Diagrams are a solutions architect’s best friend, but they can be notoriously difficult to start — Last week, I ran an experiment. I had a sticky note on my desk labeled “Architecture Diagrams.” Whenever I was in a meeting, I wrote a tick mark if I said I could ‘draw a diagram for that.’ At the end of the week, I had seven tick marks drawn…

Step Functions is an incredible workflow service from AWS. But if you’re not careful, you might get in over your head and find yourself struggling to do routine maintenance. — Last week I got a call asking for help with a nasty bug in production. The bug dealt with processing data at a scale the dev team hadn’t anticipated. They were using [Step Functions](https://aws.amazon.com/step-functions/) …

This new architecture diagram spans levels 1–3 of the C4 model to give you the fastest view at your system possible — Architecture diagrams are a wonder. They help create a shared understanding about application architecture, business processes, and data flows between you and the stakeholders of your app. Around a year ago, I wrote a post about the 5 types of architecture diagrams which described many of the diagrams we use…

Stress testing your system can be just as stressful for you as it is for your app. But with serverless, you can quickly and easily run cost-effective load tests with minimal setup — Nothing is worse than launching a new product and it promptly goes down because you weren’t able to scale with the demand. On the surface everything looked great. Your QAs ran a full suite of regression tests. You ran through every use case you can think of.

Serverless already has high availability out of the box. Do you need to add on top of that? — Disasters are one of those things that you think “ that will never happen to me”. The moment it does happen to you and you don’t have a plan, you think “ why me? “ I was sitting in an all-day manager meeting last year, actively participating in conversation in…

When deciding to go serverless, you need to put up some guardrails to protect yourself. If you don’t, you might find yourself in a hole you can’t get out of — A couple of weeks ago, an article started floating around called “After 5 years, I’m out of the serverless compute cult”. It is a bit….polarizing, to say the least. If you follow my newsletter, you know I am an active member of the serverless “cult”.

With the big push to use Step Functions over Lambda, you might be wondering “which is more cost-effective”? The answer might surprise you. — Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve done some analysis on how you can start moving toward Step Functions as part of your standard development processes. You have the option to go “storage first” with completely asynchronous workflows or go completely synchronous with express state machines.

Step Functions are quickly turning into the de facto standard for building workflows in AWS. Discover the trick to configuring them with your REST APIs. — When I first started out with serverless a few years ago, Step Functions were a bit of a mystery. I knew that they were designed for orchestrating workflows but their scope escaped me. Should they span microservices? Should they be constrained to a single microservice? Should they be limited to…

Serverless offers many options when it comes to API design. Storage first is an async pattern that is changing the game — Last week my team was having a fiery debate. They were talking about the usage of VTL exclusively for APIs. One side of the argument debated that it enabled you to get the fastest possible response times for your API. The other side argued that it is near impossible to…