Logging and dashboards using Lambda PowerTools and CDK One of the key challenges with serverless applications and microservices in general is monitoring for application issues, and tracing issues across multiple functions and services. There are some very good commercial solutions to assist as your needs become more complex — like…

Using Custom Constructs to ensure consistency in deployments This article came about as part of a project to learn about and test TypeScript Lambda PowerTools. PowerTools is a set of AWS Labs modules to assist with and enhance Lambda logging, tracing and metrics. PowerTools are available for Python, Java, .Net…

Using CDK v2 with a GitHub Source This is the second (or third depending on how we count) article on deploying cross-account pipelines with CDK Pipelines. The first part focused on using CodeCommit in a Dev Account as the source for the pipelines and the many tricks required to get…

Using CDK v2 with a CodeCommit Source This is an update to a prior article that covered how to do this with CDK v1 and the pre-release version of CDK Pipelines. …

Automating the deployment and provisioning of Permission Sets One of the very few areas of the environments I manage that is not already infrastructure as code is the SSO Permission Set. …

A guide to build with or join projects using DynamoDB on AWS. DynamoDB is a fully-managed NoSQL database on AWS, designed to provide millisecond latency at any scale — but you probably already know that, so I’m not here to go into the detail of what it is. I recently…

And a few tricks for managing SSH Keys in Secrets Manager AWS Transfer is an enterprise-focused product to handle secure file transfers from the public and inside the corporate VPC. Like everything AWS, it is designed for high availability and virtually limitless scaling. …

A guide and complete solution built on CDK — SES is an often overlooked but very useful tool for sending and tracking email. While there are other solutions more suitable if you are making a business out of email lists, for many businesses and even personal use SES is ideal. This article is a follow-on from part one, where…

With an AWS CDK example to configure SES for outbound email I’ve always felt that AWS Simple Email Service (SES) doesn’t get the love it deserves. It is significantly cheaper than more full-featured email services like MailChimp and Constant Contact, and significantly more powerful than your own SMTP relay server. …