AWS Compute Blog

Category: AWS Serverless Application Model

Building an electronic security lock using serverless

In this guide I show how to build an electronic security lock for package delivery, securing physical documents, or granting access to a secret lab. This project uses AWS Serverless to create a touchscreen keypad lock that uses SMS to alert a recipient with a custom message and unlock code. Files are included for the […]

An Adafruit PyPortal displaying a quote while synthesizing and playing speech using Amazon Polly.

Adding voice to a CircuitPython project using Amazon Polly

An Adafruit PyPortal displaying a quote while synthesizing and playing speech using Amazon Polly. As a natural means of communication, voice is a powerful way to humanize an experience. What if you could make anything talk? This guide walks through how to leverage the cloud to add voice to an off-the-shelf microcontroller. Use it to […]

Explanation of CI/CD stages

Building well-architected serverless applications: Approaching application lifecycle management – part 3

This series of blog posts uses the AWS Well-Architected Tool with the Serverless Lens to help customers build and operate applications using best practices. In each post, I address the nine serverless-specific questions identified by the Serverless Lens along with the recommended best practices. See the Introduction post for a table of contents and explanation […]

EFS: Add file system

Using Amazon EFS for AWS Lambda in your serverless applications

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, […]

CloudFormation code example creating infrastructure

Building well-architected serverless applications: Approaching application lifecycle management – part 1

This series of blog posts uses the AWS Well-Architected Tool with the Serverless Lens to help customers build and operate applications using best practices. In each post, I address the nine serverless-specific questions identified by the Serverless Lens along with the recommended best practices. See the Introduction post for a table of contents and explanation of the example application. Question OPS2: […]

Answers processing architecture

Building a location-based, scalable, serverless web app – part 3

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 […]

Ask Around Me backend architecture

Building a location-based, scalable, serverless web app – part 2

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.