20 October 2019
AWS Lambda is Amazon’s function as a service product. It’s a service that lets you package and run code without having to provision or manage servers. With Lambda, you only pay when your code is running. By contrast, you pay for managed servers like EC2 as long as they are running, even while they are not serving any requests.
To begin with AWS Lambda, you first write some code in one of the supported languages, you package and upload this code to Lambda, and now you have a Lambda function that can be run on demand. The Lambda function can be triggered from other AWS services such as SNS, SQS, API Gateway, and Cloudwatch events. Another benefit of Lambda is that it scales automatically based on the number of requests.
In this tutorial, I’ll go over how to create and manage a Lambda function, as well as how to trigger the lambda function from different event sources. This tutorial assumes you know how to write some very basic code and are familiar with the AWS Console.
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10 October 2019
In this tutorial you’ll install the AWS command line interface and learn how to set up an IAM user with programmatic access to AWS resources. This tutorial assumes you have basic command-line knowledge on either Mac or a unix-like operating system.
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01 July 2018
AWS lambda and the serverless paradigm are great. Abstracting away machines, platforms and environments allows developers to focus on code, which is a magical thing. For code that runs infrequently, the cost savings can be significant, since lambda eliminates the need for a dedicated, always-on host.
But in spite of this, developing on lambda is not without its challenges. I’ve twice run into a situation where a project that runs fine on my Macbook fails to run on lambda. The first was due to a dependency on Python Pandas and the second time was because of PyQuery.
According to this Stackoverflow post, static libraries need to be compiled on an EC2 Amazon Linux machine in order to run on lambda, which is pretty inconvenient. It would be neat if lambda could automatically install dependencies via the package.json file for Node or requirements.txt for Python.
In any case, I ended up setting up my own CD pipeline to take care of this very task. Keep reading if you’d like to learn how to incorporate this into your own CI/CD pipeline.
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10 May 2018
Jekyll is a great tool for building simple static websites and Amazon S3 makes it incredibly fast and easy to host your sites. I’m going to show you how to get up and running with your own personal site in record time.
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