Articles

Are We There Yet? When Do We Move to GraalVM?

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This is the perfect time to raise this point — just as Spring Native is coming to the forefront. Is it time to move to GraalVM? Spoiler: it depends. Yes, if you’re building serverless, probably no if you’re building pretty much anything else — with a few exceptions for some microservices.

Before I begin, I want to qualify that I’m talking about native image (SubstrateVM) which is what most people mean when they say GraalVM. That specific feature took over a much larger and more ambitious project that includes some amazing capabilities such as polyglot programming. GraalVM native images let us compile our Java projects to native code. It performs analysis and removes unnecessary stuff, it can reduce the size and startup time of a binary significantly. I’ve seen 10-20x improvement to startup time, that’s a lot. Ram usage is also much lower sometimes by a similar scale but usually not as significant.

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AWS Step Function for Modernization of Integration Involving High-Volume Transaction: A Case Study

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The serverless offerings of AWS (or any other public cloud provider today) are getting more and more popular. One of the biggest reasons is of course not needing to think about infra (server provisioning and so on). The other reasons include the offerings themselves, which at times fit well into the technical need for finding solutions to the given problems. But on the other side, it remains a challenge to know the offerings in detail to leverage them properly. There could be always some new feature hidden deep inside the bulk of the documentation.

Background

A retail company decided to leverage the AWS Serverless offering for modernizing their on-premises integrations for order management business process. We can go serverless in the cloud in various ways, but the initial solutioning was decided to leverage the Step Function and Lambda Function along with some more integration offerings from AWS, namely SNS, SQS, and EventBridge. 

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Getting Started With Service Calls and Serverless Workflow

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Workflows are great for orchestrating services, functions, or events. They provide out-of-the-box features to make your applications resilient, reliable, and simple.

But currently, each cloud vendor has its workflow solution. AWS has Step Functions, Google has Google Workflows, Microsoft has Azure Durable functions, and so on. The lack of a common way to define workflows becomes an issue when you need to migrate or host your applications on more than one cloud vendor. It also limits the potential for creating tools and infrastructures that support several platforms. This is what the Serverless Workflow specification addresses.

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The Serverless Database You Really Want

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The dreaded part of every site reliability engineer’s (SRE) job eventually: capacity planning. You know, the dance between all the stakeholders when deploying your applications. Did engineering really simulate the right load and do we understand how the application scales? Did product managers accurately estimate the amount of usage? Did we make architectural decisions that will keep us from meeting our SLA goals? And then the question that everyone will have to answer eventually: how much is this going to cost? This forces SREs to assume the roles of engineer, accountant, and fortune teller.

The large cloud providers understood this a long time ago and so the term “cloud economics” was coined. Essentially this means: rent everything and only pay for what you need. I would say this message worked because we all love some cloud. It’s not a fad either. SREs can eliminate a lot of the downside when the initial infrastructure capacity discussion was maybe a little off. Being wrong is no longer devastating. Just add more of what you need and in the best cases, the services scale themselves — giving everyone a nice night’s sleep. All this without provisioning a server, which gave rise to the term “serverless.”

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Introduction to Serverless With AWS Lambda and Bitrise API: Part 1

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In the early days of software development, anyone seeking to develop a web, mobile, or backend application had to own the hardware required to run a server, which is an expensive process.

Then, when cloud computing came, it became possible to lease server space or a number of servers remotely. The developers and companies who rent these fixed units of server space generally overbuy to ensure that a spike in traffic or activity won’t exceed their monthly limits and break their applications. Because of this, a lot of the server space that gets paid for can be wasted.

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Using AWS Lambda Function URL To Build a Serverless Backend for Slack

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A combination of AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway is a widely-used architecture for serverless microservices and API-based solutions. They enable developers to focus on their applications, instead of spending time provisioning and managing servers.

API Gateway is a feature-rich offering that includes support for different API types (HTTP, REST, WebSocket), multiple authentication schemes, API versioning, canary deployments, and much more! However, if your requirements are simpler and all you need is an HTTP(S) endpoint for your Lambda function (for example, to serve as a webhook), you can use Lambda Function URLs! When you create a function URL, Lambda automatically generates a unique HTTP(S) endpoint that is dedicated to your Lambda function.

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5 Common Step Functions Issues

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Step Functions, the serverless finite state machine service from AWS. With DynamoDB, Lambda, and API Gateway, it forms the core of serverless AWS services. If you have tasks with multiple steps and you want to ensure they will get executed in the proper order, Step Functions is your service of choice.

It offers direct integrations with many AWS services, so you don’t need to use Lambda Functions as glue. This can improve the performance of your state machine and lower its costs.

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Using PGBouncer With CockroachDB Serverless

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Given CockroachDB scales with vCPU, there’s a hard limit to how many active connections we can support per vCPU before a serious problem arises. PGBouncer stretches the limits a bit making it a cost-effective option. In serverless architectures, there is no client-side connection pooling, and using middleware like PGBouncer can alleviate the problem of connection storms. Please see my previous articles on the topic for more details.

Previous Articles

  1. Using PGBouncer with CockroachDB
  2. Using PGBouncer with Cockroach Cloud Free Tier
  3. Exploring PGBouncer auth_type(s) with CockroachDB

Motivation

We’ve covered how to deploy PGBouncer with a self-hosted CockroachDB cluster. Today, I’m going to demonstrate how to run PGBouncer along with the Cockroach Cloud free-forever tier database. The overall concepts are identical, but we will highlight some of the major differences in deploying PGBouncer with a cloud product.

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Serverless for Survival

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When new technologies arise, we first adopt them for their technical value. If that value proves out, then we reach the magic “crossing the chasm” moment: when a technology jumps to widespread adoption through proven business value and goes mainstream. 

Some technologies, a very select few, make one more jump forward, however — from mainstream to existential imperative. 

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AWS Lambda Aliases: A Practical Approach

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Lambda functions are a fundamental component of the AWS serverless model. They provide a simple, cost-effective, and easily scalable programming model based on FaaS (functions as a service).

Lambda ARNs

Lambda functions can be referenced by their ARN (Amazon Resource Name). For example, the ARN to reference a ‘helloworld‘ function in the ‘us-east-2‘ region in account ‘3445435‘ would be:

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