Fellow serverless advocate, and AWS Data Hero, Alex DeBrie, recently released The DynamoDB Book, which ventures way beyond the basics of DynamoDB, but still offers an approachable and useful resource for developers of any experience level. I had the opportunity to read the book and then speak with Alex about it on Serverless Chats. We discussed several really important lessons from the book that every DynamoDB practitioner needs to know. Here are twelve of my favorites, in no particular order.
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Takeaways from the State of Serverless Report
On a recent episode of Serverless Chats, I spoke with Stephen Pinkerton and Darcy Rayner of Datadog to dig into The State of Serverless report, which was released at the end of February 2020. After frequently fielding customer questions about the topic, Datadog looked at its data and customer use cases, and examined how they were using serverless. Datadog’s report is a way to break it all down, but it’s also an opportunity for its customers (and serverless users alike) to see how other people are using serverless in a data-driven way. I discussed methodology, findings, and key takeaways with Stephen and Darcy, and thought it’d be worthwhile to consolidate and share that insight.
🚀 Project Update: March 30, 2020
Serverless MySQL: v1.5.4 released
This update includes a minor bug fix that automatically handles reconnections when receiving the occasional EPIPE error. Special thanks to @kernwig for the PR. Read More...
Verifying self-signed JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) with AWS HTTP APIs
“Trust no one.” Or at least that’s what Fox Mulder told me back in the 90s.
With the recent GA of HTTP APIs for API Gateway, I decided to start evaluating my existing API Gateway REST APIs to see if I could migrate them over to take advantage of the decreased latency and reduced cost of the new HTTP APIs. Several of them were disqualified because they utilize service integrations (a feature that AWS is working to add), but for one of my largest applications, the lack of Custom Authorizers is what brought me to a dead end. Or so I initially thought. 😉
After a bit of research (okay, it was actually several hours because I decided to read through a bunch of specs and blog posts and then run a ton of experiments), it turns out that hosting your own OIDC Conformant “server” to verify self-signed JSON Web Tokens with HTTP APIs is actually quite simple. So as long as you can use JWT for your bearer tokens, you can utilize your existing authentication service (and probably dramatically reduce your latency and cost).
In this post, I’ll show you everything you need to know to set this up yourself. We’ll generate certificates, create our OIDC discovery service, set up our HTTP API authorizers, generate and sign our JWTs, and protect routes with scopes.
🚀 Project Update: February 22, 2020
Lambda API: v0.10.5 Released
Lambda API v0.10.5 has been released to fix a few minor bugs around ALB query string decoding and TypeScript definitions. Plus a new feature that allows you to disable error logging. Read More...
🚀 Project Update: January 31, 2020
Serverless MySQL: v1.5.3 released
This update includes a number of fixes from the community including exporting the escape function, standardizing quotations in a maintenance query, and adding a retry on PROTOCOL_CONNECTION_LOST errors to resolve the zombie cleanup race condition. Read More...
🚀 Project Update: December 14, 2019
Serverless MySQL: v1.5.2 released
Added a retry for another error that is resetting connections (this should fix the issues in #57 and #62) as well as some minor documentation and dependency updates. Read More...
🚀 Project Update: December 12, 2019
Data API Client: v1.0.1 Released
There was an issue with batch records via standard queries versus those wrapped in transactions. v1.0.1 includes a patch that checks the arguments and conditionally flattens the array for proper handling in each context. Read More...
Takeaways from AWS re:Invent 2019’s Amazon DynamoDB Deep Dive: Advanced Design Patterns (DAT403)
AWS re:Invent 2019 is a wrap, but now the real work begins! There are hundreds of session videos now available on YouTube. So when you have a few days (or weeks) of downtime, you can dig in to these amazing talks and learn about whatever AWS topics you fancy.
I was only able to attend a few talks this year, but one that I knew I couldn’t miss in person, was Rick Houlihan’s DAT403: Amazon DynamoDB deep dive: Advanced design patterns. At the last two re:Invents, he gave similar talks that explored how to use single-table designs in DynamoDB… and they blew my mind! 🤯 These videos were so mind-bending, that they inspired me to immerse myself in NoSQL design and write my How to switch from RDBMS to DynamoDB in 20 easy steps post. I was hoping to have a similar experience with this year’s edition, and I WAS NOT DISAPPOINTED.
As expected, it was a 60 minute firehose of #NoSQL knowledge bombs. There was A LOT to take away from this, so after the session, I wrote a Twitter thread that included some really interesting lessons that stuck out to me. The video has been posted, so definitely watch it (maybe like 10 times 🤷♂️), and use it to get started (or continue on) your DynamoDB journey.
🚀 Project Update: October 29, 2019
Lambda API: v0.10.3 Released
Lambda API v0.10.3 has been released to fix a few minor bugs around route prefixing and base64Encoding (thanks @Sleavely and @btakita), and to add a whitelist for headers on error cases (@hussfelt). Read More...