e502435cd4

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Episode 36 of the Hacker Noon Podcast: An interview with Joshua Strebel, CEO of Pagely and NorthStack.▻https://medium.com/media/0d1b47d6c24b20039a870c9dfbb22208/hrefListen to the interview on iTunes, or Google Podcast, or watch on YouTube.In this episode Trent Lapinski and Joshua Strebel discuss #serverless, cloud computing, #devops, #wordpress, and Joshua’s new project NorthStack.“You talk about AI and specifically around content publishing, there’s those crazy algorithms now that you can give it a sentence and a closing and it’ll write a thousand words in between and it will be on point. You’re like ‘I couldn’t have written this any better!” — Joshua StrebelThe Future of Cloud Computing with Joshua Strebel from PagelyProduction and music by Derek Bernard — haberdasherband.com/productionHost: Trent (...)

#hackernoon-podcast #cloud-computing

Comparing Nuclio and #aws Lambda
▻https://hackernoon.com/comparing-nuclio-and-aws-lambda-14e94c8f1b01?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3-

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Comparing AWS Lambda and NuclioWith #serverless, you delegate the responsibility of running your infrastructure to a platform provider as much as possible. This frees your engineers to focus on building what your customers want from you — the features that differentiate your business from your competitors’. For this philosophy to work, however, the platform needs to not only give you the tools to build those features, but also deliver the performance that will keep engineers satisfied.Yes, services such as AWS Lambda are powerful, but they have a number of well-documented limitations that make them unsuitable for some workloads. These include:Cold starts and high latency make them unsuitable for real-time applications that require consistent and millisecond-level response times.The (...)

#aws-lambda #aws-lambda-and-nuclio

How to FaaS like a pro: 12 uncommon ways to invoke your #serverless functions on #aws [Part 1]
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-to-faas-like-a-pro-12-uncommon-ways-to-invoke-your-serverless-functi

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Yes, this is you at the end of this article, contemplating new possibilities! [Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash]If you feel like skipping the brief introduction below, you can jump straight to the first four uncommon trigger with these shortlinks:Amazon Cognito User Pools — Users management & custom workflowsAWS Config — Event-driven configuration checksAmazon Kinesis Data Firehose — Data ingestion & validationAWS CloudFormation — IaC, Macros & custom transformsA bit of history firstWhen AWS Lambda became generally available on April 9th, 2015 it became the first Function-as-a-Service out there, and there were only a few ways you could trigger your functions besides direct invocation: Amazon S3, Amazon Kinesis, and Amazon SNS. Three months later we got Amazon API Gateway support, (...)

#programming #nodejs #python

Visualizing Cold Starts
▻https://hackernoon.com/visualizing-cold-starts-ddb7c3267419?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

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I wrote a lot about cold starts of #serverless functions. The articles are full of charts and numbers which are hopefully useful but might be hard to internalize. I decided to come up with a way to represent colds starts visually.I created HTTP functions that serve geographic maps (map credit Open Street Map). The map is a combination of small square tiles; each tile is 256 by 256 pixels. My selected map view consists of 12 tiles, so 12 requests are made to the serverless function to load a single view.During each experiment, I load the map and then zoom-in three times. The very first view hits the function in a cold state. Subsequently, the zoomed views are loaded from the warm function. There is a timer next to the map which shows the total time elapsed since the beginning until the (...)

#azure #google-cloud-platform #visualization #aws

#serverless Computing with #swift
▻https://hackernoon.com/serverless-computing-with-swift-4fa27ab36161?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3-

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Part 2: Apache OpenWhisk and IBM CloudYou’d Think I’d Worry About Baking Bread…Recall from Part 1 of this post — Serverless Computing with Swift: Swift and AWS Lambda — that I have decided to form a startup, It’s The Yeast I Can Do, an online bakery specializing in gourmet bread. My CLO (Chief Leavening Officer) is willing to go along with my prioritizing cloud infrastructure over actually baking product. But she’s concerned that we haven’t fully explored our options. In this article, I’ll re-write the code from Part 1 to run under Apache OpenWhisk.OpenWhisk is an open source platform for serverless computing. You can host it on your own servers, with or without containers (such as Docker). You can even run it on AWS. For this article, I will use IBM Cloud, the cloud services infrastructure formerly (...)

#cloud-computing #mobile-app-development #swift-programming

Making Terraform and #serverless framework work together
▻https://hackernoon.com/making-terraform-and-serverless-framework-work-together-b00e6af63ee9?sou

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The Serverless framework is the most popular deployment framework for serverless applications. It gives you a convenient abstraction over CloudFormation and some best practices out-of-the-box:Filters out dev dependencies for Node.js function.Update deployment packages to S3, which lets you work around the default 50MB limit on deployment packages.Enforces a consistent naming convention for functions and APIs.But our serverless applications is not only about Lambda functions. We often have to deal with share resources such as VPCs, SQS queues and RDS databases. For example, you might have a centralised Kinesis stream to capture all applications events in the system. In this case, the stream doesn’t belong to any one project and shouldn’t be tied to their deployment cycles.You still need (...)

#cloud #cloud-computing #aws-lambda #aws

Just how expensive is the full #aws SDK?
▻https://hackernoon.com/just-how-expensive-is-the-full-aws-sdk-abc73d28f62b?source=rss----3a8144

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If you’re not familiar with how cold start works within the context of AWS Lambda, then read this post first.When a Node.js Lambda function cold starts, a number of things happen:the Lambda service has to find a server with enough capacity to host the new containerthe new container is initializedthe Node.js runtime is initializedyour handler module is initialized, which includes initializing any global variables and functions you declare outside the handler functionIf you enable active tracing for a Lambda function, you will be able to see how much time is spent on these steps in X-Ray. Unfortunately, the time it takes to initialize the container and the Node.js runtime are not recorded as segments. But you can work out from the difference in durations.Here, Initialization refers to the (...)

#serverless #aws-sdk #aws-sdk-cost #aws-lambda

Getting Started with #azure Functions and their extensions Superpower
▻https://hackernoon.com/getting-started-with-azure-functions-and-their-extensions-superpower-b4b

This is a part of my “Journey with Azure” seriesI have always been fascinated by managed services and #serverless computing. It started with my first startup PureMetics, where we used AppEngine and BigQuery to built an Analytics product. Because both AppEngine and BigQuery were fully managed services, A single person (Abhishek Nandi) was able to build the entire tech for it. Later on when Abhishek & I were building Odiocast, we used other managed services to keep things simple. FireBase, AWS Lambdas and other services allowed us to worry more about the product rather than worry about Devops as a 2 person startup.The logic is simple when you have the best technology companies willing to be your Devops team, at a cost, why would you say no? You would then have time to focus on what makes (...)

#azure-functions

Getting down and dirty with metric-based alerting for #aws #lambda
▻https://hackernoon.com/getting-down-and-dirty-with-metric-based-alerting-for-aws-lambda-44dee79

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The phrase “better safe than sorry” gets thrown around whenever people talk about monitoring or getting observability into your AWS resources but the truth is that you can’t sit around and wait until a problem arises, you need to proactively look for opportunities to improve your application in order to stay one step ahead of the competition. Setting up alerts that go off whenever a particular event happens is a great way to keep tabs on what’s going on behind the scenes of your #serverless applications and this is exactly what I’d like to tackle in this article.AWS Lambda MetricsAWS Lambda is monitoring functions for you automatically, while it reports metrics through the Amazon CloudWatch. The metrics we speak of consist of total invocations, throttles, duration, error, DLQ errors, etc. You (...)

#aws-lambda #metrics-and-analytics

How to Build a Member App using Facial Recognition and #serverless
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-to-build-a-member-app-using-facial-recognition-and-serverless-ed33c3

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Using #aws #rekognition and serverless, we can build a scalable member management system to replace membership cards.This sample app is designed for clubs, gyms, museums (or even Costco )— any organization that has membership cards with a photo to gain access. With just a few serverless tools, we can develop a scalable, durable membership management system that uses facial recognition to keep track of members.The app allows an administrator to enroll faces in their organization, and then verify new faces against the known membership list. In traditional app development, this would be a major undertaking but in serverless it’s easier than you might think.The key takeaways in this project are that serverless lets us clearly delineate the front-end and back-end of a web-app, and by hooking (...)

#vuejs #aws-rekognition

What is #aws #lambda or #serverless ?
▻https://hackernoon.com/what-is-aws-lambda-or-serverless-f0a006e9d56c?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3

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AWS Lambda logoThere has been a lot of talk about serverless and AWS lambda these days. More and more companies and teams are switching towards the serverless architecture for their applications.In this article, I will be explaining serverless and we will be deploying our first hello world lambda function!What is Serverless?Serverless simply means that you don’t have to manage the servers on which your application runs.You don’t have to take care of patching the system, installing antivirus software or configuring firewalls. Also, you don’t have to worry about scaling your application as the load increases, it is handled automatically!Hence, it allows you to focus more on the functionality of your application.Why is it better?Normally, when you are creating a dynamic web application you (...)

#cloud #cloud-computing

How to Unwrap an AggregateException Thrown by #aws #lambda
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-to-unwrap-an-aggregateexception-thrown-by-aws-lambda-6652fd085952?so

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If you’ve written a .NET Lambda function which calls async code and returns either Task or Task<T>, you’ve probably seen an AggregateException which wraps the real exception.This example comes from the handler below which calls an asnyc method that always throws a FormatException.The AggregateException can be unwrapped, though. When AWS added .NET Core 2.1 support to Lambda, they also added an undocumented feature toggle. The only real mention of it is by the AWS .NET team on Reddit.When the UNWRAP_AGGREGATE_EXCEPTIONS environment variable is set to 1 or true, Lambda will call GetAwaiter().GetResult() instead of using theResult property.Note that this only works if your method returns Task or Task<T>.This causes the first exception thrown to be returned instead of an (...)

#dotnet-core #serverless #csharp

Chaos test your Lambda functions with Thundra
▻https://hackernoon.com/chaos-test-your-lambda-functions-with-thundra-48743fe98a91?source=rss---

Failures are inevitable. Just as we need to test our application to find bugs in our business logic before they affect our users. We need to test our application against infrastructure failures. And we need to do it before they happen in production. and cause irreparable damages.The discipline of Chaos Engineering shows us how to use controlled experiments to uncover these weaknesses.In this post, we will see how we can leverage Thundra’s span listeners to inject failures into our #serverless application. We will use these failures to expose weaknesses such as:Missing error handler for DynamoDB operations.Missing fallback when the primary data source is unavailable.Missing timeout on outbound HTTP requests.But first, here’s a quick primer on Thundra.Hello, Thundra!Consider an API with two (...)

#lambda-function #aws #cloud-computing #aws-lambda

You Might Not Need Server Side Rendering
▻https://hackernoon.com/you-might-not-need-server-side-rendering-f2681e02e4e?source=rss----3a814

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The Displaced Universal #react Web App in a #serverless FutureTaco Lost in the AbyssIt’s easy to get lost in the labyrinth of choices when building a web app these days. I jumped on the “universal” bandwagon (back when it was called “isomorphic”) early and have many learned lessons since.A universal app is one that can execute the same code universally — on the server and client. React provides ways to render components to static markup as documented in the official docs, typically used on a Node server. This support revolutionized the way many of us think of and write JavaScript. The practicality of scaling and maintaining such a mechanism however is questionable.Universal… Why?Beyond the ability to share code across the stack, why go universal? Some would say SEO (just that one word). I remember (...)

#universal-app #server-side-rendering #lighthouse

Better local development for #serverless Functions
▻https://hackernoon.com/better-local-development-for-serverless-functions-b96b5a4cfa8f?source=rs

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Lambda is a terrific piece of kit for all the benefits listed on the #aws product page and Serverless is a very useful framework for developing Lambda functions. However, developing serverless applications locally is a total pain if what you’re solving isn’t totally trivial.When things get complicated and your Lambda functions start to integrate with other AWS services, things really begin to break down. There are a few things that look like silver-bullets, I’ll share them here and explain why they didn’t work for me, then give you a working example that I myself struggled to find(hence me writing this).LocalstackLocalstack is definitely the biggest attempt silver bullet here. Basically emulate a huge chunk of AWS locally and connect your serverless functions into that. Why I didn’t use  (...)

#serverless-functions #javascript #jest

Lambda optimization tip — enable HTTP keep-alive
▻https://hackernoon.com/lambda-optimization-tip-enable-http-keep-alive-6dc503f6f114?source=rss--

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Lambda optimization tip — enable HTTP keep-aliveI recently watched an excellent talk by Matt Levin on optimization tips for Lambda and saw a slide on making DynamoDB use HTTP keep-alive. It reminded me of a conversation I had with Sebastian Cohnen, so I set out to test the effect this simple optimization has.What is it all about?As it turns out, Node.js’s default HTTP agent doesn’t use keep-alive and therefore every request would incur the cost of setting up a new TCP connection. This is clearly inefficient, as you need to perform a three-way handshake to establish a TCP connection. For operations that are short-lived (such as DynamoDB operations, which typically complete within a single digit ms) the latency overhead of establishing the TCP connection might be greater than the operation (...)

#cloud #serverless #aws #cloud-computing #aws-lambda

Build and Deploy an #api with Standard Library and Node.js in 6 Easy Steps
▻https://hackernoon.com/build-deploy-and-publish-an-api-using-code-xyz-and-node-js-in-6-steps-8a

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APIs, the building blocks of software, run our world. They’re how software systems communicate with each other, and how we as people communicate with software. Knowing how to build an API is not only a crucial skill for a software developer, but a foundational part of general coding literacy — a skill that can help anyone in their career.In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to build an API directly from your web browser — no other tools required — using #code on Standard Library, the online API editor. Whether you’re new to software development or a veteran looking for faster ways to ship code, I’ll demonstrate how quickly you can build a working API with Code on Standard Library. We’ll use Code on Standard Library to build a fully functional SMS service that connects AscenDB’s Peaks API for (...)

#programming #serverless #nodejs