Staff Engineer at Datadog
(ex) Principal Engineer at Serverless Framework.
Serverless & distributed systems. Avid parachutist, hiker, dog-lover.
Boston, MA
Heads up serverless developers! A recent change in the Lambda sandbox environment changes how timeouts are handled, potentially causing your function to enter a permanent doom loop. This post will explain the change, how to spot it, and how to avoid the doom loop.
Erasure coding and multi-tier backups can help you store your data safely and cheaply. Here's how I use a Synology DiskStation and AWS Glacier to store my BASE jumping videos, and my opinions on both after a bit of use.
Securing your API Keys, database passwords, or SSH keys for Lambda Functions is tricky. This post compares Systems Manager, Secrets Manager, Key Management Service, and environment variables for handling your secrets in Lambda. We'll cover costs, features, performance, and more. Then we'll lay out a framework for considering the risk of your particular secret, so that you know what's best for your application's secrets.
We've seen how containers on Lambda initialize as fast or faster than their zip-based counterparts. This post examines exactly how the Lambda team did this, and the performance advantages of everyone shipping the same code.
Lambda recently improved the cold start performance of container images by up to 15x, but this isn't the only reason you should use them. The tooling, ecosystem, and entire developer culture has moved to container images and you should too.
AWS Lambda layers can help in certain, narrow use cases. But they don't help reduce overall function size, they don't improve cold starts, and they leave you vulnerable to a particularly nasty bug.
AWS Lambda warms up your functions, such that 50%-85% of Lambda Sandbox initializations don't increase latency for users. In this article we'll define Proactive Initialization, observe its frequency, and help you identify invocations where your cold starts weren't really that cold.
This post will show you how to identify opportunities where Lazy Loading dependencies can help you reduce Cold Start Latency. We'll walk through a demo application and measure the performance impact of Lazy Loading in AWS Lambda!
A quick look a new way to stream data from AWS Lambda functions, written in NodeJS.
Benchmarking cold start performance of the AWS SDK v2 and v3.
My three favorite features launched at re:Invent 2022
A first look at the new way to beat cold starts - 6 minutes
Exploring an interesting side-effect of CloudFormation deployments for Lambda - 6 minutes
A quick look at a brand new way to invoke Lambda functions!
Understanding the various types of cold starts in Lambda - 9 minutes
Leveraging DynamoDB streams to improve your API performance and service reliability - 8 minutes
An analytical comparison of two common API patterns in Lambda - 8 minutes
Reduce complexity, cognitive load, and deployment times by splitting cloud infrastructure from lambda code, using CloudFormation Outputs to share resources, and use SSM to play nice with Terraform and other IaC tools. - 8 mins
Stop emulating, start developing with real cloud services - 5 minutes
Easily pass an SQS URL to your serverless function - 2 minutes
That's not possible! Learning new and fun things about the Zip file data structure. Reading time - 2 minutes
My thoughts on how years of Lego robotics competition shaped my career as a Software Engineer. Reading time - 7 minutes
Leverage this CloudFormation template with a few simple tweaks to deploy a cost-effective Image Service to your platform.
Leverage support for multiple databases in Rails 5 to implement custom migration types for post-deploy migrations, or for scheduled migrations.
How we successfully merged two identity providers, imported 50,000 user accounts, and did it all with no downtime.