Last week, I talked about my article about provisioned concurrency and how to schedule it for recurring peak usage. In this article, George Mao explains how to use autoscaling instead of scheduling, and adjust provisioned concurrency according to your load (based on Cloudwatch metrics). Another way to keep control on the costs.

Excellent article from Yan Cui where he describes several metrics from API Gateway, Lambda, Dynamo that you can leverage to troubleshoot latency problems. Lambda function Duration is just a small part of the picture and this article provides a much deeper view of this picture.

The cool thing with Sheen Brisals (and Lego) is that you always get feedback from the field. In this one, he describes the path they followed to build a 'Back-in-stock Email Notification' feature. Concretely, he ends up with EventBridge (event bus) as the communication channel between all modules. If you didn't play with it already, you should give it a try, it really eases building event driven architectures.

Interesting article from Allen Helton, who lists few challenges with serverless and few recommendations on how to solve them. Among others things, use Dead Letter Queues and monitor them. If too many messages are inserted in this queue, raise alarms.

Talking about challenges, this one is prolific. Brian Pfeil provides a list of challenges and some suggestions. It goes from technical stuff such as EventBridge Observability to more human challenges: serverless skills/developers availability, DynamoDB learning curve, cost forecasting... Good reading but I would have expected a bit more links and content in the suggestions. This one is mainly intended for AWS to improve its services.

Google Cloud updates

2 interesting news on Google Cloud:

• Google announced Workflows (beta) to orchestrate Google Cloud and HTTP-based API services into serverless workflows. Looks like AWS Step Functions or Azure Logic Apps. Definitely something to have in his serverless toolset.
• API Gateway is now available in public beta. Sincerely a bit surprised by this one as it seems to me AWS API Gateway has been around for ages. But good news for Google Cloud users.

A series from James Beswick on the AWS blog, as always very good, in which he tells the story of "Happy Path", a mobile application. From this app, users can upload and share pictures from parks. And James describes how to leverage serverless services (with a big focus on Step Functions) to quickly build this app.

Quite a long article (~20 min) to detail how to use AWS X-Ray with Lambda. Tracing is mandatory when building microservices and X-Ray can help a lot. If you plan to use Lambda for your microservices, this deep dive article will help you add X-Ray and get traces.

AWS updates

Few updates to notice on the serverless landscape:

• Step functions increases payload size to 256 kb. It looks like a small update but it is actually important as you don't need to store your data in DynamoDB or S3 anymore... Simply pass it to the next state.
• API Gateway HTTP APIs now supports Lambda and IAM authorization options. HTTP API will progressively obtain the features already present in REST API, for 1/3 of the price and better performance...
• GraphiQL Explorer integrated in AppSync console. As mentioned in one of the articles above, developer experience is important and this is just about it: simplify the developer experience with this open source tool.