December 2020 Summaries

Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS are two communication services offered by AWS that help deliver events to various destinations with expected behavior. SQS is a message queuing service where messages are stored in a queue, while SNS is designed for mass-communication and event distribution among many subscribers. Amazon EventBridge, a relatively new service, extends CloudWatch Events and allows developers to create event rules and schedule triggers to target services, using an Enterprise Event Bus concept. Each service has its strengths and weaknesses, including latency, throughput, and feature sets, making it essential to choose the right service for specific use cases in serverless applications. Additionally, monitoring and debugging distributed applications can be challenging without proper tools, highlighting the importance of external observability services like Lumigo.

This blog post provides a step-by-step guide to implementing AWS Step Functions workflows with full monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities, using the "right to be forgotten" GDPR workflow as an example application. The authors discuss the difficulties encountered when handling monitoring, logging, and alerting in serverless applications and propose a solution by integrating Lumigo, a monitoring platform specifically designed for serverless applications running on the AWS cloud. The implementation uses a completely serverless approach with AWS Step Functions, AWS Lambda, AWS SNS, and DynamoDB to manage and monitor the deletion of user data across multiple systems in parallel, ensuring compliance with GDPR regulations. By leveraging Lumigo, the authors demonstrate how to quickly and cost-effectively deploy a solution that can coordinate the removal of required data throughout their domains, abstracting away all the monitoring, logging, and alerting code/configuration.

AWS has announced a new feature for its Lambda platform, allowing developers to package their code and dependencies as container images. This capability makes it easier for enterprise users to use consistent tools for security scanning, code signing, and other tasks. The maximum code package size for a function is now 10GB, significantly higher than the previous limit of 250MB. Container images can be used to run long-running services in Lambda, but they still must interact with the Lambda Runtime API to request events and send responses. This feature blurs the line between Lambda and containers, requiring careful consideration of its implications. While it may address specific pain points for some customers, it also introduces additional complexity and overhead. As such, it's not a replacement for ECS or Fargate, but rather an alternative solution for certain use cases.