AWS and Multicloud: Existing capabilities & continued enhancements

By Dustin Ward

When I speak to large-scale AWS customers about their challenges and concerns, the conversation often turns to the topic of multicloud. Whether by intent or by accident, these customers sometimes choose to make use of services from more than one cloud provider, sometimes in conjunction with applications or services that are still hosted on-premises. In…

Why and how to monitor Amazon API Gateway HTTP APIs

By Dustin Ward

API gateways are part of every modern microservice architecture. As their name already suggests, they are the gateway into your system; everyone who wants to access your service has to go through a gateway. In 2019, AWS announced HTTP APIs for its API Gateway (APIG) service. This was a big step to add more flexibility…

Getting down and dirty with metric-based alerting for AWS Lambda

By Dustin Ward

Originally posted to Dashbird blog. Traditionally in white-box monitoring, error reporting has been achieved with third party libraries, that catch and communicate failures to external services and notify developers whenever a problem occurrs. I’m here to argue that for managed services this can be achieved with less effort, no agents and without performance overhead. In…

5 Common Amazon Kinesis Issues

By Dustin Ward

Amazon Kinesis is the real-time stream processing service of AWS. Whether you got video, audio, or IoT streaming data to handle, Kinesis is the way to go. Kinesis is a serverless managed service that integrates nicely with other services like Lambda or S3. Often, you will use it when SQS or SNS is too low-level.   But as…

5 Common Amazon SQS Issues

By Dustin Ward

Originally posted to Dashbird blog. The simple query service (SQS) was one of the first services AWS offered. It’s a managed queuing service that lets you take pressure from your downstream services. You put your items on the queue, and other services can pull them whenever they have the capacity to work on them. It’s…