Author: James Beswick

This post introduces the Simple Trivia Service, a single- and multi-player game built using a serverless-first architecture on AWS. I cover different solutions that you can use to enable connectivity from your game client to a serverless-first backend for both single- and multi-player games.

This post explains the Lambda execution environment and how the service protects customer data. It covers important steps you should take to prevent data leakage between invocations and provides additional security resources to review.

This post discusses choosing and managing runtimes, the effect on performance, and how you can use multiple runtimes within a single serverless application. It explains the networking model and whether a Lambda function must have access to a customer VPC or can run with the default VPC configuration. It also compares the different invocation modes for Lambda functions.

As customers increasingly use SaaS solutions in their businesses, they want the same customization and extensibility available in on-premises solutions. SaaS partners have developed APIs and integration hooks to help address this need. For more sophisticated customization, products enable custom code to run within their SaaS workflows.

This post explains scaling and concurrency in Lambda and the different behaviors of on-demand and Provisioned Concurrency. It also shows how to use service integrations and asynchronous patterns in Lambda-based applications. Finally, I discuss how reserved concurrency works and how to use it in your application design.

Lambda works with other AWS services to process and manage requests and data. This post explains how to understand and manage Service Quotas, when to request increases, and architecting with quotas in mind. It also explains how to control traffic for downstream server-based resources.

This post demonstrates two ways you can implement and deploy a solution for server-side rendering in React applications, by using Lambda or Lambda@Edge. It also shows how to use open-source tools and AWS CDK to automate the building and deployment of such applications.

This post discusses anti-pattern in event-driven architectures using Lambda. I show some of the issues when using monolithic Lambda functions or using custom code to orchestrate workflows. I explain how to avoid recursive architectures that cause loops and why you should avoid functions calling functions.

This post discusses the design principles that can help you develop well-architected serverless applications. I explain why using services instead of code can help improve your application’s agility and scalability. I also show how statelessness and function design also contribute to good application architecture.

In this post, we show how SNS delivery to Kinesis Data Firehose enables you to integrate SNS with storage and analytics services. The example shows how to create an SNS subscription to use a Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream to store SNS messages in an S3 bucket.