July 2022 Summaries

AWS provides multiple ways to deploy containerized applications, including AWS Lambda, which offers scalable computation using functions, and is ideal for short-running tasks and cron jobs. In contrast, AWS App Runner is a fully-managed platform for running containers, designed for request-response type of applications, with no management of infrastructure or orchestration required. Amazon ECS provides a fully-managed container orchestration service, offering flexibility and scalability, while also allowing users to create custom scaling metrics. Amazon EKS is a managed Kubernetes service, providing a rich ecosystem and various features and tools, but also being the most complex option. Each service has different scalability characteristics and restrictions, and choosing the right one depends on specific use cases and requirements.

AWS Lambda's new Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) functionality allows for more fine-grained control over access to resources, enabling organizations to manage access based on project or team tags. This feature is now in general availability and can be used to allocate resource access dynamically while maintaining user-level control. With ABAC, IAM users can only access Lambda functions with matching tags, allowing for a dynamic way to create and access resources. The new controls being made available to Lambda functions include `aws:RequestTag/key`, `aws:tagKeys`, `aws:PrincipalTag/key`, and `aws:ResourceTag/key`, which provide more dimensions to how IAM permissions, roles, and users can be defined. By utilizing these controls, organizations can create policies dynamically to allow permissions to Lambda API actions only if the resource tag matches the IAM role tag. Additionally, Lumigo's Tag Filtering feature allows for filtering specific resource tags, enabling end-to-end observability of Lambda functions.

This article discusses the author's experience with running serverless workloads in production for five years. The author shares five important lessons learned from this experience, which include the importance of observability from day one, using multiple AWS accounts to mitigate limits and security breaches, securely loading secrets at runtime, following the principle of least privilege, and optimizing cold start performance for Lambda functions.

AWS Amplify is a set of tools and services that enables applications to be built and deployed for scale, supporting various web languages and frameworks such as JavaScript, React, Angular, Vue, iOS, Android, and mobile frameworks like React Native and Flutter. To get started with AWS Amplify, developers need to install the Amplify CLI, configure it with their AWS account, and then initialize a new backend application using the CLI. This can be done by running commands such as `amplify init` and `amplify add api`, which will create a new API and deploy it to AWS Amplify. Lumigo is a monitoring and debugging platform for serverless environments that provides integration with AWS Amplify, allowing developers to monitor their APIs, Lambda functions, and other resources in a single dashboard. With Lumigo, developers can troubleshoot issues, set up alerts, and gain insights into their application's performance, scalability, and resource utilization.