AWS Resources

All Blog Posts

What’s the point of Lambda SnapStart?

| |

Lambda SnapStart is intended to improve the cold start time for a Lambda function. It’s been available for Java workloads since 2022, and was recently released for Python and .Net workloads. It works by running the initialization code of your Lambda function when you release a version, and then storing an image of the Lambda execution environment. Cold starts load this image rather than running the initialization themselves. Given that cold starts happen unpredictably, and may be measured in seconds, this seems like a win-win situation.

The reality, as usual, is more nuanced. SnapStart introduces its own cold start delays, as it loads the image into the runtime. And it increases the time and effort of deployment. In this post I drill down into the nuance, so that you can decide whether it’s a worthwhile choice fo your project.

Read More ⟶

Websockets feeding Kinesis

| | , ,

We recently explored a project to retrieve data from a third-party service. They didn’t offer any push capabilities such as writing to a Kafka or Kinesis stream, or even a web-hook. But they did offer a WebSocket interface, so we explored whether we could use that as our streaming source. We didn’t go that route, but I was intrigued by the idea enough to make a proof-of-concept.

Read More ⟶

Lambda Four Ways, a Rosetta Stone for AWS

| | , , , , ,

When I write Lambdas professionally, Python is my preferred language. It offers decent performance, a straightforward syntax, and high developer productivity. I’ve also used Java, both in demonstration apps and actual client work. But while I have some familiarity with other languages supported by the platform, I’ve never used them. So, with some downtime, I decided to implement the same Lambda in four different languages: Python, Java, JavaScript, and Go, to get a better sense of their strengths and weaknesses.

Read More ⟶

Transforming Data with Amazon Athena

| | , ,

My prior posts used Lambda to do data transformation. But what if we could use a non-programmatic tool, in keeping with the Extract-Load-Transform mindset of the modern data pipeline. As it turns, we can: Amazon Athena can write data as well as query it. There are, of course, a few stumbles along the way. In this blog post I walk through the process of aggregating CloudTrail data using SQL.

Read More ⟶
1 2 … 9

Featured Videos

All the AWS CodeBuild You Can Stomach in 45 Minutes

In this 45 minute talk, Ken Rimple gives a quick overview of AWS CodeBuild, then dives into a few of the challenges he’s faced, from dealing with build errors properly, configuring CodeBuild to run inside of AWS, testing locally so you don’t go crazy waiting for 15 minutes each time you deploy a new build, how to properly access your build artifacts and reports, running tools like Cypress, to building and deploying Docker containers to ECS, and more.

AWS: Things I Learned the Hard Way

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a collection of nearly 200 services. They can be intimidating to the newcomer, and offer many opportunities for mistakes: some expensive, some just inconvenient. In this Lunch and Learn, our panel of AWS experts look at some of the mistakes they made, and how these could have been avoided.

All Videos

1 2 3

Looking to discuss an AWS project with our team? Contact us.