Tag: aws - Jeremy Daly

Ensuring Data Integrity with DynamoDB

Posted in Databases, DynamoDB & Serverless on December 16, 2021

DynamoDB is an incredibly powerful NoSQL database. It’s schema-less, which gives you lots of flexibility, but it also means that you are responsible for managing the integrity of your data. This includes ensuring the structure of your data, as well as the ability to preserve metadata throughout your data’s lifecycle.

Unfortunately, DynamoDB doesn’t currently store any metadata associated with items. If you want to know when a particular item was written to the table, for example, you have to store that information yourself. While it’s not particularly difficult to add these attributes to an item, maintaining their integrity can come with some challenges.

In this article, we’ll discuss several strategies that can be used to ensure data integrity in your DynamoDB tables.

Jeremy’s Guide to a Very Serverless re:Invent 2020

Posted in Serverless on November 29, 2020
Last Updated: September 10, 2023

It’s AWS re:Invent time, and once again, developers, architects, business leaders, and everyone in between are faced with the daunting task of selecting from thousands of hours of re:Invent content. As usual, I will be focusing most of my time on serverless, so I’ve combed through the massive session catalog and picked out the ones that look the most interesting to me. If you’re looking to focus on serverless during this re:Invent, perhaps you’ll find my suggestions useful.

My picks are also available on the Cloud Pegboard re:Invent Tool (Thanks, Ken). Select “Jeremy Daly” from the “AWS Hero Picks” dropdown and you’ll see all my selections with the options to add them to your wishlist and export them to your calendar. I have about 60 sessions on my list, which I’ve categorized below. But I realize that no human is likely going to be able to watch them all, so I’ve also made a list of Sessions you can’t miss!

There are sure to be plenty of announcements throughout the three weeks of re:Invent, so be sure to subscribe to the Off-by-none newsletter for weekly recaps.

Takeaways from Programming AWS Lambda by Mike Roberts and John Chapin

Posted in Reviews & Serverless on May 27, 2020
Last Updated: September 10, 2023

Recently, Symphonia co-founders Mike Roberts and John Chapin wrote a book called Programming AWS Lambda: Build and Deploy Serverless Applications with Java. I personally abandoned Java long ago, but I knew full well that anything written by Mike and John was sure to be great. So despite the title (and my past war stories of working with Java), I picked up the book and gave it a read. I discovered that it’s not really a book about Java, but a book about building serverless applications with the examples in Java. Sure, there are a few very Java specific things (which every Java developer probably needs to read), but overall, this book offers some great insight into serverless from two experts in the field.

I had the chance to catch up with Mike on a recent episode of Serverless Chats. We discussed the book, how John and Mike got started with serverless (by building Java Lambda functions, of course), and what are some of the best practices people need to think about when building serverless applications. It was a great conversation (which you can watch/listen to here), but it was also jam packed with information, so I thought I’d highlight some of the important takeaways.

12 Important Lessons from The DynamoDB Book

Posted in Databases & Serverless on April 16, 2020

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.

Takeaways from the State of Serverless Report

Posted in Serverless on April 9, 2020
Last Updated: December 20, 2020

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.

Takeaways from AWS re:Invent 2019’s Amazon DynamoDB Deep Dive: Advanced Design Patterns (DAT403)

Posted in Databases & Serverless on December 7, 2019
Last Updated: December 20, 2020

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.

The Dynamic Composer (an AWS serverless pattern)

Posted in Serverless on October 20, 2019
Last Updated: March 30, 2020

I’m a big fan of following the Single Responsibility Principle when creating Lambda functions in my serverless applications. The idea of each function doing “one thing well” allows you to easily separate discrete pieces of business logic into reusable components. In addition, the Lambda concurrency model, along with the ability to add fine-grained IAM permissions per function, gives you a tremendous amount of control over the security, scalability, and cost of each part of your application.

However, there are several drawbacks with this approach that often attract criticism. These include things like increased complexity, higher likelihood of cold starts, separation of log files, and the inability to easily compose functions. I think there is merit to these criticisms, but I have personally found the benefits to far outweigh any of the negatives. A little bit of googling should help you find ways to mitigate many of these concerns, but I want to focus on the one that seems to trip most people up: function composition.

Developing Serverless Applications Locally with the “serverless-cloudside-plugin”

Posted in Serverless & Serverless Cloudside Plugin on May 5, 2019
Last Updated: March 30, 2020

Developing and testing serverless applications locally can be a challenge. Even with tools like SAM and the Serverless Framework, you often end up mocking your cloud resources, or resorting to tricks (like using pseudo-variables) to build ARNs and service endpoint URLs manually. While these workarounds may have the desired result, they also complicate our configuration files with (potentially brittle) user-constructed strings, which duplicates information already available to CloudFormation.

This is a common problem for me and other serverless developers I know. So I decided to come up with a solution.

Stop Calling Everything Serverless!

Posted in Serverless on December 21, 2018
Last Updated: March 30, 2020

I’ve been building serverless applications since AWS Lambda went GA in early 2015. I’m not saying that makes me an expert on the subject, but as I’ve watched the ecosystem mature and the community expand, I have formed some opinions around what it means exactly to be “serverless.” I often see tweets or articles that talk about serverless in a way that’s, let’s say, incompatible with my interpretation. This sometimes makes my blood boil, because I believe that “serverless” isn’t a buzzword, and that it actually stands for something important.

I’m sure that many people believe that this is just a semantic argument, but I disagree. When we refer to something as being “serverless”, there should be an agreed upon understanding of not only what that means, but also what it empowers you to do. If we continue to let marketers hijack the term, then it will become a buzzword with absolutely no discernible meaning whatsoever. In this post, we’ll look at how some leaders in the serverless space have defined it, I’ll add some of my thoughts, and then offer my own definition at the end.