Category: Best Practices

Web application backends are one of the most popular workload types for serverless applications. The pay-per-value model works well for this type of workload. As traffic grows, it’s important to consider the design choices and service configurations used to optimize your cost.

Messaging is an important part of serverless applications and AWS services provide queues, publish/subscribe, and event routing capabilities. This post reviews the main features of SNS, SQS, and EventBridge and how they provide different capabilities for your workloads.

Lambda layers provide a convenient and effective way to package code libraries for sharing with Lambda functions in your account. Using layers can help reduce the size of uploaded archives and make it faster to deploy your code.

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. Security question […]

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. Security question […]

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. Security question […]

I show how traditional web-server applications compare with their serverless counterparts. I show how the infrastructure is managed for you in serverless, and how code for serverless developers in primarily focused on business logic.

Serverless applications can help you develop more agile applications that can scale automatically. By using serverless services in your architecture, this reduces the amount of boilerplate code. It also helps offload complex tasks to specialized services. As a result, a well-designed serverless application can be modified easily to deliver new feature requests, while maintaining high […]

This blog post covers common encryption workflows on Amazon EBS. Examples of these workflows are: setting up permissions policies, creating encrypted EBS volumes, running Amazon EC2 instances, taking snapshots, and sharing your encrypted data using customer-managed CMK. Introduction Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) service provides high-performance block-level storage volumes for Amazon EC2 instances. Customers […]

This post examines how cold starts impact performance in serverless backends for web applications. It shows how the most important focus area is usually synchronous APIs called by the frontend application. I explain options available for targeting cold starts in the Lambda service.