Category: AWS Lambda

Constantin Gonzalez is a Principal Solutions Architect at AWS

In my free time, I run a small blog that uses Amazon S3 to host static content and Amazon CloudFront to distribute it world-wide. I use a home-grown, static website generator to create and upload my blog content onto S3.

My blog uses two S3 buckets: one for staging and testing, and one for production. As a website owner, I want to update the production bucket with all changes from the staging bucket in a reliable and efficient way, without having to create and populate a new bucket from scratch. Therefore, to synchronize files between these two buckets, I use AWS Lambda and AWS Step Functions.

In this post, I show how you can use Step Functions to build a scalable synchronization engine for S3 buckets and learn some common patterns for designing Step Functions state machines while you do so. (more…)

Juan Villa – Partner Solutions Architect

When most people hear “Java” they think of Java the programming language. Java is a lot more than a programming language, it also implies a larger ecosystem including the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Java, the programming language, is just one of the many languages that can be compiled to run on the JVM. Some of the most popular JVM languages, other than Java, are Clojure, Groovy, Scala, Kotlin, JRuby, and Jython (see this link for a list of more JVM languages).

Did you know that you can compile and subsequently run all these languages on AWS Lambda?

AWS Lambda supports the Java 8 runtime, but this does not mean you are limited to the Java language. The Java 8 runtime is capable of running JVM languages such as Kotlin and Groovy once they have been compiled and packaged as a “fat” JAR (a JAR file containing all necessary dependencies and classes bundled in).

In this blog post we’ll work through building AWS Lambda functions in both Kotlin and Groovy programming languages. To compile and package our projects we will use Gradle build tool.

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Stephen Liedig, Solutions Architect

One of the many challenges professional software architects and developers face is how to make cloud-native applications scalable, fault-tolerant, and highly available.

Fundamental to your project success is understanding the importance of making systems highly cohesive and loosely coupled. That means considering the multi-dimensional facets of system coupling to support the distributed nature of the applications that you are building for the cloud.

By that, I mean addressing not only the application-level coupling (managing incoming and outgoing dependencies), but also considering the impacts of of platform, spatial, and temporal coupling of your systems. Platform coupling relates to the interoperability (or lack thereof) of heterogeneous systems components. Spatial coupling deals with managing components at a network topology level or protocol level. Temporal, or runtime coupling, refers to the ability of a component within your system to do any kind of meaningful work while it is performing a synchronous, blocking operation.

The AWS messaging services, Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS, help you deal with these forms of coupling by providing mechanisms for:

• Reliable, durable, and fault-tolerant delivery of messages between application components
• Logical decomposition of systems and increased autonomy of components
• Creating unidirectional, non-blocking operations, temporarily decoupling system components at runtime
• Decreasing the dependencies that components have on each other through standard communication and network channels

Following on the recent topic, Building Scalable Applications and Microservices: Adding Messaging to Your Toolbox, in this post, I look at some of the ways you can introduce SQS and SNS into your architectures to decouple your components, and show how you can implement them using C#. (more…)

Ed Lima, Solutions Architect

Our identities are what define us as human beings. Philosophical discussions aside, it also applies to our day-to-day lives. For instance, I need my work badge to get access to my office building or my passport to travel overseas. My identity in this case is attached to my work badge or passport. As part of the system that checks my access, these documents or objects help define whether I have access to get into the office building or travel internationally.

This exact same concept can also be applied to cloud applications and APIs. To provide secure access to your application users, you define who can access the application resources and what kind of access can be granted. (more…)

Michael G. Khmelnitsky, Senior Programmer Writer

Sometimes, messages can’t be processed because of a variety of possible issues, such as erroneous conditions within the producer or consumer application. For example, if a user places an order within a certain number of minutes of creating an account, the producer might pass a message with an empty string instead of a customer identifier. Occasionally, producers and consumers might fail to interpret aspects of the protocol that they use to communicate, causing message corruption or loss. Also, the consumer’s hardware errors might corrupt message payload. For these reasons, messages that can’t be processed in a timely manner are delivered to a dead-letter queue. (more…)

Aaron Friedman is a Healthcare and Life Sciences Partner Solutions Architect at AWS

Angel Pizarro is a Scientific Computing Technical Business Development Manager at AWS

This post is the fourth in a series on how to build a genomics workflow on AWS. In Part 1, we introduced a general architecture, shown below, and highlighted the three common layers in a batch workflow:

• Job
• Batch
• Workflow

In Part 2, you built a Docker container for each job that needed to run as part of your workflow, and stored them in Amazon ECR.

In Part 3, you tackled the batch layer and built a scalable, elastic, and easily maintainable batch engine using AWS Batch. This solution took care of dynamically scaling your compute resources in response to the number of runnable jobs in your job queue length as well as managed job placement. (more…)

Jakub Wojciak, Senior Software Development Engineer

Throughout our careers, we developers keep adding new tools to our development toolboxes. These range from the programming languages we learn, use, and become experts in, to architectural components such as HTTP servers, load balancers, and databases (both relational and NoSQL).

I’d like to kick off a series of posts to introduce you to the architectural components of messaging solutions. Expand your toolbox with this indispensable tool for building modern, scalable services and applications. In the coming months, I will update this post with links that dive deeper into each topic and illustrate messaging use cases using Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). (more…)

Deepak Sury, Principal Product Manager – Amazon AppStream 2.0

Want to stream desktop applications to a web browser, without rewriting them? Amazon AppStream 2.0 is a fully managed, secure, application streaming service. An easy way to learn what the service does is to try out the end-user experience, at no cost.

In this post, I describe how you can scale your AppStream 2.0 environment, and achieve some cost optimizations. I also add some setup and monitoring tips. (more…)

Jumia is an ecosystem of nine different companies operating in 22 different countries in Africa. Jumia employs 3000 people and serves 15 million users/month.

Want to secure and centralize millions of user accounts across Africa? Shut down your servers! Jumia Group unified and centralized customer authentication on nine digital services platforms, operating in 22 (and counting) countries in Africa, totaling over 120 customer and merchant facing applications. All were unified into a custom Jumia Central Authentication System (JCAS), built in a timely fashion and designed using a serverless architecture.

In this post, we give you our solution overview. For the full technical implementation, see the Jumia Central Authentication System post on the Jumia Tech blog. (more…)

Aaron Rehaag, Senior Software Engineer, Amazon Web Services

AWS Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows. You can scale and modify your applications quickly by building applications from individual components, each of which performs a discrete function.

You can use Step Functions to create state machines, which orchestrate multiple AWS Lambda functions to build multi-step serverless applications. In certain cases, a Lambda function returns an error. Regardless of whether the error is a function exception created by the developer (e.g., file not found), or unpredicted (e.g., out of memory), Step Functions allows you to respond with conditional logic based on the type of error message in the form of function error handling. (more…)