Author: James Beswick

In this post, I discuss focus areas for load testing of serverless applications, and highlight two tools commonly used. I show how to configure Artillery with customized functions, and how to run tests to simulate load on the Ask Around Me application.

In this post, I show how to integrate the AWS Batch CLI by AWS ParallelCluster with API Gateway.

Web and mobile applications usually interact with a backend service, often via an API. Many front-end applications pass requests for processing, wait for a result, and then display this to the user. This synchronous approach is only one way to handle messages, but modern applications have alternatives to provide a better user experience. There are […]

This blog post explores how you can solve geolocation queries using geohashing. I discuss how you should decide on the resolution of a geohash for your specific workload.

Serverless applications are event-driven, using ephemeral compute functions to integrate services and transform data. While AWS Lambda includes a 512-MB temporary file system for your code, this is an ephemeral scratch resource not intended for durable storage. Amazon EFS is a fully managed, elastic, shared file system designed to be consumed by other AWS services, […]

EventBridge is the evolution of the CloudWatch Events service. It brings new features, including the ability to integrate data from popular SaaS providers as events within AWS.

In this post, I walk through configuring streaming of API access logs from Amazon API Gateway to Amazon S3 via a Kinesis Firehose delivery stream.

In part 2, I cover the API configuration, geohashing algorithm, and real-time messaging architecture used in the Ask Around Me web application. These are needed for receiving and processing questions and answers, and sending results back to users in real time. In this post, I explain the backend processing architecture, how data is aggregated, and […]

This post explores the backend architecture of the Ask Around Me application. I compare the cost and features in deciding between REST APIs and HTTP APIs in API Gateway. I introduce geohashing and the npm library used to handle geo-location queries in DynamoDB. And I show how you can build real-time messaging into your web applications using the publish-subscribe pattern with AWS IoT Core.

In this post, I introduce the Ask Around Me example web application. Learn to build a serverless realtime, Vue.js web app in part 1 of this series.