While writing an AWS Step Function, I needed to sort an array of objects by an object path -- something that was beyond the ability of the built-in intrinsic functions. It was easily done with a Lambda, but that struck me as overkill. Could I use something lightweight like CloudFront functions? Yes! In this post, I'll show how I use CloudFront as a performant, inexpensive REST API that runs on the edge.
Did you know that setting environment variables on a Lambda function could add over 20 ms to your coldstart times? In this post, I'll talk about how I discovered this and when it matters.
It is common to emit two log types; application logs and request logs from a service application. In EC2, ECS and Fargate these logs can be pumped to separate CloudWatch Log Groups using the CloudWatch Agent, FireLens and FluentBit. Unfortunately in Lambda, these logs can only go to one log group. In this post, I explore a method for pumping request logs to a separate log group to workaround this Lambda limitation.
Have you ever thought you understood the timeline of a request in AWS Lambda only to stare at your logs and traces and find out that you didn't? The official documentation has diagrams that look pretty, but don't convey everything that is important. In this post I'll present the infographic I use to understand what Lambda is doing and what is and isn't in the logs.
In November 2023, I noticed Lambda coldstarts were 40 ms - 300 ms slower because they unnecessarily loaded the SSO credentials provider. I cut a GitHub issue which was closed with wontfix. Fast forward to January 29, version 3.502 of the AWS JavaScript SDK was released to lazy load non-essential credentials providers. This is a big win, but you can still squeeze out more performance. In this post I'll show you how to make your coldstarts 35 ms faster.
Big coldstart will try anything. It’s bikeshedding. Git gud. Negligible at scale. Use the AWS SDK v3. Read this blog. Just use provisioned concurrency.
But the truth is, we aren’t holding it wrong and coldstarts aren’t all your fault. In this post, I fail to stay frosty. In fact I get spicy, and make the case that we shouldn’t lay off the pepper until we stopped getting blamed for AWS’s coldstart problem.
I'm a big fan of the CloudWatch Embedded Metrics Format. It lets you write metrics to the lambda log without the overhead of a service call. Alas, there is no Embedded EventBridge Format, you need to make a sync call to EventBridge to put events onto the bus. Can we make it more asynchronous? In this post, I'll describe a back door to publishing events to EventBridge by just writing JSON to the lambda log.
You thought you could just set some flags and your node.js lambda function would be bundled, tree-shaken, minified and go from ice cold to glowing hot in milliseconds? My sweet summer child. I thought that too, but then I analyzed the bundle, pored over some traces and realized how wrong I was. What follows is the rabbit hole I went down to optimize my lambda coldstarts.
How to log Hello World is taught, but how to log something useful isn't. Too often, developers add logging until their code works, then they forget about it. In this post I'll teach you how to instrument your code with request logs so when you have millions of users and production is going sideways, you know exactly what is going on.
I've learned several undocumented tricks log diving with CloudWatch Logs Insights. In this "Dropping the K" post I'll share some of my favorites.