Tag Archives: AWS AppSync

Serverless ICYMI Q2 2024

Post Syndicated from Julian Wood original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/serverless-icymi-q2-2024/

Welcome to the 26th edition of the AWS Serverless ICYMI (in case you missed it) quarterly recap. Every quarter, we share all the most recent product launches, feature enhancements, blog posts, webinars, live streams, and other interesting things that you might have missed!

In case you missed our last ICYMI, check out what happened last quarter here.

Calendar

Calendar

EDA Day – London 2024

The AWS Serverless DA team hosted the third Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) Day in London on May 14th. This event brought together prominent figures in the event-driven architecture community, AWS, and customer speakers.

EDA Day covered 13 sessions, 2 workshops, and a Q&A panel. David Boyne was the keynote speaker with a talk “Complexity is the Gotcha of Event-Driven Architecture”. There were AWS speakers including Matthew Meckes, Natasha Wright, Julian Wood, Gillian Amstrong, Josh Kahn, Veda Ramen, and Uma Ramadoss. There was also an impressive lineup of guest speakers, Daniele Frasca, David Anderson, Ryan Cormack, Sarah Hamilton, Sheen Brisals, Marcin Sodkiewicz, and Ben Ellerby.

Videos are available on YouTube

EDA Day London

EDA Day London

The future of Serverless

There has been a lot of talk about the future of serverless, with this year being the 10th anniversary of AWS Lambda. Eric Johnson addresses the topic in his ServerlessDays Milan keynote, “Now serverless is all grown up, what’s next”.

AWS Lambda

AWS launched support for the latest release of Ruby 3.3 is based on the new Amazon Linux 2023 runtime. The Ruby 3.3 runtime also provides access to the latest Ruby language features.

There is a new guide on how to retrieve data about Lambda functions that use a deprecated runtime.

Learn how to run code after returning a response from an AWS Lambda function. This post shows how to return a synchronous function response as soon as possible, yet also perform additional asynchronous work after you send the response. For example, you may store data in a database or send information to a logging system.

See how you can use the circuit-breaker pattern with Lambda extensions and Amazon DynamoDB. The circuit breaker pattern can help prevent cascading failures and improve overall system stability.

Circuit-breaker pattern

Circuit-breaker pattern

Lambda functions now scale up to 12X faster in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Powertools for AWS Lambda (Python) adds support for Agents for Amazon Bedrock.

The AWS SDK for JavaScript v2 enters maintenance mode on September 8, 2024 and reaches end-of-support on September 8, 2025.

Amazon CloudWatch Logs introduced Live Tail streaming CLI support.

Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate

You can now secure Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) workloads on AWS Fargate with customer managed keys (CMKs). Once you add your keys to AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), you can use these to encrypt the underlying ephemeral storage of an Amazon ECS task on AWS Fargate.

Windows containers on AWS Fargate now start faster, up to 42% for Windows Server 2022 Core. AWS has optimized the Windows Server AMIs, introduced EC2 fast launch with pre-provisioned snapshots, and reduced network latency.

Amazon ECS Service Connect is a networking capability to simplify service discovery, connectivity, and traffic observability for Amazon ECS. You can now proactively scale Amazon ECS services by using custom metrics.

ECS Connect custom metrics

ECS Service Connect custom metrics

AWS Step Functions

The AWS Step Functions TestState API allows you to test individual states independently and to integrate testing into your preferred development workflows. Learn how to accelerate workflow development to iterate faster.

Step Functions TestState API

Step Functions TestState API

Amazon EventBridge

Amazon EventBridge Pipes now supports event delivery through AWS PrivateLink. You can send events from an event source located in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to a Pipes target without traversing the public internet.

Amazon Timestream for LiveAnalytics is now an EventBridge Pipes target. Timestream for LiveAnalytics is a fast, scalable, purpose-built time series database that makes it easy to store and analyze trillions of time series data points per day.

EventBridge has a new console dashboard which provides a centralized view of your resources, metrics, and quotas. The console has an improved Learn page and other console enhancements. When using the CloudFormation template export for Pipes, you can also generate the IAM role. There is a new Rules tab in the Event Bus detail page, and the monitoring tab in the Rule detail page now includes additional metrics.

EventBridge Scheduler has some new API request metrics for improved observability.

Generative AI

Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed Generative AI service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies through a single API. Bedrock now supports new models, including Anthropic’s Claude 3.5, AI21 Labs’ Jamba-Instruct, Amazon Titan Text Premier.

The new Bedrock Converse API provides a consistent way to invoke Amazon Bedrock models and simplifies multi-turn conversations. There is also a JavaScript tutorial to walk you through sending requests to the Converse API using the Javascript SDK.

Amazon Q Developer is now generally available. Amazon Q Developer, part of the Amazon Q family, is a generative AI–powered assistant for software development. Amazon Q is available in the AWS Management Console and as an integrated development environment (IDE) extension for Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, and JetBrains IDEs. Amazon Q Developer has knowledge of your AWS account resources and can help understand your costs.

Amazon Q list Lambda functions

Amazon Q list Lambda functions

You can use Amazon Q Developer to develop code features and transform code to upgrade Java applications. Amazon Q Developer also offers inline completions in the command line. For more information, see Reimagining software development with the Amazon Q Developer Agent.

Amazon Q code features

Amazon Q code features

Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock now let you configure Guardrails, configure inference parameters, and offers observability logs.

Storage and data

Amazon S3 no longer charges for several HTTP error codes if initiated from outside your individual AWS account or AWS Organization.

You can automatically detect malware in new object uploads to S3 with Amazon GuardDuty.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) now support up to 1.5 GiB/s of throughput per client, a 3x increase over the previous limit of 500 MiB/s.

Discover architectural patterns for real-time analytics using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams in part 1 and part 2 and see how to optimize write throughput.

Amazon API Gateway

Amazon API Gateway now allows you to increase the integration timeout beyond the prior limit of 29 seconds. You can raise the integration timeout for Regional and private REST APIs, but this might require a reduction in your account-level throttle quota limit. This launch can help with workloads that require longer timeouts, such as Generative AI use cases with Large Language Models (LLMs).

You can also now use Amazon Verified Permissions to secure API Gateway REST APIs when using an Open ID connect (OIDC) compliant identity provider. You can now control access based on user attributes and group memberships, without writing code.

AWS AppSync

You can now invoke your AWS AppSync data sources in an event-driven manner. Previously, you could only invoke Lambda functions synchronously from AWS AppSync. AWS AppSync can now trigger Lambda functions in Event mode, asynchronously decoupling the API response from the Lambda invocation, which helps with long-running operations.

AWS AppSync now passes application request headers to Lambda custom authorizer functions. You can make authorization decisions based on the value of the authorization header, and the value of other headers that were sent with the request from the application client.

Learn best practices for AWS AppSync GraphQL APIs. See how to how to optimize the security, performance, coding standards, and deployment of your AWS AppSync API. AWS AppSync also has increase quotas, and new metrics

AWS Amplify

AWS Amplify Gen 2 is now generally available. This now provides a code-first developer experience for building full-stack apps using TypeScript. Amplify Gen 2 allows you to express app requirements like the data models, business logic, and authorization rules in TypeScript.

AWS Amplify Gen2

AWS Amplify Gen2

Amplify has a new experience for file storage. This post explores using Lambda to create serverless functions for Amplify using TypeScript. There are also new team environment workflows.

Serverless blog posts

April

May

June

Serverless container blog posts

April

May

June

Serverless Office Hours

Serverless Office Hours

Serverless Office Hours

April

May

June

Containers from the Couch

Containers from the Couch

Containers from the Couch

April

May

FooBar Serverless

April

February

June

Still looking for more?

The Serverless landing page has more information. The Lambda resources page contains case studies, webinars, whitepapers, customer stories, reference architectures, and even more Getting Started tutorials.

You can also follow the Serverless Developer Advocacy team on X (formerly Twitter) to see the latest news, follow conversations, and interact with the team.

And finally, visit the Serverless Land and Containers on AWS websites for all your serverless and serverless container needs.

Build real-time applications with Amazon EventBridge and AWS AppSync

Post Syndicated from James Beswick original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/build-real-time-applications-with-amazon-eventbridge-and-aws-appsync/

This post is written by Josh Kahn, Tech Leader, Serverless.

Amazon EventBridge now supports publishing events to AWS AppSync GraphQL APIs as native targets. The new integration enables builders to publish events easily to a wider variety of consumers and simplifies updating clients with near real-time data. You can use EventBridge and AWS AppSync to build resilient, subscription-based event-driven architectures across consumers.

To illustrate using EventBridge with AWS AppSync, consider a simplified airport operations scenario. In this example, airlines publish flight events (for example, boarding, push back, gate changes, and delays) to a service that maintains flight status on in-airport displays. Airlines also publish events that are useful for other entities at the airport, such as baggage handlers and maintenance, but not to passengers. This depicts a conceptual view of the system:

Conceptual view of the system

Passengers want the in-airport displays to be up-to-date and accurate. There are a number of ways to design the display application so that data remains up-to-date. Broadly, these include the application polling some API or the application subscribing to data changes.

Subscriptions for this scenario are better as the data changes are small and incremental relative to the large amount of information displayed. In a delay, for example, the display updates the status and departure time but no other details of a single flight among a larger list of flight information.

Flight board

AWS AppSync can enable clients to listen for real-time data changes through the use of GraphQL subscriptions. These are implemented using a WebSocket connection between the client and the AWS AppSync service. The display application client invokes the GraphQL subscription operation to establish a secure connection. AWS AppSync will automatically push data changes (or mutations) via the GraphQL API to subscribers using that connection.

Previously, builders could use EventBridge API Destinations to wire events published and routed through EventBridge to AWS AppSync, as described in an earlier blog post, and available in Serverless Land patterns (API Key, OAuth). The approach is useful for dealing with “out-of-band” updates in which data changes outside of an AWS AppSync mutation. Out-of-band updates generally require a NONE data source in AWS AppSync to notify subscribers of changes, as described in the AWS re:Post Knowledge Center. The addition of AWS AppSync as a target for EventBridge simplifies these use cases as you can now trigger a mutation in response to an event without additional code.

Airport Operations Events

Expanding the scenario, airport operations events look like this:

{
  "flightNum": 123,
  "carrierCode": "JK",
  "date": "2024-01-25",
  "event": "FlightDelayed",
  "message": "Delayed 15 minutes, late aircraft",
  "info": "{ \"newDepTime\": \"2024-01-25T13:15:00Z\", \"delayMinutes\": 15 }"
}

The event field identifies the type of event and if it is relevant to passengers. The event details provide further information about the event, which varies based on the type of event. The airport publishes a variety of events but the airport displays only need a subset of those changes.

AWS AppSync GraphQL APIs start with a GraphQL schema that defines the types, fields, and operations available in that API. AWS AppSync documentation provides an overview of schema and other GraphQL essentials. The partial GraphQL schema for the airport scenario is as follows:


type DelayEventInfo implements EventInfo {
	message: String
	delayMinutes: Int
	newDepTime: AWSDateTime
}

interface EventInfo {
	message: String
}

enum StatusEvent {
	FlightArrived
	FlightBoarding
	FlightCancelled
	FlightDelayed
	FlightGateChanged
	FlightLanded
	FlightPushBack
	FlightTookOff
}

type StatusUpdate {
	num: Int!
	carrier: String!
	date: AWSDate!
	event: StatusEvent!
	info: EventInfo
}

input StatusUpdateInput {
	num: Int!
	carrier: String!
	date: AWSDate!
	event: StatusEvent!
	message: String
	extra: AWSJSON
}

type Mutation {
	updateFlightStatus(input: StatusUpdateInput!): StatusUpdate!
}

type Query {
	listStatusUpdates(by: String): [StatusUpdate]
}

type Subscription {
	onFlightStatusUpdate(date: AWSDate, carrier: String): StatusUpdate
		@aws_subscribe(mutations: ["updateFlightStatus"])
}

schema {
	query: Query
	mutation: Mutation
	subscription: Subscription
}

Connect EventBridge to AWS AppSync

EventBridge allows you to filter, transform, and route events to a number of targets. The airport display service only needs events that directly impact passengers. You can define a rule in EventBridge that routes only those events (included in the preceding GraphQL schema) to the AWS AppSync target. Other events are routed elsewhere, as defined by other rules, or dropped. Details on creating EventBridge rules and the event matching pattern format can be found in EventBridge documentation.

The previous flight delayed event would be delivered using EventBridge as follows:

{
  "id": "b051312994104931b0980d1ad1c5340f",
  "detail-type": "Operations: Flight delayed",
  "source": "airport-operations",
  "time": "2024-01-25T16:58:37Z",
  "detail": {
    "flightNum": 123,
    "carrierCode": "JK",
    "date": "2024-01-25",
    "event": "FlightDelayed",
    "message": "Delayed 15 minutes, late aircraft",
    "info": "{ \"newDepTime\": \"2024-01-25T13:15:00Z\", \"delayMinutes\": 15 }"
  }
}

In this scenario, there is a specific list of events of interest, but EventBridge provides a flexible set of operations to match patterns, inspect arrays, and filter by content using prefix, numerical, or other matching. Some organizations will also allow subscribers to define their own rules on an EventBridge event bus, allowing targets to subscribe to events via self-service.

The following event pattern matches on the events needed for the airport display service:

{
  "source": [ "airport-operations" ],
  "detail": {
    "event": [ "FlightArrived", "FlightBoarding", "FlightCancelled", ... ]
  }
}

To create a new EventBridge rule, you can use the AWS Management Console or infrastructure as code. You can find the CloudFormation definition for the completed rule, with the AWS AppSync target, later in this post.

Console view

Create the AWS AppSync target

Now that EventBridge is configured to route selected events, define AWS AppSync as the target for the rule. The AWS AppSync API must support IAM authorization to be used as an EventBridge target. AWS AppSync supports multiple authorization types on a single GraphQL type, so you can also use OpenID Connect, Amazon Cognito User Pools, or other authorization methods as needed.

To configure AWS AppSync as an EventBridge target, define the target using the AWS Management Console or infrastructure as code. In the console, select the Target Type as “AWS Service” and Target as “AppSync.” Select your API. EventBridge parses the GraphQL schema and allows you to select the mutation to invoke when the rule is triggered.

When using the AWS Management Console, EventBridge will also configure the necessary AWS IAM role to invoke the selected mutation. Remember to create and associate a role with an appropriate trust policy when configuring with IaC.

EventBridge target types

EventBridge supports input transformation to customize the contents of an event before passing the information as input to the target. Configure the input transformer to extract needed values from the event using JSON path and a template in the input format expected by the AWS AppSync API. EventBridge provides a handy utility in the Console to pass and test the output of a sample event.

Target input transformer

Finally, configure the selection set to include the response from the AWS AppSync API. These are the fields that will be returned to EventBridge when the mutation is invoked. While the result returned to EventBridge is not overly useful (aside from troubleshooting), the mutation selection set will also determine the fields available to subscribers to the onFlightStatusUpdate subscription.

Configuring the selection set

Define the EventBridge to AWS AppSync rule in CloudFormation

Infrastructure as code templates, including AWS CloudFormation and AWS CDK, are useful for codifying infrastructure definitions to deploy across Regions and accounts. While you can write CloudFormation by hand, EventBridge provides a useful CloudFormation export in the AWS Management Console. You can use this feature to export the definition for a defined rule.

Export definition

This is the CloudFormation for the previous configured rule and AWS AppSync target. This snippet includes both the rule definition and the target configuration.

PassengerEventsToDisplayServiceRule:
    Type: AWS::Events::Rule
    Properties:
      Description: Route passenger related events to the display service endpoint
      EventBusName: eb-to-appsync
      EventPattern:
        source:
          - airport-operations
        detail:
          event:
            - FlightArrived
            - FlightBoarding
            - FlightCancelled
            - FlightDelayed
            - FlightGateChanged
            - FlightLanded
            - FlightPushBack
            - FlightTookOff
      Name: passenger-events-to-display-service
      State: ENABLED
      Targets:
        - Id: 12344535353263463
          Arn: <AppSync API GraphQL API ARN>
          RoleArn: <EventBridge Role ARN (defined elsewhere)>
          InputTransformer:
            InputPathsMap:
              carrier: $.detail.carrierCode
              date: $.detail.date
              event: $.detail.event
              extra: $.detail.info
              message: $.detail.message
              num: $.detail.flightNum
            InputTemplate: |-
              {
                "input": {
                  "num": <num>,
                  "carrier": <carrier>,
                  "date": <date>,
                  "event": <event>,
                  "message": "<message>",
                  "extra": <extra>
                }
              }
          AppSyncParameters:
            GraphQLOperation: >-
              mutation
              UpdateFlightStatus($input:StatusUpdateInput!){updateFlightStatus(input:$input){
                event
                date
                carrier
                num
                info {
                  __typename
                  ... on DelayEventInfo {
                    message
                    delayMinutes
                    newDepTime
                  }
                }
              }}

The ARN of the AWS AppSync API follows the form arn:aws:appsync:<AWS_REGION>:<ACCOUNT_ID>:endpoints/graphql-api/<GRAPHQL_ENDPOINT_ID>. The ARN is available in CloudFormation (see GraphQLEndpointArn return value) or can be created using the identifier found in the AWS AppSync GraphQL endpoint. The ARN included in the EventBridge execution role policy is the AWS AppSync API ARN (a different ARN).

The AppSyncParameters field includes the GraphQL operation for EventBridge to invoke on the AWS AppSync API. This must be well formatted and match the GraphQL schema. Include any fields that must be available to subscribers in the selection set.

Testing subscriptions

AWS AppSync is now configured as a target for the EventBridge rule. The real-life display application would use a GraphQL library, such as AWS Amplify, to subscribe to real-time data changes. The AWS Management Console provides a useful utility to test. Navigate to the AWS AppSync console and select Queries in the menu for your API. Enter the following query and choose Run to subscribe for data changes:

subscription MySubscription {
  onFlightStatusUpdate {
    carrier
    date
    event
    num
    info {
      __typename
      … on DelayEventInfo {
        message
        delayMinutes
        newDepTime
      }
    }
  }
}

In a separate browser tab, navigate to the EventBridge console, and choose Send events. On the Send events page, select the required event bus and set the Event source to “airport-operations.” Then enter a detail type of your choice. Finally, paste the following as the Event detail, then choose Send.

{
  "id": "b051312994104931b0980d1ad1c5340f",
  "detail-type": "Operations: Flight delayed",
  "source": "airport-operations",
  "time": "2024-01-25T16:58:37Z",
  "detail": {
    "flightNum": 123,
    "carrierCode": "JK",
    "date": "2024-01-25",
    "event": "FlightDelayed",
    "message": "Delayed 15 minutes, late aircraft",
    "info": "{ \"newDepTime\": \"2024-01-25T13:15:00Z\", \"delayMinutes\": 15 }"
  }
}

Return to the AWS AppSync tab in your browser to see the changed data in the result pane:

Result pane

Conclusion

Directly invoking AWS AppSync GraphQL API targets from EventBridge simplifies and streamlines integration between these two services, ideal for notifying a variety of subscribers of data changes in event-driven workloads. You can also take advantage of other features available from the two services. For example, use AWS AppSync enhanced subscription filtering to update only airport displays in the terminal in which they are located.

To learn more about serverless, visit Serverless Land for a wide array of reusable patterns, tutorials, and learning materials. Newly added to the pattern library is an EventBridge to AWS AppSync pattern similar to the one described in this post. Visit EventBridge documentation for more details.

For more serverless learning resources, visit Serverless Land.

The serverless attendee’s guide to AWS re:Invent 2023

Post Syndicated from Marcia Villalba original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/the-serverless-attendees-guide-to-aws-reinvent-2023/

AWS re:Invent 2023 is fast approaching, bringing together tens of thousands of Builders in Las Vegas in November. However, even if you can’t attend in person, you can catch up with sessions on-demand.

Breakout sessions are lecture-style 60-minute informative sessions presented by AWS experts, customers, or partners. These sessions cover beginner (100 level) topics to advanced and expert (300–400 level) topics. The sessions are recorded and uploaded a few days after to the AWS Events YouTube channel.

This post shares the “must watch” breakout sessions related to serverless architectures and services.

Sessions related to serverless architecture

SVS401

SVS401 | Best practices for serverless developers
Provides architectural best practices, optimizations, and useful shortcuts that experts use to build secure, high-scale, and high-performance serverless applications.

Chris Munns, Startup Tech Leader, AWS
Julian Wood, Principal Developer Advocate, AWS

SVS305 | Refactoring to serverless
Shows how you can refactor your application to serverless with real-life examples.

Gregor Hohpe, Senior Principal Evangelist, AWS
Sindhu Pillai, Senior Solutions Architect, AWS

SVS308 | Building low-latency, event-driven applications
Explores building serverless web applications for low-latency and event-driven support. Marvel Snap share how they achieve low-latency in their games using serverless technology.

Marcia Villalba, Principal Developer Advocate, AWS
Brenna Moore, Second Dinner

SVS309 | Improve productivity by shifting more responsibility to developers
Learn about approaches to accelerate serverless development with faster feedback cycles, exploring best practices and tools. Watch a live demo featuring an improved developer experience for building serverless applications while complying with enterprise governance requirements.

Heeki Park, Principal Solutions Architect, AWS
Sam Dengler, Capital One

GBL203-ES | Building serverless-first applications with MAPFRE
This session is delivered in Spanish. Learn what modern, serverless-first applications are and how to implement them with services such as AWS Lambda or AWS Fargate. Find out how MAPFRE have adopted and implemented a serverless strategy.

Jesus Bernal, Senior Solutions Architect, AWS
Iñigo Lacave, MAPFRE
Mat Jovanovic, MAPFRE

Sessions related to AWS Lambda

BOA311

BOA311 | Unlocking serverless web applications with AWS Lambda Web Adapter
Learn about the AWS Lambda Web Adapter and how it integrates with familiar frameworks and tools. Find out how to migrate existing web applications to serverless or create new applications using AWS Lambda.

Betty Zheng, Senior Developer Advocate, AWS
Harold Sun, Senior Solutions Architect, AWS

OPN305 | The pragmatic serverless Python developer
Covers an opinionated approach to setting up a serverless Python project, including testing, profiling, deployments, and operations. Learn about many open source tools, including Powertools for AWS Lambda—a toolkit that can help you implement serverless best practices and increase developer velocity.

Heitor Lessa, Principal Solutions Architect, AWS
Ran Isenberg, CyberArk

XNT301 | Build production-ready serverless .NET apps with AWS Lambda
Explores development and architectural best practices when building serverless applications with .NET and AWS Lambda, including when to run ASP.NET on Lambda, code structure, and using native AOT to massively increase performance.

James Eastham, Senior Cloud Architect, AWS
Craig Bossie, Solutions Architect, AWS

COM306 | “Rustifying” serverless: Boost AWS Lambda performance with Rust
Discover how to deploy Rust functions using AWS SAM and cargo-lambda, facilitating a smooth development process from your local machine. Explore how to integrate Rust into Python Lambda functions effortlessly using tools like PyO3 and maturin, along with the AWS SDK for Rust. Uncover how Rust can optimize Lambda functions, including the development of Lambda extensions, all without requiring a complete rewrite of your existing code base.

Efi Merdler-Kravitz, Cloudex

COM305 | Demystifying and mitigating AWS Lambda cold starts
Examines the Lambda initialization process at a low level, using benchmarks comparing common architectural patterns, and then benchmarking various RAM configurations and payload sizes. Next, measure and discuss common mistakes that can increase initialization latency, explore and understand proactive initialization, and learn several strategies you can use to thaw your AWS Lambda cold starts.

AJ Stuyvenberg, Datadog

Sessions related to event-driven architecture

API302

API302 | Building next gen applications with event driven architecture
Learn about common integration patterns and discover how you can use AWS messaging services to connect microservices and coordinate data flow using minimal custom code. Learn and plan for idempotency, handling duplicating events and building resiliency into your architectures.

Eric Johnson, Principal Developer Advocate, AWS

API303 | Navigating the journey of serverless event-driven architecture
Learn about the journey businesses undertake when adopting EDAs, from initial design and implementation to ongoing operation and maintenance. The session highlights the many benefits EDAs can offer organizations and focuses on areas of EDA that are challenging and often overlooked. Through a combination of patterns, best practices, and practical tips, this session provides a comprehensive overview of the opportunities and challenges of implementing EDAs and helps you understand how you can use them to drive business success.

David Boyne, Senior Developer Advocate, AWS

API309 | Advanced integration patterns and trade-offs for loosely coupled apps
In this session, learn about common design trade-offs for distributed systems, how to navigate them with design patterns, and how to embed those patterns in your cloud automation.

Dirk Fröhner, Principal Solutions Architect, AWS
Gregor Hohpe, Senior Principal Evangelist, AWS

SVS205 | Getting started building serverless event-driven applications
Learn about the process of prototyping a solution from concept to a fully featured application that uses Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, Amazon EventBridge, AWS Step Functions, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Application Composer, and more. Learn why serverless is a great tool set for experimenting with new ideas and how the extensibility and modularity of serverless applications allow you to start small and quickly make your idea a reality.

Emily Shea, Head of Application Integration Go-to-Market, AWS
Naren Gakka, Solutions Architect, AWS

API206 | Bringing workloads together with event-driven architecture
Attend this session to learn the steps to bring your existing container workloads closer together using event-driven architecture with minimal code changes and a high degree of reusability. Using a real-life business example, this session walks through a demo to highlight the power of this approach.

Dhiraj Mahapatro, Principal Solutions Architect, AWS
Nicholas Stumpos, JPMorgan Chase & Co

COM301 | Advanced event-driven patterns with Amazon EventBridge
Gain an understanding of the characteristics of EventBridge and how it plays a pivotal role in serverless architectures. Learn the primary elements of event-driven architecture and some of the best practices. With real-world use cases, explore how the features of EventBridge support implementing advanced architectural patterns in serverless.

Sheen Brisals, The LEGO Group

Sessions related to serverless APIs

SVS301

SVS301 | Building APIs: Choosing the best API solution and strategy for your workloads
Learn about access patterns and how to evaluate the best API technology for your applications. The session considers the features and benefits of Amazon API Gateway, AWS AppSync, Amazon VPC Lattice, and other options.

Josh Kahn, Tech Leader Serverless, AWS
Arthi Jaganathan, Principal Solutions Architect, AWS

SVS323 | I didn’t know Amazon API Gateway did that
This session provides an introduction to Amazon API Gateway and the problems it solves. Learn about the moving parts of API Gateway and how it works, including common and not-so-common use cases. Discover why you should use API Gateway and what it can do.

Eric Johnson, Principal Developer Advocate, AWS

FWM201 | What’s new with AWS AppSync for enterprise API developers
Join this session to learn about all the exciting new AWS AppSync features released this year that make it even more seamless for API developers to realize the benefits of GraphQL for application development.

Michael Liendo, Senior Developer Advocate, AWS
Brice Pellé, Principal Product Manager, AWS

FWM204 | Implement real-time event patterns with WebSockets and AWS AppSync
Learn how the PGA Tour uses AWS AppSync to deliver real-time event updates to their app users; review new features, like enhanced filtering options and native integration with Amazon EventBridge; and provide a sneak peek at what’s coming next.

Ryan Yanchuleff, Senior Solutions Architect, AWS
Bill Fine, Senior Product Manager, AWS
David Provan, PGA Tour

Sessions related to AWS Step Functions

API401

API401 | Advanced workflow patterns and business processes with AWS Step Functions
Learn about architectural best practices and repeatable patterns for building workflows and cost optimizations, and discover handy cheat codes that you can use to build secure, high-scale, high-performance serverless applications

Ben Smith, Principal Developer Advocate, AWS

BOA304 | Using AI and serverless to automate video production
Learn how to use Step Functions to build workflows using AI services and how to use Amazon EventBridge real-time events.

Marcia Villalba, Principal Developer Advocate, AWS

SVS204 | Building Serverlesspresso: Creating event-driven architectures
This session explores the design decisions that were made when building Serverlesspresso, how new features influenced the development process, and lessons learned when creating a production-ready application using this approach. Explore useful patterns and options for extensibility that helped in the design of a robust, scalable solution that costs about one dollar per day to operate. This session includes examples you can apply to your serverless applications and complex architectural challenges for larger applications.

James Beswick, Senior Manager Developer Advocacy, AWS

API310 | Scale interactive data analysis with Step Functions Distributed Map
Learn how to build a data processing or other automation once and readily scale it to thousands of parallel processes with serverless technologies. Explore how this approach simplifies development and error handling while improving speed and lowering cost. Hear from an AWS customer that refactored an existing machine learning application to use Distributed Map and the lessons they learned along the way.

Adam Wagner, Principal Solutions Architect, AWS
Roberto Iturralde, Vertex Pharmaceuticals

Sessions related to handling data using serverless services and serverless databases

SVS307

SVS307 | Scaling your serverless data processing with Amazon Kinesis and Kafka
Explore how to build scalable data processing applications using AWS Lambda. Learn practical insights into integrating Lambda with Amazon Kinesis and Apache Kafka using their event-driven models for real-time data streaming and processing.

Julian Wood, Principal Developer Advocate, AWS

DAT410 | Advanced data modeling with Amazon DynamoDB
This session shows you advanced techniques to get the most out of DynamoDB. Learn how to “think in DynamoDB” by learning the DynamoDB foundations and principles for data modeling. Learn practical strategies and DynamoDB features to handle difficult use cases in your application.

Alex De Brie – Independent consultant

COM308 | Serverless data streaming: Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and AWS Lambda
Explore the intricacies of creating scalable, production-ready data streaming architectures using Kinesis Data Streams and Lambda. Delve into tips and best practices essential to navigating the challenges and pitfalls inherent to distributed systems that arise along the way, and observe how AWS services work and interact.

Anahit Pogosova, Solita

Additional resources

If you are attending the event, there are many chalk talks, workshops, and other sessions to visit. See ServerlessLand for a full list of all the serverless sessions and also the Serverless Hero, Danielle Heberling’s Serverless re:Invent attendee guide for her top picks.

Visit us in the AWS Village in the Expo Hall where you can find the Serverless and Containers booth and enjoy a free cup of coffee at Serverlesspresso.

For more serverless learning resources, visit Serverless Land.

Using AWS AppSync and AWS Lake Formation to access a secure data lake through a GraphQL API

Post Syndicated from Rana Dutt original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/using-aws-appsync-and-aws-lake-formation-to-access-a-secure-data-lake-through-a-graphql-api/

Data lakes have been gaining popularity for storing vast amounts of data from diverse sources in a scalable and cost-effective way. As the number of data consumers grows, data lake administrators often need to implement fine-grained access controls for different user profiles. They might need to restrict access to certain tables or columns depending on the type of user making the request. Also, businesses sometimes want to make data available to external applications but aren’t sure how to do so securely. To address these challenges, organizations can turn to GraphQL and AWS Lake Formation.

GraphQL provides a powerful, secure, and flexible way to query and retrieve data. AWS AppSync is a service for creating GraphQL APIs that can query multiple databases, microservices, and APIs from one unified GraphQL endpoint.

Data lake administrators can use Lake Formation to govern access to data lakes. Lake Formation offers fine-grained access controls for managing user and group permissions at the table, column, and cell level. It can therefore ensure data security and compliance. Additionally, this Lake Formation integrates with other AWS services, such as Amazon Athena, making it ideal for querying data lakes through APIs.

In this post, we demonstrate how to build an application that can extract data from a data lake through a GraphQL API and deliver the results to different types of users based on their specific data access privileges. The example application described in this post was built by AWS Partner NETSOL Technologies.

Solution overview

Our solution uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store the data, AWS Glue Data Catalog to house the schema of the data, and Lake Formation to provide governance over the AWS Glue Data Catalog objects by implementing role-based access. We also use Amazon EventBridge to capture events in our data lake and launch downstream processes. The solution architecture is shown in the following diagram.

Appsync and LakeFormation Arch itecture diagram

Figure 1 – Solution architecture

The following is a step by step description of the solution:

  1. The data lake is created in an S3 bucket registered with Lake Formation. Whenever new data arrives, an EventBridge rule is invoked.
  2. The EventBridge rule runs an AWS Lambda function to start an AWS Glue crawler to discover new data and update any schema changes so that the latest data can be queried.
    Note: AWS Glue crawlers can also be launched directly from Amazon S3 events, as described in this blog post.
  3. AWS Amplify allows users to sign in using Amazon Cognito as an identity provider. Cognito authenticates the user’s credentials and returns access tokens.
  4. Authenticated users invoke an AWS AppSync GraphQL API through Amplify, fetching data from the data lake. A Lambda function is run to handle the request.
  5. The Lambda function retrieves the user details from Cognito and assumes the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role associated with the requesting user’s Cognito user group.
  6. The Lambda function then runs an Athena query against the data lake tables and returns the results to AWS AppSync, which then returns the results to the user.

Prerequisites

To deploy this solution, you must first do the following:

git clone [email protected]:aws-samples/aws-appsync-with-lake-formation.git
cd aws-appsync-with-lake-formation

Prepare Lake Formation permissions

Sign in to the LakeFormation console and add yourself as an administrator. If you’re signing in to Lake Formation for the first time, you can do this by selecting Add myself on the Welcome to Lake Formation screen and choosing Get started as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 – Add yourself as the Lake Formation administrator

Otherwise, you can choose Administrative roles and tasks in the left navigation bar and choose Manage Administrators to add yourself. You should see your IAM username under Data lake administrators with Full access when done.

Select Data catalog settings in the left navigation bar and make sure the two IAM access control boxes are not selected, as shown in Figure 3. You want Lake Formation, not IAM, to control access to new databases.

Lake Formation data catalog settings

Figure 3 – Lake Formation data catalog settings

Deploy the solution

To create the solution in your AWS environment, launch the following AWS CloudFormation stack:  Launch Cloudformation Stack

The following resources will be launched through the CloudFormation template:

  • Amazon VPC and networking components (subnets, security groups, and NAT gateway)
  • IAM roles
  • Lake Formation encapsulating S3 bucket, AWS Glue crawler, and AWS Glue database
  • Lambda functions
  • Cognito user pool
  • AWS AppSync GraphQL API
  • EventBridge rules

After the required resources have been deployed from the CloudFormation stack, you must create two Lambda functions and upload the dataset to Amazon S3. Lake Formation will govern the data lake that is stored in the S3 bucket.

Create the Lambda functions

Whenever a new file is placed in the designated S3 bucket, an EventBridge rule is invoked, which launches a Lambda function to initiate the AWS Glue crawler. The crawler updates the AWS Glue Data Catalog to reflect any changes to the schema.

When the application makes a query for data through the GraphQL API, a request handler Lambda function is invoked to process the query and return the results.

To create these two Lambda functions, proceed as follows.

  1. Sign in to the Lambda console.
  2. Select the request handler Lambda function named dl-dev-crawlerLambdaFunction.
  3. Find the crawler Lambda function file in your lambdas/crawler-lambda folder in the git repo that you cloned to your local machine.
  4. Copy and paste the code in that file to the Code section of the dl-dev-crawlerLambdaFunction in your Lambda console. Then choose Deploy to deploy the function.
Copy and paste code into the Lambda function

Figure 4 – Copy and paste code into the Lambda function

  1. Repeat steps 2 through 4 for the request handler function named dl-dev-requestHandlerLambdaFunction using the code in lambdas/request-handler-lambda.

Create a layer for the request handler Lambda

You now must upload some additional library code needed by the request handler Lambda function.

  1. Select Layers in the left menu and choose Create layer.
  2. Enter a name such as appsync-lambda-layer.
  3. Download this package layer ZIP file to your local machine.
  4. Upload the ZIP file using the Upload button on the Create layer page.
  5. Choose Python 3.7 as the runtime for the layer.
  6. Choose Create.
  7. Select Functions on the left menu and select the dl-dev-requestHandler Lambda function.
  8. Scroll down to the Layers section and choose Add a layer.
  9. Select the Custom layers option and then select the layer you created above.
  10. Click Add.

Upload the data to Amazon S3

Navigate to the root directory of the cloned git repository and run the following commands to upload the sample dataset. Replace the bucket_name placeholder with the S3 bucket provisioned using the CloudFormation template. You can get the bucket name from the CloudFormation console by going to the Outputs tab with key datalakes3bucketName as shown in image below.

Figure 5 – S3 bucket name shown in CloudFormation Outputs tab

Figure 5 – S3 bucket name shown in CloudFormation Outputs tab

Enter the following commands in your project folder in your local machine to upload the dataset to the S3 bucket.

cd dataset
aws s3 cp . s3://bucket_name/ --recursive

Now let’s take a look at the deployed artifacts.

Data lake

The S3 bucket holds sample data for two entities: companies and their respective owners. The bucket is registered with Lake Formation, as shown in Figure 6. This enables Lake Formation to create and manage data catalogs and manage permissions on the data.

Figure 6 – Lake Formation console showing data lake location

Figure 6 – Lake Formation console showing data lake location

A database is created to hold the schema of data present in Amazon S3. An AWS Glue crawler is used to update any change in schema in the S3 bucket. This crawler is granted permission to CREATE, ALTER, and DROP tables in the database using Lake Formation.

Apply data lake access controls

Two IAM roles are created, dl-us-east-1-developer and dl-us-east-1-business-analyst, each assigned to a different Cognito user group. Each role is assigned different authorizations through Lake Formation. The Developer role gains access to every column in the data lake, while the Business Analyst role is only granted access to the non-personally identifiable information (PII) columns.

Lake Formation console data lake permissions assigned to group roles

Figure 7 –Lake Formation console data lake permissions assigned to group roles

GraphQL schema

The GraphQL API is viewable from the AWS AppSync console. The Companies type includes several attributes describing the owners of the companies.

Schema for GraphQL API

Figure 8 – Schema for GraphQL API

The data source for the GraphQL API is a Lambda function, which handles the requests.

– AWS AppSync data source mapped to Lambda function

Figure 9 – AWS AppSync data source mapped to Lambda function

Handling the GraphQL API requests

The GraphQL API request handler Lambda function retrieves the Cognito user pool ID from the environment variables. Using the boto3 library, you create a Cognito client and use the get_group method to obtain the IAM role associated to the Cognito user group.

You use a helper function in the Lambda function to obtain the role.

def get_cognito_group_role(group_name):
    response = cognito_idp_client.get_group(
            GroupName=group_name,
            UserPoolId=cognito_user_pool_id
        )
    print(response)
    role_arn = response.get('Group').get('RoleArn')
    return role_arn

Using the AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) through a boto3 client, you can assume the IAM role and obtain the temporary credentials you need to run the Athena query.

def get_temp_creds(role_arn):
    response = sts_client.assume_role(
        RoleArn=role_arn,
        RoleSessionName='stsAssumeRoleAthenaQuery',
    )
    return response['Credentials']['AccessKeyId'],
response['Credentials']['SecretAccessKey'],  response['Credentials']['SessionToken']

We pass the temporary credentials as parameters when creating our Boto3 Amazon Athena client.

athena_client = boto3.client('athena', aws_access_key_id=access_key, aws_secret_access_key=secret_key, aws_session_token=session_token)

The client and query are passed into our Athena query helper function which executes the query and returns a query id. With the query id, we are able to read the results from S3 and bundle it as a Python dictionary to be returned in the response.

def get_query_result(s3_client, output_location):
    bucket, object_key_path = get_bucket_and_path(output_location)
    response = s3_client.get_object(Bucket=bucket, Key=object_key_path)
    status = response.get("ResponseMetadata", {}).get("HTTPStatusCode")
    result = []
    if status == 200:
        print(f"Successful S3 get_object response. Status - {status}")
        df = pandas.read_csv(response.get("Body"))
        df = df.fillna('')
        result = df.to_dict('records')
        print(result)
    else:
        print(f"Unsuccessful S3 get_object response. Status - {status}")
    return result

Enabling client-side access to the data lake

On the client side, AWS Amplify is configured with an Amazon Cognito user pool for authentication. We’ll navigate to the Amazon Cognito console to view the user pool and groups that were created.

Figure 10 –Amazon Cognito User pools

Figure 10 –Amazon Cognito User pools

For our sample application we have two groups in our user pool:

  • dl-dev-businessAnalystUserGroup – Business analysts with limited permissions.
  • dl-dev-developerUserGroup – Developers with full permissions.

If you explore these groups, you’ll see an IAM role associated to each. This is the IAM role that is assigned to the user when they authenticate. Athena assumes this role when querying the data lake.

If you view the permissions for this IAM role, you’ll notice that it doesn’t include access controls below the table level. You need the additional layer of governance provided by Lake Formation to add fine-grained access control.

After the user is verified and authenticated by Cognito, Amplify uses access tokens to invoke the AWS AppSync GraphQL API and fetch the data. Based on the user’s group, a Lambda function assumes the corresponding Cognito user group role. Using the assumed role, an Athena query is run and the result returned to the user.

Create test users

Create two users, one for dev and one for business analyst, and add them to user groups.

  1. Navigate to Cognito and select the user pool, dl-dev-cognitoUserPool, that’s created.
  2. Choose Create user and provide the details to create a new business analyst user. The username can be biz-analyst. Leave the email address blank, and enter a password.
  3. Select the Users tab and select the user you just created.
  4. Add this user to the business analyst group by choosing the Add user to group button.
  5. Follow the same steps to create another user with the username developer and add the user to the developers group.

Test the solution

To test your solution, launch the React application on your local machine.

  1. In the cloned project directory, navigate to the react-app directory.
  2. Install the project dependencies.
npm install
  1. Install the Amplify CLI:
npm install -g @aws-amplify/cli
  1. Create a new file called .env by running the following commands. Then use a text editor to update the environment variable values in the file.
echo export REACT_APP_APPSYNC_URL=Your AppSync endpoint URL > .env
echo export REACT_APP_CLIENT_ID=Your Cognito app client ID >> .env
echo export REACT_APP_USER_POOL_ID=Your Cognito user pool ID >> .env

Use the Outputs tab of your CloudFormation console stack to get the required values from the keys as follows:

REACT_APP_APPSYNC_URL appsyncApiEndpoint
REACT_APP_CLIENT_ID cognitoUserPoolClientId
REACT_APP_USER_POOL_ID cognitoUserPoolId
  1. Add the preceding variables to your environment.
source .env
  1. Generate the code needed to interact with the API using Amplify CodeGen. In the Outputs tab of your Cloudformation console, find your AWS Appsync API ID next to the appsyncApiId key.
amplify add codegen --apiId <appsyncApiId>

Accept all the default options for the above command by pressing Enter at each prompt.

  1. Start the application.
npm start

You can confirm that the application is running by visiting http://localhost:3000 and signing in as the developer user you created earlier.

Now that you have the application running, let’s take a look at how each role is served from the companies endpoint.

First, sign is as the developer role, which has access to all the fields, and make the API request to the companies endpoint. Note which fields you have access to.

The results for developer role

Figure 11 –The results for developer role

Now, sign in as the business analyst user and make the request to the same endpoint and compare the included fields.

The results for Business Analyst role

Figure 12 –The results for Business Analyst role

The First Name and Last Name columns of the companies list is excluded in the business analyst view even though you made the request to the same endpoint. This demonstrates the power of using one unified GraphQL endpoint together with multiple Cognito user group IAM roles mapped to Lake Formation permissions to manage role-based access to your data.

Cleaning up

After you’re done testing the solution, clean up the following resources to avoid incurring future charges:

  1. Empty the S3 buckets created by the CloudFormation template.
  2. Delete the CloudFormation stack to remove the S3 buckets and other resources.

Conclusion

In this post, we showed you how to securely serve data in a data lake to authenticated users of a React application based on their role-based access privileges. To accomplish this, you used GraphQL APIs in AWS AppSync, fine-grained access controls from Lake Formation, and Cognito for authenticating users by group and mapping them to IAM roles. You also used Athena to query the data.

For related reading on this topic, see Visualizing big data with AWS AppSync, Amazon Athena, and AWS Amplify and Design a data mesh architecture using AWS Lake Formation and AWS Glue.

Will you implement this approach for serving data from your data lake? Let us know in the comments!


About the Authors

Rana Dutt is a Principal Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. He has a background in architecting scalable software platforms for financial services, healthcare, and telecom companies, and is passionate about helping customers build on AWS.

Ranjith Rayaprolu is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working with customers in the Pacific Northwest. He helps customers design and operate Well-Architected solutions in AWS that address their business problems and accelerate the adoption of AWS services. He focuses on AWS security and networking technologies to develop solutions in the cloud across different industry verticals. Ranjith lives in the Seattle area and loves outdoor activities.

Justin Leto is a Sr. Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services with specialization in databases, big data analytics, and machine learning. His passion is helping customers achieve better cloud adoption. In his spare time, he enjoys offshore sailing and playing jazz piano. He lives in New York City with his wife and baby daughter.

AWS Weekly Roundup – AWS AppSync, AWS CodePipeline, Events and More – August 21, 2023

Post Syndicated from Marcia Villalba original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-aws-appsync-aws-codepipeline-events-and-more-august-21-2023/

In a few days, I will board a plane towards the south. My tour around Latin America starts. But I won’t be alone in this adventure, you can find some other News Blog authors, like Jeff or Seb, speaking at AWS Community Days and local events in Peru, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. If you see us, come and say hi. We would love to meet you.

Latam Community in reInvent 2022

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some launches that got my attention during the previous week.

AWS AppSync now supports JavaScript for all resolvers in GraphQL APIs – Last year, we announced that AppSync now supports JavaScript pipeline resolvers. And starting last week, developers can use JavaScript to write unit resolvers, pipeline resolvers, and AppSync functions that are run on the AppSync Javascript runtime.

AWS CodePipeline now supports GitLabNow you can use your GitLab.com source repository to build, test, and deploy code changes using AWS CodePipeline, in addition to other providers like AWS CodeCommit, Bitbucket, GitHub.com, and GitHub Enterprise Server.

Amazon CloudWatch Agent adds support for OpenTelemetry traces and AWS X-Ray With the new version of the agent you are now able to collect metrics, logs, and traces with a single agent, not only for CloudWatch but also for OpenTelemetry and AWS X-Ray. Simplifying the installation, configuration, and management of telemetry collection.

New instance types: Amazon EC2 M7a and Amazon EC2 Hpc7a – The new Amazon EC2 M7a is a general purpose instance type powered by 4th Gen AMD EPYC processor. In the announcement blog, you can find all the specifics for this instance type. The new Amazon EC2 Hpc7a instances are also powered by 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors. These instance types are optimized for high performance computing and Channy Yun wrote a blog post describing the different characteristics of the Amazon EC2 Hpc7a instance type.

AWS DeepRacer Educator PlaybooksLast week we introduced the AWS DeepRacer educator playblooks, these are a tool for educators to integrate foundational machine learning (ML) curriculum and labs into their classrooms. Educators can use these playbooks to easily upskill students in the basics of ML with autonomous vehicles.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
Some other updates and news that you might have missed:

Guide for using AWS Lambda to process Apache Kafka StreamsJulian Wood just published the most complete guide you can find on how to use Lambda with Apache Kafka. If you are an Amazon Kinesis user, don’t worry. We’ve got you covered with this video series where you will find similar topics.

Using AWS Lambda with Kafka guide

The Official AWS Podcast – Listen each week for updates on the latest AWS news and deep dives into exciting use cases. There are also official AWS podcasts in several languages. Check out the ones in FrenchGermanItalian, and Spanish.

AWS Open-Source News and Updates – This is a newsletter curated by my colleague Ricardo to bring you the latest open source projects, posts, events, and more.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

Join AWS Hybrid Cloud & Edge Day to learn how to deploy your applications in the everywhere cloud

AWS Global SummitsAWS Summits – The 2023 AWS Summits season is almost ending with the last two in-person events in Mexico City (August 30) and Johannesburg (September 26).

AWS re:Invent reInvent(November 27–December 1) – But don’t worry because re:Invent season is coming closer. Join us to hear the latest from AWS, learn from experts, and connect with the global cloud community. Registration is now open.

AWS Community Days AWS Community Day– Join a community-led conference run by AWS user group leaders in your region:Taiwan (August 26), Aotearoa (September 6), Lebanon (September 9), Munich (September 14), Argentina (September 16), Spain (September 23), and Chile (September 30). Check all the upcoming AWS Community Days here.

CDK Day (September 29) – A community-led fully virtual event with tracks in English and in Spanish about CDK and related projects. Learn more in the website.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

— Marcia

AWS Week in Review – Step Functions Versions and Aliases, EC2 Instances with Graviton3E Processors, and More – June 26, 2023

Post Syndicated from Danilo Poccia original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-step-functions-versions-and-aliases-ec2-instances-with-graviton3e-processors-and-more-june-26-2023/

It’s now summer in the northern hemisphere, and you can feel it in London where I live. But let’s not get distracted by the nice weather and go through your AWS updates from the previous seven days.

Last Week’s Launches
Another interesting week with many announcements! Here are some that got more of my attention:

Architectural diagram for AWS Step Functions versioning and aliasesAWS Step FunctionsYou can now use versions and aliases to maintain multiple versions of your workflows, track which version was used for each execution, and create aliases that route traffic between workflow versions. To learn more, refer to this blog post.

AWS SAM – You can now simplify the way you define an AppSync GraphQL API in AWS SAM with the new a resource abstraction that includes everything necessary for a typical AppSync GraphQL API definition, including the API schema, the resolver pipeline functions, and data sources.

AWS Amplify – With the new Amplify UI Builder Figma plugin, you can theme your components, upgrade to new Amplify UI kit versions, and generate and preview React code from your designs directly in Figma.

AWS Local ZonesNow available in Manila, Philippines. You can use AWS Local Zones for applications that require single-digit millisecond latency or local data processing.

AWS Control Tower – The integration with Security Hub is now generally available. You can now enable over 170 Security Hub detective controls that map to related control objectives from AWS Control Tower. AWS Control Tower also detects drifts when you disable a control from Security Hub.

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose – You can now deliver streaming data to Amazon Redshift Serverless. In this way, you can build an analytics platform without having to manage ingestion infrastructure or data warehouse clusters.

Amazon CloudWatch Internet MonitorNow available in all standard AWS Regions. Internet Monitor helps you diagnose internet issues between your AWS hosted applications and your application’s end users.

AWS Verified Access – Now provides improved logging functionality. With that, It’s easier to author and troubleshoot application access policies by reviewing the end-user context received from third-party services.

Amazon Managed Grafana – Now supports Trace Analytics with the OpenSearch Grafana data source plugin in addition to the existing support for Log Analytics. You can simplify the correlation and analysis of logs and trace data stored in OpenSearch along with metrics from other data sources.

Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights – You can now use the new dedup command in your queries to view unique results based on one or more fields. Duplicates are discarded based on the sort order so that only the first result is kept.

AWS Config – Now supports 21 more resource types for services such as AWS Amplify, AWS App Mesh, AWS App Runner, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, and Amazon SageMaker.

Amazon EC2 – Announcing the new EC2 C7gn and Hpc7g instances that use Graviton3E processors. The Graviton3E processor delivers higher memory bandwidth and compute performance than Graviton2, and higher vector instruction performance than Graviton3. Read more in Jeff’s C7gn and Channy’s Hpc7g blog posts.

Amazon EFS – Provisioned Throughput now supports up to 10 GiB/s (from 3 GiB/s) for reads and 3 GiB/s (from 1 GiB/s) for writes.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
Architecture diagram for AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry sample app.A few more news items and blog posts you might have missed:

Good tipsMitigate Common Web Threats with One Click in Amazon CloudFront

A nice seriesLet’s Architect! Open-source technologies on AWS

An interesting solutionDeploy a serverless ML inference endpoint of large language models using FastAPI, AWS Lambda, and AWS CDK

For AWS open-source news and updates, check out the latest newsletter curated by Ricardo to bring you the most recent updates on open-source projects, posts, events, and more.

Upcoming AWS Events
Here are some opportunities to meet and learn:

AWS Applications Innovation Day (June 27) – Learn how product teams across applications, security, and artificial intelligence (AI) are collaborating with AWS Partners like Asana, Slack, Splunk, Atlassian, Okta, and more to help organizations work smarter together. For more information on the event, refer to this blog post.

AWS Summits – Get together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS in Hong Kong (July 20), New York (July 26), Taiwan (Aug 2 & 3), Sao Paulo (Aug 3).

AWS re:Invent (Nov 27 – Dec 1) – Join us to hear the latest from AWS, learn from experts, and connect with the global cloud community. Registration is now open.

Amazon Prime Day (July 11-12) is coming, and you can learn more in this blog post. We should keep an eye out for Jeff’s annual Prime Day post following the event.

That’s all from me for this week. Come back next Monday for another Week in Review!

Danilo

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

AWS Week in Review – AWS Notifications, Serverless event, and More – May 8, 2023

Post Syndicated from Marcia Villalba original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-aws-notifications-serverless-event-and-more-may-8-2023/

At the end of this week, I’m flying to Seattle to take part in the AWS Serverless Innovation Day. Along with many customers and colleagues from AWS, we are going to be live on May 17 at a virtual free event. During the AWS Serverless Innovation Day we will share best practices related to building event-driven applications and using serverless functions and containers. Get a calendar reminder and check the full agenda at the event site.

Serverless innovation day

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some launches that got my attention during the previous week.

New Local Zones in Auckland – AWS Local Zones allow you to deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency or local data processing. Starting last week, AWS Local Zones is available in Auckland, New Zealand.

All AWS Local Zones

AWS Notifications Channy wrote an article explaining how you can view and configure notifications for your AWS account. In addition to the AWS Management Console notifications, the AWS Console Mobile Application now allows you to create and receive actionable push notifications when a resource requires your attention.

AWS SimSpace Weaver Last reInvent, we launched AWS SimSpace Weaver, a fully managed compute service that helps you deploy large spatial simulations in the cloud. Starting last week, AWS SimSpace Weaver allows you to save the state of the simulations at a specific point in time.

AWS Security Hub Added four new integration partners to help customers with their cloud security posture monitoring, and now it provides detailed tracking of finding changes with the finding history feature. This last feature provides an immutable trail of changes to get more visibility into the changes made to your findings.

AWS Compute Optimizer – AWS Compute Optimizer supports inferred workload type filtering on Amazon EC2 instance recommendations and automatically detects the applications that might run on your AWS resources. Now AWS Compute Optimizer supports filtering your rightsizing recommendation by tags and identifies and filters Microsoft SQL Server workloads as an inferred workload type.

AWS AppSyncNow AWS AppSync GraphQL APIs support Private API. With Private APIs, you can now create GraphQL APIs that can only be accessed from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
Some other updates and news that you may have missed:

  • Responsible AI in the Generative EraAmazon Science published a very interesting blog post this week about the special challenges raised by building a responsible generative AI and the different things builders of applications can do in order to solve these challenges.
  • Patterns for Building an API to Upload Files to Amazon S3 – Amazon S3 is one of the most used services by our customers, and applications often require a way for users to upload files. In this article, Thomas Moore shows different ways to do this in a secure way.
  • The Official AWS Podcast – Listen each week for updates on the latest AWS news and deep dives into exciting use cases. There are also official AWS podcasts in your local languages. Check out the ones in FrenchGermanItalian, and Spanish.
  • AWS Open-Source News and Updates – This is a newsletter curated by my colleague Ricardo to bring you the latest open-source projects, posts, events, and more.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

  • AWS Serverless Innovation DayJoin us on May 17 for a virtual and free event about AWS Serverless. We will have talks and fireside chats with customers related to AWS Lambda, Amazon ECS with Fargate, AWS Step Functions, and Amazon EventBridge.
  • AWS re:Inforce 2023You can now register for AWS re:Inforce, happening in Anaheim, California, on June 13–14.
  • AWS Global Summits – There are many summits going on right now around the world: Stockholm (May 11), Hong Kong (May 23), India (May 25), Amsterdam (June 1), London (June 7), Washington, DC (June 7–8), Toronto (June 14), Madrid (June 15), and Milano (June 22).
  • AWS Community Day – Join a community-led conference run by AWS user group leaders in your region: Warsaw (June 1), Chicago (June 15), Manila (June 29–30), and Munich (September 14).
  • AWS User Group Peru Conference – The local AWS User Group announced a one-day cloud event in Spanish and English in Lima on September 23. Seb, Jeff, and I will be attending the event from the AWS News blog team. Register today!

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— Marcia

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

AWS Week in Review – November 21, 2022

Post Syndicated from Danilo Poccia original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-november-21-2022/

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

A new week starts, and the News Blog team is getting ready for AWS re:Invent! Many of us will be there next week and it would be great to meet in person. If you’re coming, do you know about PeerTalk? It’s an onsite networking program for re:Invent attendees available through the AWS Events mobile app (which you can get on Google Play or Apple App Store) to help facilitate connections among the re:Invent community.

If you’re not coming to re:Invent, no worries, you can get a free online pass to watch keynotes and leadership sessions.

Last Week’s Launches
It was a busy week for our service teams! Here are the launches that got my attention:

AWS Region in Spain – The AWS Region in Aragón, Spain, is now open. The official name is Europe (Spain), and the API name is eu-south-2.

Amazon Athena – You can now apply AWS Lake Formation fine-grained access control policies with all table and file format supported by Amazon Athena to centrally manage permissions and access data catalog resources in your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) data lake. With fine-grained access control, you can restrict access to data in query results using data filters to achieve column-level, row-level, and cell-level security.

Amazon EventBridge – With these additional filtering capabilities, you can now filter events by suffix, ignore case, and match if at least one condition is true. This makes it easier to write complex rules when building event-driven applications.

AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) – The ACK for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is now generally available and lets you provision and manage EC2 networking resources, such as VPCs, security groups and internet gateways using the Kubernetes API. Also, the ACK for Amazon EMR on EKS is now generally available to allow you to declaratively define and manage EMR on EKS resources such as virtual clusters and job runs as Kubernetes custom resources. Learn more about ACK for Amazon EMR on EKS in this blog post.

Amazon HealthLake – New analytics capabilities make it easier to query, visualize, and build machine learning (ML) models. Now HealthLake transforms customer data into an analytics-ready format in near real-time so that you can query, and use the resulting data to build visualizations or ML models. Also new is Amazon HealthLake Imaging (preview), a new HIPAA-eligible capability that enables you to easily store, access, and analyze medical images at any scale. More on HealthLake Imaging can be found in this blog post.

Amazon RDS – You can now transfer files between Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle and an Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file system. You can use this integration to stage files like Oracle Data Pump export files when you import them. You can also use EFS to share a file system between an application and one or more RDS Oracle DB instances to address specific application needs.

Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS – We added centralized logging support for Windows containers to help you easily process and forward container logs to various AWS and third-party destinations such as Amazon CloudWatch, S3, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, Datadog, and Splunk. See these blog posts for how to use this new capability with ECS and with EKS.

AWS SAM CLI – You can now use the Serverless Application Model CLI to locally test and debug an AWS Lambda function defined in a Terraform application. You can see a walkthrough in this blog post.

AWS Lambda – Now supports Node.js 18 as both a managed runtime and a container base image, which you can learn more about in this blog post. Also check out this interesting article on why and how you should use AWS SDK for JavaScript V3 with Node.js 18. And last but not least, there is new tooling support to build and deploy native AOT compiled .NET 7 applications to AWS Lambda. With this tooling, you can enable faster application starts and benefit from reduced costs through the faster initialization times and lower memory consumption of native AOT applications. Learn more in this blog post.

AWS Step Functions – Now supports cross-account access for more than 220 AWS services to process data, automate IT and business processes, and build applications across multiple accounts. Learn more in this blog post.

AWS Fargate – Adds the ability to monitor the utilization of the ephemeral storage attached to an Amazon ECS task. You can track the storage utilization with Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights and ECS Task Metadata endpoint.

AWS Proton – Now has a centralized dashboard for all resources deployed and managed by AWS Proton, which you can learn more about in this blog post. You can now also specify custom commands to provision infrastructure from templates. In this way, you can manage templates defined using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) and other templating and provisioning tools. More on CDK support and AWS CodeBuild provisioning can be found in this blog post.

AWS IAM – You can now use more than one multi-factor authentication (MFA) device for root account users and IAM users in your AWS accounts. More information is available in this post.

Amazon ElastiCache – You can now use IAM authentication to access Redis clusters. With this new capability, IAM users and roles can be associated with ElastiCache for Redis users to manage their cluster access.

Amazon WorkSpaces – You can now use version 2.0 of the WorkSpaces Streaming Protocol (WSP) host agent that offers significant streaming quality and performance improvements, and you can learn more in this blog post. Also, with Amazon WorkSpaces Multi-Region Resilience, you can implement business continuity solutions that keep users online and productive with less than 30-minute recovery time objective (RTO) in another AWS Region during disruptive events. More on multi-region resilience is available in this post.

Amazon CloudWatch RUM – You can now send custom events (in addition to predefined events) for better troubleshooting and application specific monitoring. In this way, you can monitor specific functions of your application and troubleshoot end user impacting issues unique to the application components.

AWS AppSync – You can now define GraphQL API resolvers using JavaScript. You can also mix functions written in JavaScript and Velocity Template Language (VTL) inside a single pipeline resolver. To simplify local development of resolvers, AppSync released two new NPM libraries and a new API command. More info can be found in this blog post.

AWS SDK for SAP ABAP – This new SDK makes it easier for ABAP developers to modernize and transform SAP-based business processes and connect to AWS services natively using the SAP ABAP language. Learn more in this blog post.

AWS CloudFormation – CloudFormation can now send event notifications via Amazon EventBridge when you create, update, or delete a stack set.

AWS Console – With the new Applications widget on the Console home, you have one-click access to applications in AWS Systems Manager Application Manager and their resources, code, and related data. From Application Manager, you can view the resources that power your application and your costs using AWS Cost Explorer.

AWS Amplify – Expands Flutter support (developer preview) to Web and Desktop for the API, Analytics, and Storage use cases. You can now build cross-platform Flutter apps with Amplify that target iOS, Android, Web, and Desktop (macOS, Windows, Linux) using a single codebase. Learn more on Flutter Web and Desktop support for AWS Amplify in this post. Amplify Hosting now supports fully managed CI/CD deployments and hosting for server-side rendered (SSR) apps built using Next.js 12 and 13. Learn more in this blog post and see how to deploy a NextJS 13 app with the AWS CDK here.

Amazon SQS – With attribute-based access control (ABAC), you can define permissions based on tags attached to users and AWS resources. With this release, you can now use tags to configure access permissions and policies for SQS queues. More details can be found in this blog.

AWS Well-Architected Framework – The latest version of the Data Analytics Lens is now available. The Data Analytics Lens is a collection of design principles, best practices, and prescriptive guidance to help you running analytics on AWS.

AWS Organizations – You can now manage accounts, organizational units (OUs), and policies within your organization using CloudFormation templates.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
A few more stuff you might have missed:

Introducing our final AWS Heroes of the year – As the end of 2022 approaches, we are recognizing individuals whose enthusiasm for knowledge-sharing has a real impact with the AWS community. Please meet them here!

The Distributed Computing ManifestoWerner Vogles, VP & CTO at Amazon.com, shared the Distributed Computing Manifesto, a canonical document from the early days of Amazon that transformed the way we built architectures and highlights the challenges faced at the end of the 20th century.

AWS re:Post – To make this community more accessible globally, we expanded the user experience to support five additional languages. You can now interact with AWS re:Post also using Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, French, Japanese, and Korean.

For AWS open-source news and updates, here’s the latest newsletter curated by Ricardo to bring you the most recent updates on open-source projects, posts, events, and more.

Upcoming AWS Events
As usual, there are many opportunities to meet:

AWS re:Invent – Our yearly event is next week from November 28 to December 2. If you can’t be there in person, get your free online pass to watch live the keynotes and the leadership sessions.

AWS Community DaysAWS Community Day events are community-led conferences to share and learn together. Join us in Sri Lanka (on December 6-7), Dubai, UAE (December 10), Pune, India (December 10), and Ahmedabad, India (December 17).

That’s all from me for this week. Next week we’ll focus on re:Invent, and then we’ll take a short break. We’ll be back with the next Week in Review on December 12!

Danilo

AWS AppSync GraphQL APIs Supports JavaScript Resolvers

Post Syndicated from Marcia Villalba original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-appsync-graphql-apis-supports-javascript-resolvers/

Starting today, AWS AppSync supports JavaScript resolvers and provides a resolver evaluation engine to test them before publishing them to the cloud.

AWS AppSync, launched in 2017, is a service that allows you to build, manage, and host GraphQL APIs in the cloud. AWS AppSync connects your GraphQL schema to different data sources using resolvers. Resolvers are how AWS AppSync translates GraphQL requests and fetches information from the different data sources.

Until today, many customers had to write their resolvers using Apache Velocity Template Language (VTL). To write VTL resolvers, many developers needed to learn a new language, and that discouraged them from taking advantage of the capabilities that resolvers offer. And when they did write them, developers faced the challenge of how to test the VTL resolvers. That is why many customers resorted to writing their complex resolvers as AWS Lambda functions and then creating a simple VTL resolver that invoked that function. This adds more complexity to their applications, as now they have to maintain and operate this new Lambda function.

AWS AppSync executes resolvers on a GraphQL field. Sometimes, applications require executing multiple operations to resolve a single GraphQL field. When using AWS AppSync, developers can create pipeline resolvers to compose operations (called functions) and execute them in sequence. Each function performs an operation over a data source, for example, fetching an item from an Amazon DynamoDB table.

How a function works

Introducing AWS AppSync JavaScript pipeline resolvers
Now, in addition to VTL, developers can use JavaScript to write their functions. You can mix functions written in JavaScript and VTL inside a pipeline resolver.

This new launch comes with two new NPM libraries to simplify development: @aws-appsync/eslint-plugin to catch and fix problems quickly during development and @aws-appsync/utils to provide type validation and autocompletion in code editors.

Developers can test their JavaScript code using AWS AppSync’s new API command, evaluate-code. During a test, the code is validated for correctness and evaluated with mock data. This helps developers validate their code before pushing their changes to the cloud.

With this launch, AWS AppSync becomes one of the easiest ways for your applications to talk to almost any AWS service. You can write an HTTP function that calls any AWS service with an API endpoint using JavaScript and use that function as part of your pipeline. For example, you can create a pipeline resolver that is invoked when a query on a GraphQL field occurs. This field returns the translated text in Spanish of an item stored in a table. This pipeline resolver is composed of two functions, one that fetches data from a DynamoDB table and one that uses Amazon Translate API to translate the item text into Spanish.

function awsTranslateRequest(Text, SourceLanguageCode, SourceLanguageCode) {
  return {
    method: 'POST',
    resourcePath: '/',
    params: {
      headers: {
        'content-type': 'application/x-amz-json-1.1',
        'x-amz-target': 'AWSShineFrontendService_20170701.TranslateText',
      },
      body: JSON.stringify({ Text, SourceLanguageCode, SourceLanguageCode }),
    },
  };
}

Getting started
You can create JavaScript functions from the AWS AppSync console or using the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). Let’s create a pipeline resolver that gets an item from an existing DynamoDB table using the AWS CLI. This resolver only has one function.

When creating a new AWS AppSync function, you need to provide the code for that function. Create a new JavaScript file and copy the following code snippet.

import { util } from '@aws-appsync/utils';

/**
 * Request a single item from the attached DynamoDB table
 * @param ctx the request context
 */
export function request(ctx) {
  return {
    operation: 'GetItem',
    key: util.dynamodb.toMapValues({ id: ctx.args.id }),
  };
}

/**
 * Returns the DynamoDB result directly
 * @param ctx the request context
 */
export function response(ctx) {
  return ctx.result;
}

All functions need to have a request and response method, and in each of these methods, you can perform the operations for fulfilling the business need.

To get started, first make sure that you have the latest version of the AWS CLI, that you have a DynamoDB table created, and that you have an AWS AppSync API. Then you can create the function in AWS AppSync using the AWS CLI create-function command and the file you just created. This command returns the function ID. To create the resolver, pass the function ID, the GraphQL operation, and the field where you want to apply the resolver. In the documentation, you can find a detailed tutorial on how to create pipeline resolvers.

Testing a resolver
To test a function, use the evaluate-code command from AWS CLI or AWS SDK. This command calls the AWS AppSync service and evaluates the code with the provided context. To automate the test, you can use any JavaScript testing and assertion library. For example, the following code snippet uses Jest to validate the returned results programmatically.

import * as AWS from 'aws-sdk'
import { readFile } from 'fs/promises'
const appsync = new AWS.AppSync({ region: 'us-east-2' })
const file = './functions/updateItem.js'

test('validate an update request', async () => {
  const context = JSON.stringify({
    arguments: {
      input: { id: '<my-id>', title: 'change!', description: null },
    },
  })
  const code = await readFile(file, { encoding: 'utf8' })
  const runtime = { name: 'APPSYNC_JS', runtimeVersion: '1.0.0' }
  const params = { context, code, runtime, function: 'request' }

  const response = await appsync.evaluateCode(params).promise()
  expect(response.error).toBeUndefined()
  expect(response.evaluationResult).toBeDefined()
  const result = JSON.parse(response.evaluationResult)
  expect(result.key.id.S).toEqual(context.arguments.input.id)
  expect(result.update.expressionNames).not.toHaveProperty('#id')
  expect(result.update.expressionNames).toHaveProperty('#title')
  expect(result.update.expressionNames).toHaveProperty('#description')
  expect(result.update.expressionValues).not.toHaveProperty(':description')
})

In this way, you can add your API tests to your build process and validate that you coded the resolvers correctly before you push the changes to the cloud.

Get started today
The support for JavaScript AWS AppSync resolvers in AWS AppSync is available for all Regions that currently support AWS AppSync. You can start using this feature today from the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or Amazon CloudFormation.

Learn more about this launch by visiting the AWS AppSync service page.

Marcia

What to consider when modernizing APIs with GraphQL on AWS

Post Syndicated from Lewis Tang original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/what-to-consider-when-modernizing-apis-with-graphql-on-aws/

In the next few years, companies will build over 500 million new applications, more than has been developed in the previous 40 years combined (see IDC article). API operations enable innovation. They are the “front door” to applications and microservices, and an integral layer in the application stack. In recent years, GraphQL has emerged as a modern API approach. With GraphQL, companies can improve the performance of their applications and the speed in which development teams can build applications. In this post, we will discuss how GraphQL works and how integrating it with AWS services can help you build modern applications. We will explore the options for running GraphQL on AWS.

How GraphQL works

Imagine you have an API frontend implemented with GraphQL for your ecommerce application. As shown in Figure 1, there are different services in your ecommerce system backend that are accessible via different technologies. For example, user profile data is stored in a highly scalable NoSQL table. Orders are accessed through a REST API. The current inventory stock is checked through an AWS Lambda function. And the pricing information is in an SQL database.

How GraphQL works

Figure 1. How GraphQL works

Without using GraphQL, client applications must make multiple separate calls to each one of these services. Because each service is exposed through different API endpoints, the complexity of accessing data from the client side increases significantly. In order to get the data, you have to make multiple calls. In some cases, you might over fetch data as the data source would send you an entire payload including data you might not need. In some other circumstances, you might under fetch data as a single data source would not have all your required data.

A GraphQL API combines the data from all these different services into a single payload that the client defines based on its needs. For example, a smartphone has a smaller screen than a desktop application. A smartphone application might require less data. The data is retrieved from multiple data sources automatically. The client just sees a single constructed payload. This payload might be receiving user profile data from Amazon DynamoDB, or order details from Amazon API Gateway. Or it could involve the injection of specific fields with inventory availability and price data from AWS Lambda and Amazon Aurora.

When modernizing frontend APIs with GraphQL, you can build applications faster because your frontend developers don’t need to wait for backend service teams to create new APIs for integration. GraphQL simplifies data access by interacting with data from multiple data sources using a single API. This reduces the number of API requests and network traffic, which results in improved application performance. Furthermore, GraphQL subscriptions enable two-way communication between the backend and client. It supports publishing updates to data in real time to subscribed clients. You can create engaging applications in real time with use cases such as updating sports scores, bidding statuses, and more.

Options for running GraphQL on AWS

There are two main options for running GraphQL implementation on AWS, fully managed on AWS using AWS AppSync, and self-managed GraphQL.

I. Fully managed using AWS AppSync

The most straightforward way to run GraphQL is by using AWS AppSync, a fully managed service. AWS AppSync handles the heavy lifting of securely connecting to data sources, such as Amazon DynamoDB, and to develop GraphQL APIs. You can write business logic against these data sources by choosing code templates that implement common GraphQL API patterns. Your APIs can also interact with other AWS AppSync functionality such as caching, to improve performance. Use subscriptions to support real-time updates, and client-side data stores to keep offline devices in sync. AWS AppSync will scale automatically to support varied API request loads. You can find more details from the AWS AppSync features page.

AWS AppSync in an ecommerce system implementation

Figure 2. AWS AppSync in an ecommerce system implementation

Let’s take a closer look at this GraphQL implementation with AWS AppSync in an ecommerce system. In Figure 2, a schema is created to define types and capabilities of the desired GraphQL API. You can tie the schema to a Resolver function. The schema can either be created to mirror existing data sources, or AWS AppSync can create tables automatically based the schema definition. You can also use GraphQL features for data discovery without viewing the backend data sources.

After a schema definition is established, an AWS AppSync client can be configured with an operation request, such as a query operation. The client submits the operation request to GraphQL Proxy along with an identity context and credentials. The GraphQL Proxy passes this request to the Resolver, which maps and initiates the request payload against pre-configured AWS data services. These can be an Amazon DynamoDB table for user profile, an AWS Lambda function for inventory service, and more. The Resolver initiates calls to one or all of these services within a single API call. This minimizes CPU cycles and network bandwidth needs. The Resolver then returns the response to the client. Additionally, the client application can change data requirements in code on demand. The AWS AppSync GraphQL API will dynamically map requests for data accordingly, enabling faster prototyping and development.

II. Self-Managed GraphQL

If you want the flexibility of selecting a particular open-source project, you may choose to run your own GraphQL API layer. Apollo, graphql-ruby, Juniper, gqlgen, and Lacinia are some popular GraphQL implementations. You can leverage AWS Lambda or container services such as Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS) to run GraphQL open-source implementations. This gives you the ability to fine-tune the operational characteristics of your API.

When running a GraphQL API layer on AWS Lambda, you can take advantage of the serverless benefits of automatic scaling, paying only for what you use, and not having to manage your servers. You can create a private GraphQL API using Amazon ECS, EKS, or AWS Lambda, which can only be accessed from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). With Apollo GraphQL open-source implementation, you can create a Federated GraphQL that allows you to combine GraphQL APIs from multiple microservices into a single API, illustrated in Figure 3. The Apollo GraphQL Federation with AWS AppSync post shows a concrete example of how to integrate an AWS AppSync API with an Apollo Federation gateway. It uses specification-compliant queries and directives.

Apollo GraphQL implementation on AWS Lambda

Figure 3. Apollo GraphQL implementation on AWS Lambda

When choosing self-managed GraphQL implementation, you have to spend time writing non-business logic code to connect data sources. You must implement authorization, authentication, and integrate other common functionalities. This can be caches to improve performance, subscriptions to support real-time updates, and client-side data stores to keep offline devices in sync. Because of these responsibilities, you have less time to focus on the business logic of application.

Similarly, backend development teams and API operators of an open-source GraphQL implementation must provision and maintain their own GraphQL servers. Remember that even with a serverless model, API developers and operators are still responsible for monitoring, performance tuning, and troubleshooting the API platform service.

Conclusion

Modernizing APIs with GraphQL gives your frontend application the ability to fetch just the data that’s needed from multiple data sources with an API call. You can build modern mobile and web applications faster, because GraphQL simplifies API management. You have flexibility to run an open-source GraphQL implementation most closely aligned with your needs on AWS Lambda, Amazon ECS, and Amazon EKS. With AWS AppSync, you can set up GraphQL quickly and increase your development velocity by reducing the amount of non-business API logic code.

Further reading:

ICYMI: Serverless Q1 2022

Post Syndicated from James Beswick original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/icymi-serverless-q1-2022/

Welcome to the 16th edition of the AWS Serverless ICYMI (in case you missed it) quarterly recap. Every quarter, we share all the most recent product launches, feature enhancements, blog posts, webinars, Twitch live streams, and other interesting things that you might have missed!

Calendar

In case you missed our last ICYMI, check out what happened last quarter here.

AWS Lambda

Lambda now offers larger ephemeral storage for functions, up to 10 GB. Previously, the storage was set to 512 MB. There are several common use-cases that can benefit from expanded temporary storage, including extract-transform load (ETL) jobs, machine learning inference, and data processing workloads. To see how to configure the amount of /tmp storage in AWS SAM, deploy this Serverless Land Pattern.

Ephemeral storage settings

For Node.js developers, Lambda now supports ES Modules and top-level await for Node.js 14. This enables developers to use a wider range of JavaScript packages in functions. With top-level await, when used with Provisioned Concurrency, this can improve cold-start performance when using asynchronous initialization.

For .NET developers, Lambda now supports .NET 6 as both a managed runtime and container base image. You can now use new features of the runtime such as improved logging, simplified function definitions using top-level statements, and improved performance using source generators.

The Lambda console now allows you to share test events with other developers in your team, using granular IAM permissions. Previously, test events were only visible to the builder who created them. To learn about creating sharable test events, read this documentation.

Amazon EventBridge

Amazon EventBridge Schema Registry helps you create code bindings from event schemas for use directly in your preferred IDE. You can generate these code bindings for a schema by using the EventBridge console, APIs, or AWS SDK toolkits for Jetbrains (Intellij, PyCharm, Webstorm, Rider) and VS Code. This feature now supports Go, in addition to Java, Python, and TypeScript, and is available at no additional cost.

AWS Step Functions

Developers can test state machines locally using Step Functions Local, and the service recently announced mocked service integrations for local testing. This allows you to define sample output from AWS service integrations and combine them into test cases to validate workflow control. This new feature introduces a robust way to state machines in isolation.

Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon DynamoDB now supports limiting the number of items processed in PartiQL operation, using an optional parameter on each request. The service also increased default Service Quotas, which can help simplify the use of large numbers of tables. The per-account, per-Region quota increased from 256 to 2,500 tables.

AWS AppSync

AWS AppSync added support for custom response headers, allowing you to define additional headers to send to clients in response to an API call. You can now use the new resolver utility $util.http.addResponseHeaders() to configure additional headers in the response for a GraphQL API operation.

Serverless blog posts

January

Jan 6 – Using Node.js ES modules and top-level await in AWS Lambda

Jan 6 – Validating addresses with AWS Lambda and the Amazon Location Service

Jan 20 – Introducing AWS Lambda batching controls for message broker services

Jan 24 – Migrating AWS Lambda functions to Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors

Jan 31 – Using the circuit breaker pattern with AWS Step Functions and Amazon DynamoDB

Jan 31 – Mocking service integrations with AWS Step Functions Local

February

Feb 8 – Capturing client events using Amazon API Gateway and Amazon EventBridge

Feb 10 – Introducing AWS Virtual Waiting Room

Feb 14 – Building custom connectors using the Amazon AppFlow Custom Connector SDK

Feb 22 – Building TypeScript projects with AWS SAM CLI

Feb 24 – Introducing the .NET 6 runtime for AWS Lambda

March

Mar 6 – Migrating a monolithic .NET REST API to AWS Lambda

Mar 7 – Decoding protobuf messages using AWS Lambda

Mar 8 – Building a serverless image catalog with AWS Step Functions Workflow Studio

Mar 9 – Composing AWS Step Functions to abstract polling of asynchronous services

Mar 10 – Building serverless multi-Region WebSocket APIs

Mar 15 – Using organization IDs as principals in Lambda resource policies

Mar 16 – Implementing mutual TLS for Java-based AWS Lambda functions

Mar 21 – Running cross-account workflows with AWS Step Functions and Amazon API Gateway

Mar 22 – Sending events to Amazon EventBridge from AWS Organizations accounts

Mar 23 – Choosing the right solution for AWS Lambda external parameters

Mar 28 – Using larger ephemeral storage for AWS Lambda

Mar 29 – Using AWS Step Functions and Amazon DynamoDB for business rules orchestration

Mar 31 – Optimizing AWS Lambda function performance for Java

First anniversary of Serverless Land Patterns

Serverless Patterns Collection

The DA team launched the Serverless Patterns Collection in March 2021 as a repository of serverless examples that demonstrate integrating two or more AWS services. Each pattern uses an infrastructure as code (IaC) framework to automate the deployment. These can simplify the creation and configuration of the services used in your applications.

The Serverless Patterns Collection is both an educational resource to help developers understand how to join different services, and an aid for developers that are getting started with building serverless applications.

The collection has just celebrated its first anniversary. It now contains 239 patterns for CDK, AWS SAM, Serverless Framework, and Terraform, covering 30 AWS services. We have expanded example runtimes to include .NET, Java, Rust, Python, Node.js and TypeScript. We’ve served tens of thousands of developers in the first year and we’re just getting started.

Many thanks to our contributors and community. You can also contribute your own patterns.

Videos

YouTube: youtube.com/serverlessland

Serverless Office Hours – Tues 10 AM PT

Weekly live virtual office hours. In each session we talk about a specific topic or technology related to serverless and open it up to helping you with your real serverless challenges and issues. Ask us anything you want about serverless technologies and applications.

YouTube: youtube.com/serverlessland
Twitch: twitch.tv/aws

January

February

March

FooBar Serverless YouTube channel

The Developer Advocate team is delighted to welcome Marcia Villalba onboard. Marcia was an AWS Serverless Hero before joining AWS over two years ago, and she has created one of the most popular serverless YouTube channels. You can view all of Marcia’s videos at https://www.youtube.com/c/FooBar_codes.

January

February

March

AWS Summits

AWS Global Summits are free events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. This year, we have restarted in-person Summits at major cities around the world.

The next 4 Summits planned are Paris (April 12), San Francisco (April 20-21), London (April 27), and Madrid (May 4-5). To find and register for your nearest AWS Summit, visit the AWS Summits homepage.

Still looking for more?

The Serverless landing page has more information. The Lambda resources page contains case studies, webinars, whitepapers, customer stories, reference architectures, and even more Getting Started tutorials.

You can also follow the Serverless Developer Advocacy team on Twitter to see the latest news, follow conversations, and interact with the team.

ICYMI: Serverless Q4 2021

Post Syndicated from James Beswick original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/icymi-serverless-q4-2021/

Welcome to the 15th edition of the AWS Serverless ICYMI (in case you missed it) quarterly recap. Every quarter, we share all of the most recent product launches, feature enhancements, blog posts, webinars, Twitch live streams, and other interesting things that you might have missed!

Q4 calendar

In case you missed our last ICYMI, check out what happened last quarter here.

AWS Lambda

For developers using Amazon MSK as an event source, Lambda has expanded authentication options to include IAM, in addition to SASL/SCRAM. Lambda also now supports mutual TLS authentication for Amazon MSK and self-managed Kafka as an event source.

Lambda also launched features to make it easier to operate across AWS accounts. You can now invoke Lambda functions from Amazon SQS queues in different accounts. You must grant permission to the Lambda function’s execution role and have SQS grant cross-account permissions. For developers using container packaging for Lambda functions, Lambda also now supports pulling images from Amazon ECR in other AWS accounts. To learn about the permissions required, see this documentation.

The service now supports a partial batch response when using SQS as an event source for both standard and FIFO queues. When messages fail to process, Lambda marks the failed messages and allows reprocessing of only those messages. This helps to improve processing performance and may reduce compute costs.

Lambda launched content filtering options for functions using SQS, DynamoDB, and Kinesis as an event source. You can specify up to five filter criteria that are combined using OR logic. This uses the same content filtering language that’s used in Amazon EventBridge, and can dramatically reduce the number of downstream Lambda invocations.

Amazon EventBridge

Previously, you could consume Amazon S3 events in EventBridge via CloudTrail. Now, EventBridge receives events from the S3 service directly, making it easier to build serverless workflows triggered by activity in S3. You can use content filtering in rules to identify relevant events and forward these to 18 service targets, including AWS Lambda. You can also use event archive and replay, making it possible to reprocess events in testing, or in the event of an error.

AWS Step Functions

The AWS Batch console has added support for visualizing Step Functions workflows. This makes it easier to combine these services to orchestrate complex workflows over business-critical batch operations, such as data analysis or overnight processes.

Additionally, Amazon Athena has also added console support for visualizing Step Functions workflows. This can help when building distributed data processing pipelines, allowing Step Functions to orchestrate services such as AWS Glue, Amazon S3, or Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose.

Synchronous Express Workflows now supports AWS PrivateLink. This enables you to start these workflows privately from within your virtual private clouds (VPCs) without traversing the internet. To learn more about this feature, read the What’s New post.

Amazon SNS

Amazon SNS announced support for token-based authentication when sending push notifications to Apple devices. This creates a secure, stateless communication between SNS and the Apple Push Notification (APN) service.

SNS also launched the new PublishBatch API which enables developers to send up to 10 messages to SNS in a single request. This can reduce cost by up to 90%, since you need fewer API calls to publish the same number of messages to the service.

Amazon SQS

Amazon SQS released an enhanced DLQ management experience for standard queues. This allows you to redrive messages from a DLQ back to the source queue. This can be configured in the AWS Management Console, as shown here.

Amazon DynamoDB

The NoSQL Workbench for DynamoDB is a tool to simplify designing, visualizing and querying DynamoDB tables. The tools now supports importing sample data from CSV files and exporting the results of queries.

DynamoDB announced the new Standard-Infrequent Access table class. Use this for tables that store infrequently accessed data to reduce your costs by up to 60%. You can switch to the new table class without an impact on performance or availability and without changing application code.

AWS Amplify

AWS Amplify now allows developers to override Amplify-generated IAM, Amazon Cognito, and S3 configurations. This makes it easier to customize the generated resources to best meet your application’s requirements. To learn more about the “amplify override auth” command, visit the feature’s documentation.

Similarly, you can also add custom AWS resources using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) or AWS CloudFormation. In another new feature, developers can then export Amplify backends as CDK stacks and incorporate them into their deployment pipelines.

AWS Amplify UI has launched a new Authenticator component for React, Angular, and Vue.js. Aside from the visual refresh, this provides the easiest way to incorporate social sign-in in your frontend applications with zero-configuration setup. It also includes more customization options and form capabilities.

AWS launched AWS Amplify Studio, which automatically translates designs made in Figma to React UI component code. This enables you to connect UI components visually to backend data, providing a unified interface that can accelerate development.

AWS AppSync

You can now use custom domain names for AWS AppSync GraphQL endpoints. This enables you to specify a custom domain for both GraphQL API and Realtime API, and have AWS Certificate Manager provide and manage the certificate.

To learn more, read the feature’s documentation page.

News from other services

Serverless blog posts

October

November

December

AWS re:Invent breakouts

AWS re:Invent was held in Las Vegas from November 29 to December 3, 2021. The Serverless DA team presented numerous breakouts, workshops and chalk talks. Rewatch all our breakout content:

Serverlesspresso

We also launched an interactive serverless application at re:Invent to help customers get caffeinated!

Serverlesspresso is a contactless, serverless order management system for a physical coffee bar. The architecture comprises several serverless apps that support an ordering process from a customer’s smartphone to a real espresso bar. The customer can check the virtual line, place an order, and receive a notification when their drink is ready for pickup.

Serverlesspresso booth

You can learn more about the architecture and download the code repo at https://serverlessland.com/reinvent2021/serverlesspresso. You can also see a video of the exhibit.

Videos

Serverless Land videos

Serverless Office Hours – Tues 10 AM PT

Weekly live virtual office hours. In each session we talk about a specific topic or technology related to serverless and open it up to helping you with your real serverless challenges and issues. Ask us anything you want about serverless technologies and applications.

YouTube: youtube.com/serverlessland
Twitch: twitch.tv/aws

October

November

December

Still looking for more?

The Serverless landing page has more information. The Lambda resources page contains case studies, webinars, whitepapers, customer stories, reference architectures, and even more Getting Started tutorials.

You can also follow the Serverless Developer Advocacy team on Twitter to see the latest news, follow conversations, and interact with the team.

Building well-architected serverless applications: Optimizing application costs

Post Syndicated from Julian Wood original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/building-well-architected-serverless-applications-optimizing-application-costs/

This series of blog posts uses the AWS Well-Architected Tool with the Serverless Lens to help customers build and operate applications using best practices. In each post, I address the serverless-specific questions identified by the Serverless Lens along with the recommended best practices. See the introduction post for a table of contents and explanation of the example application.

COST 1. How do you optimize your serverless application costs?

Design, implement, and optimize your application to maximize value. Asynchronous design patterns and performance practices ensure efficient resource use and directly impact the value per business transaction. By optimizing your serverless application performance and its code patterns, you can directly impact the value it provides, while making more efficient use of resources.

Serverless architectures are easier to manage in terms of correct resource allocation compared to traditional architectures. Due to its pay-per-value pricing model and scale based on demand, a serverless approach effectively reduces the capacity planning effort. As covered in the operational excellence and performance pillars, optimizing your serverless application has a direct impact on the value it produces and its cost. For general serverless optimization guidance, see the AWS re:Invent talks, “Optimizing your Serverless applications” Part 1 and Part 2, and “Serverless architectural patterns and best practices”.

Required practice: Minimize external calls and function code initialization

AWS Lambda functions may call other managed services and third-party APIs. Functions may also use application dependencies that may not be suitable for ephemeral environments. Understanding and controlling what your function accesses while it runs can have a direct impact on value provided per invocation.

Review code initialization

I explain the Lambda initialization process with cold and warm starts in “Optimizing application performance – part 1”. Lambda reports the time it takes to initialize application code in Amazon CloudWatch Logs. As Lambda functions are billed by request and duration, you can use this to track costs and performance. Consider reviewing your application code and its dependencies to improve the overall execution time to maximize value.

You can take advantage of Lambda execution environment reuse to make external calls to resources and use the results for subsequent invocations. Use TTL mechanisms inside your function handler code. This ensures that you can prevent additional external calls that incur additional execution time, while preemptively fetching data that isn’t stale.

Review third-party application deployments and permissions

When using Lambda layers or applications provisioned by AWS Serverless Application Repository, be sure to understand any associated charges that these may incur. When deploying functions packaged as container images, understand the charges for storing images in Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR).

Ensure that your Lambda function only has access to what its application code needs. Regularly review that your function has a predicted usage pattern so you can factor in the cost of other services, such as Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB.

Required practice: Optimize logging output and its retention

Considering reviewing your application logging level. Ensure that logging output and log retention are appropriately set to your operational needs to prevent unnecessary logging and data retention. This helps you have the minimum of log retention to investigate operational and performance inquiries when necessary.

Emit and capture only what is necessary to understand and operate your component as intended.

With Lambda, any standard output statements are sent to CloudWatch Logs. Capture and emit business and operational events that are necessary to help you understand your function, its integration, and its interactions. Use a logging framework and environment variables to dynamically set a logging level. When applicable, sample debugging logs for a percentage of invocations.

In the serverless airline example used in this series, the booking service Lambda functions use Lambda Powertools as a logging framework with output structured as JSON.

Lambda Powertools is added to the Lambda functions as a shared Lambda layer in the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) template. The layer ARN is stored in Systems Manager Parameter Store.

Parameters:
  SharedLibsLayer:
    Type: AWS::SSM::Parameter::Value<String>
    Description: Project shared libraries Lambda Layer ARN
Resources:
    ConfirmBooking:
        Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
        Properties:
            FunctionName: !Sub ServerlessAirline-ConfirmBooking-${Stage}
            Handler: confirm.lambda_handler
            CodeUri: src/confirm-booking
            Layers:
                - !Ref SharedLibsLayer
            Runtime: python3.7
…

The LOG_LEVEL and other Powertools settings are configured in the Globals section as Lambda environment variable for all functions.

Globals:
    Function:
        Environment:
            Variables:
                POWERTOOLS_SERVICE_NAME: booking
                POWERTOOLS_METRICS_NAMESPACE: ServerlessAirline
                LOG_LEVEL: INFO 

For Amazon API Gateway, there are two types of logging in CloudWatch: execution logging and access logging. Execution logs contain information that you can use to identify and troubleshoot API errors. API Gateway manages the CloudWatch Logs, creating the log groups and log streams. Access logs contain details about who accessed your API and how they accessed it. You can create your own log group or choose an existing log group that could be managed by API Gateway.

Enable access logs, and selectively review the output format and request fields that might be necessary. For more information, see “Setting up CloudWatch logging for a REST API in API Gateway”.

API Gateway logging

API Gateway logging

Enable AWS AppSync logging which uses CloudWatch to monitor and debug requests. You can configure two types of logging: request-level and field-level. For more information, see “Monitoring and Logging”.

AWS AppSync logging

AWS AppSync logging

Define and set a log retention strategy

Define a log retention strategy to satisfy your operational and business needs. Set log expiration for each CloudWatch log group as they are kept indefinitely by default.

For example, in the booking service AWS SAM template, log groups are explicitly created for each Lambda function with a parameter specifying the retention period.

Parameters:
    LogRetentionInDays:
        Type: Number
        Default: 14
        Description: CloudWatch Logs retention period
Resources:
    ConfirmBookingLogGroup:
        Type: AWS::Logs::LogGroup
        Properties:
            LogGroupName: !Sub "/aws/lambda/${ConfirmBooking}"
            RetentionInDays: !Ref LogRetentionInDays

The Serverless Application Repository application, auto-set-log-group-retention can update the retention policy for new and existing CloudWatch log groups to the specified number of days.

For log archival, you can export CloudWatch Logs to S3 and store them in Amazon S3 Glacier for more cost-effective retention. You can use CloudWatch Log subscriptions for custom processing, analysis, or loading to other systems. Lambda extensions allows you to process, filter, and route logs directly from Lambda to a destination of your choice.

Good practice: Optimize function configuration to reduce cost

Benchmark your function using a different set of memory size

For Lambda functions, memory is the capacity unit for controlling the performance and cost of a function. You can configure the amount of memory allocated to a Lambda function, between 128 MB and 10,240 MB. The amount of memory also determines the amount of virtual CPU available to a function. Benchmark your AWS Lambda functions with differing amounts of memory allocated. Adding more memory and proportional CPU may lower the duration and reduce the cost of each invocation.

In “Optimizing application performance – part 2”, I cover using AWS Lambda Power Tuning to automate the memory testing process to balances performance and cost.

Best practice: Use cost-aware usage patterns in code

Reduce the time your function runs by reducing job-polling or task coordination. This avoids overpaying for unnecessary compute time.

Decide whether your application can fit an asynchronous pattern

Avoid scenarios where your Lambda functions wait for external activities to complete. I explain the difference between synchronous and asynchronous processing in “Optimizing application performance – part 1”. You can use asynchronous processing to aggregate queues, streams, or events for more efficient processing time per invocation. This reduces wait times and latency from requesting apps and functions.

Long polling or waiting increases the costs of Lambda functions and also reduces overall account concurrency. This can impact the ability of other functions to run.

Consider using other services such as AWS Step Functions to help reduce code and coordinate asynchronous workloads. You can build workflows using state machines with long-polling, and failure handling. Step Functions also supports direct service integrations, such as DynamoDB, without having to use Lambda functions.

In the serverless airline example used in this series, Step Functions is used to orchestrate the Booking microservice. The ProcessBooking state machine handles all the necessary steps to create bookings, including payment.

Booking service state machine

Booking service state machine

To reduce costs and improves performance with CloudWatch, create custom metrics asynchronously. You can use the Embedded Metrics Format to write logs, rather than the PutMetricsData API call. I cover using the embedded metrics format in “Understanding application health” – part 1 and part 2.

For example, once a booking is made, the logs are visible in the CloudWatch console. You can select a log stream and find the custom metric as part of the structured log entry.

Custom metric structured log entry

Custom metric structured log entry

CloudWatch automatically creates metrics from these structured logs. You can create graphs and alarms based on them. For example, here is a graph based on a BookingSuccessful custom metric.

CloudWatch metrics custom graph

CloudWatch metrics custom graph

Consider asynchronous invocations and review run away functions where applicable

Take advantage of Lambda’s event-based model. Lambda functions can be triggered based on events ingested into Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) queues, S3 buckets, and Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. AWS manages the polling infrastructure on your behalf with no additional cost. Avoid code that polls for third-party software as a service (SaaS) providers. Rather use Amazon EventBridge to integrate with SaaS instead when possible.

Carefully consider and review recursion, and establish timeouts to prevent run away functions.

Conclusion

Design, implement, and optimize your application to maximize value. Asynchronous design patterns and performance practices ensure efficient resource use and directly impact the value per business transaction. By optimizing your serverless application performance and its code patterns, you can reduce costs while making more efficient use of resources.

In this post, I cover minimizing external calls and function code initialization. I show how to optimize logging output with the embedded metrics format, and log retention. I recap optimizing function configuration to reduce cost and highlight the benefits of asynchronous event-driven patterns.

This post wraps up the series, building well-architected serverless applications, where I cover the AWS Well-Architected Tool with the Serverless Lens . See the introduction post for links to all the blog posts.

For more serverless learning resources, visit Serverless Land.

 

Building well-architected serverless applications: Building in resiliency – part 2

Post Syndicated from Julian Wood original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/building-well-architected-serverless-applications-building-in-resiliency-part-2/

This series of blog posts uses the AWS Well-Architected Tool with the Serverless Lens to help customers build and operate applications using best practices. In each post, I address the serverless-specific questions identified by the Serverless Lens along with the recommended best practices. See the introduction post for a table of contents and explanation of the example application.

Reliability question REL2: How do you build resiliency into your serverless application?

This post continues part 1 of this reliability question. Previously, I cover managing failures using retries, exponential backoff, and jitter. I explain how DLQs can isolate failed messages. I show how to use state machines to orchestrate long running transactions rather than handling these in application code.

Required practice: Manage duplicate and unwanted events

Duplicate events can occur when a request is retried or multiple consumers process the same message from a queue or stream. A duplicate can also happen when a request is sent twice at different time intervals with the same parameters. Design your applications to process multiple identical requests to have the same effect as making a single request.

Idempotency refers to the capacity of an application or component to identify repeated events and prevent duplicated, inconsistent, or lost data. This means that receiving the same event multiple times does not change the result beyond the first time the event was received. An idempotent application can, for example, handle multiple identical refund operations. The first refund operation is processed. Any further refund requests to the same customer with the same payment reference should not be processes again.

When using AWS Lambda, you can make your function idempotent. The function’s code must properly validate input events and identify if the events were processed before. For more information, see “How do I make my Lambda function idempotent?

When processing streaming data, your application must anticipate and appropriately handle processing individual records multiple times. There are two primary reasons why records may be delivered more than once to your Amazon Kinesis Data Streams application: producer retries and consumer retries. For more information, see “Handling Duplicate Records”.

Generate unique attributes to manage duplicate events at the beginning of the transaction

Create, or use an existing unique identifier at the beginning of a transaction to ensure idempotency. These identifiers are also known as idempotency tokens. A number of Lambda triggers include a unique identifier as part of the event:

You can also create your own identifiers. These can be business-specific, such as transaction ID, payment ID, or booking ID. You can use an opaque random alphanumeric string, unique correlation identifiers, or the hash of the content.

A Lambda function, for example can use these identifiers to check whether the event has been previously processed.

Depending on the final destination, duplicate events might write to the same record with the same content instead of generating a duplicate entry. This may therefore not require additional safeguards.

Use an external system to store unique transaction attributes and verify for duplicates

Lambda functions can use Amazon DynamoDB to store and track transactions and idempotency tokens to determine if the transaction has been handled previously. DynamoDB Time to Live (TTL) allows you to define a per-item timestamp to determine when an item is no longer needed. This helps to limit the storage space used. Base the TTL on the event source. For example, the message retention period for SQS.

Using DynamoDB to store idempotent tokens

Using DynamoDB to store idempotent tokens

You can also use DynamoDB conditional writes to ensure a write operation only succeeds if an item attribute meets one of more expected conditions. For example, you can use this to fail a refund operation if a payment reference has already been refunded. This signals to the application that it is a duplicate transaction. The application can then catch this exception and return the same result to the customer as if the refund was processed successfully.

Third-party APIs can also support idempotency directly. For example, Stripe allows you to add an Idempotency-Key: <key> header to the request. Stripe saves the resulting status code and body of the first request made for any given idempotency key, regardless of whether it succeeded or failed. Subsequent requests with the same key return the same result.

Validate events using a pre-defined and agreed upon schema

Implicitly trusting data from clients, external sources, or machines could lead to malformed data being processed. Use a schema to validate your event conforms to what you are expecting. Process the event using the schema within your application code or at the event source when applicable. Events not adhering to your schema should be discarded.

For API Gateway, I cover validating incoming HTTP requests against a schema in “Implementing application workload security – part 1”.

Amazon EventBridge rules match event patterns. EventBridge provides schemas for all events that are generated by AWS services. You can create or upload custom schemas or infer schemas directly from events on an event bus. You can also generate code bindings for event schemas.

SNS supports message filtering. This allows a subscriber to receive a subset of the messages sent to the topic using a filter policy. For more information, see the documentation.

JSON Schema is a tool for validating the structure of JSON documents. There are a number of implementations available.

Best practice: Consider scaling patterns at burst rates

Load testing your serverless application allows you to monitor the performance of an application before it is deployed to production. Serverless applications can be simpler to load test, thanks to the automatic scaling built into many of the services. For more information, see “How to design Serverless Applications for massive scale”.

In addition to your baseline performance, consider evaluating how your workload handles initial burst rates. This ensures that your workload can sustain burst rates while scaling to meet possibly unexpected demand.

Perform load tests using a burst strategy with random intervals of idleness

Perform load tests using a burst of requests for a short period of time. Also introduce burst delays to allow your components to recover from unexpected load. This allows you to future-proof the workload for key events when you do not know peak traffic levels.

There are a number of AWS Marketplace and AWS Partner Network (APN) solutions available for performance testing, including Gatling FrontLine, BlazeMeter, and Apica.

In regulating inbound request rates – part 1, I cover running a performance test suite using Gatling, an open source tool.

Gatling performance results

Gatling performance results

Amazon does have a network stress testing policy that defines which high volume network tests are allowed. Tests that purposefully attempt to overwhelm the target and/or infrastructure are considered distributed denial of service (DDoS) tests and are prohibited. For more information, see “Amazon EC2 Testing Policy”.

Review service account limits with combined utilization across resources

AWS accounts have default quotas, also referred to as limits, for each AWS service. These are generally Region-specific. You can request increases for some limits while other limits cannot be increased. Service Quotas is an AWS service that helps you manage your limits for many AWS services. Along with looking up the values, you can also request a limit increase from the Service Quotas console.

Service Quotas dashboard

Service Quotas dashboard

As these limits are shared within an account, review the combined utilization across resources including the following:

  • Amazon API Gateway: number of requests per second across all APIs. (link)
  • AWS AppSync: throttle rate limits. (link)
  • AWS Lambda: function concurrency reservations and pool capacity to allow other functions to scale. (link)
  • Amazon CloudFront: requests per second per distribution. (link)
  • AWS IoT Core message broker: concurrent requests per second. (link)
  • Amazon EventBridge: API requests and target invocations limit. (link)
  • Amazon Cognito: API limits. (link)
  • Amazon DynamoDB: throughput, indexes, and request rates limits. (link)

Evaluate key metrics to understand how workloads recover from bursts

There are a number of key Amazon CloudWatch metrics to evaluate and alert on to understand whether your workload recovers from bursts.

  • AWS Lambda: Duration, Errors, Throttling, ConcurrentExecutions, UnreservedConcurrentExecutions. (link)
  • Amazon API Gateway: Latency, IntegrationLatency, 5xxError, 4xxError. (link)
  • Application Load Balancer: HTTPCode_ELB_5XX_Count, RejectedConnectionCount, HTTPCode_Target_5XX_Count, UnHealthyHostCount, LambdaInternalError, LambdaUserError. (link)
  • AWS AppSync: 5XX, Latency. (link)
  • Amazon SQS: ApproximateAgeOfOldestMessage. (link)
  • Amazon Kinesis Data Streams: ReadProvisionedThroughputExceeded, WriteProvisionedThroughputExceeded, GetRecords.IteratorAgeMilliseconds, PutRecord.Success, PutRecords.Success (if using Kinesis Producer Library), GetRecords.Success. (link)
  • Amazon SNS: NumberOfNotificationsFailed, NumberOfNotificationsFilteredOut-InvalidAttributes. (link)
  • Amazon Simple Email Service (SES): Rejects, Bounces, Complaints, Rendering Failures. (link)
  • AWS Step Functions: ExecutionThrottled, ExecutionsFailed, ExecutionsTimedOut. (link)
  • Amazon EventBridge: FailedInvocations, ThrottledRules. (link)
  • Amazon S3: 5xxErrors, TotalRequestLatency. (link)
  • Amazon DynamoDB: ReadThrottleEvents, WriteThrottleEvents, SystemErrors, ThrottledRequests, UserErrors. (link)

Conclusion

This post continues from part 1 and looks at managing duplicate and unwanted events with idempotency and an event schema. I cover how to consider scaling patterns at burst rates by managing account limits and show relevant metrics to evaluate

Build resiliency into your workloads. Ensure that applications can withstand partial and intermittent failures across components that may only surface in production. In the next post in the series, I cover the performance efficiency pillar from the Well-Architected Serverless Lens.

For more serverless learning resources, visit Serverless Land.

Building well-architected serverless applications: Managing application security boundaries – part 2

Post Syndicated from Julian Wood original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/building-well-architected-serverless-applications-managing-application-security-boundaries-part-2/

This series uses the AWS Well-Architected Tool with the Serverless Lens to help customers build and operate applications using best practices. In each post, I address the nine serverless-specific questions identified by the Serverless Lens along with the recommended best practices. See the introduction post for a table of contents and explanation of the example application.

Security question SEC2: How do you manage your serverless application’s security boundaries?

This post continues part 1 of this security question. Previously, I cover how to evaluate and define resource policies, showing what policies are available for various serverless services. I show some of the features of AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) to protect APIs. Then then go through how to control network traffic at all layers. I explain how AWS Lambda functions connect to VPCs, and how to use private APIs and VPC endpoints. I walk through how to audit your traffic.

Required practice: Use temporary credentials between resources and components

Do not share credentials and permissions policies between resources to maintain a granular segregation of permissions and improve the security posture. Use temporary credentials that are frequently rotated and that have policies tailored to the access the resource needs.

Use dynamic authentication when accessing components and managed services

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles allows your applications to access AWS services securely without requiring you to manage or hardcode the security credentials. When you use a role, you don’t have to distribute long-term credentials such as a user name and password, or access keys. Instead, the role supplies temporary permissions that applications can use when they make calls to other AWS resources. When you create a Lambda function, for example, you specify an IAM role to associate with the function. The function can then use the role-supplied temporary credentials to sign API requests.

Use IAM for authorizing access to AWS managed services such as Lambda or Amazon S3. Lambda also assumes IAM roles, exposing and rotating temporary credentials to your functions. This enables your application code to access AWS services.

Use IAM to authorize access to internal or private Amazon API Gateway API consumers. See this list of AWS services that work with IAM.

Within the serverless airline example used in this series, the loyalty service uses a Lambda function to fetch loyalty points and next tier progress. AWS AppSync acts as the client using an HTTP resolver, via an API Gateway REST API /loyalty/{customerId}/get resource, to invoke the function.

To ensure only AWS AppSync is authorized to invoke the API, IAM authorization is set within the API Gateway method request.

Viewing API Gateway IAM authorization

Viewing API Gateway IAM authorization

The IAM role specifies that appsync.amazonaws.com can perform an execute-api:Invoke on the specific API Gateway resource arn:aws:execute-api:${AWS::Region}:${AWS::AccountId}:${LoyaltyApi}/*/*/*

For more information, see “Using an IAM role to grant permissions to applications”.

Use a framework such as the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) to deploy your applications. This ensures that AWS resources are provisioned with unique per resource IAM roles. For example, AWS SAM automatically creates unique IAM roles for every Lambda function you create.

Best practice: Design smaller, single purpose functions

Creating smaller, single purpose functions enables you to keep your permissions aligned to least privileged access. This reduces the risk of compromise since the function does not require access to more than it needs.

Create single purpose functions with their own IAM role

Single purpose Lambda functions allow you to create IAM roles that are specific to your access requirements. For example, a large multipurpose function might need access to multiple AWS resources such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). Single purpose functions would not need access to all of them at the same time.

With smaller, single purpose functions, it’s often easier to identify the specific resources and access requirements, and grant only those permissions. Additionally, new features are usually implemented by new functions in this architectural design. You can specifically grant permissions in new IAM roles for these functions.

Avoid sharing IAM roles with multiple cloud resources. As permissions are added to the role, these are shared across all resources using this role. For example, use one dedicated IAM role per Lambda function. This allows you to control permissions more intentionally. Even if some functions have the same policy initially, always separate the IAM roles to ensure least privilege policies.

Use least privilege access policies with your users and roles

When you create IAM policies, follow the standard security advice of granting least privilege, or granting only the permissions required to perform a task. Determine what users (and roles) must do and then craft policies that allow them to perform only those tasks.

Start with a minimum set of permissions and grant additional permissions as necessary. Doing so is more secure than starting with permissions that are too lenient and then trying to tighten them later. In the unlikely event of misused credentials, credentials will only be able to perform limited interactions.

To control access to AWS resources, AWS SAM uses the same mechanisms as AWS CloudFormation. For more information, see “Controlling access with AWS Identity and Access Management” in the AWS CloudFormation User Guide.

For a Lambda function, AWS SAM scopes the permissions of your Lambda functions to the resources that are used by your application. You add IAM policies as part of the AWS SAM template. The policies property can be the name of AWS managed policies, inline IAM policy documents, or AWS SAM policy templates.

For example, the serverless airline has a ConfirmBooking Lambda function that has UpdateItem permissions to the specific DynamoDB BookingTable resource.

Parameters:
    BookingTable:
        Type: AWS::SSM::Parameter::Value<String>
        Description: Parameter Name for Booking Table
Resources:
    ConfirmBooking:
        Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
        Properties:
            FunctionName: !Sub ServerlessAirline-ConfirmBooking-${Stage}
            Policies:
                - Version: "2012-10-17"
                  Statement:
                      Action: dynamodb:UpdateItem
                      Effect: Allow
                      Resource: !Sub "arn:${AWS::Partition}:dynamodb:${AWS::Region}:${AWS::AccountId}:table/${BookingTable}"

One of the fastest ways to scope permissions appropriately is to use AWS SAM policy templates. You can reference these templates directly in the AWS SAM template for your application, providing custom parameters as required.

The serverless patterns collection allows you to build integrations quickly using AWS SAM and AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) templates.

The booking service uses the SNSPublishMessagePolicy. This policy gives permission to the NotifyBooking Lambda function to publish a message to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic.

    BookingTopic:
        Type: AWS::SNS::Topic

    NotifyBooking:
        Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
        Properties:
            Policies:
                - SNSPublishMessagePolicy:
                      TopicName: !Sub ${BookingTopic.TopicName}
        …

Auditing permissions and removing unnecessary permissions

Audit permissions regularly to help you identify unused permissions so that you can remove them. You can use last accessed information to refine your policies and allow access to only the services and actions that your entities use. Use the IAM console to view when last an IAM role was used.

IAM last used

IAM last used

Use IAM access advisor to review when was the last time an AWS service was used from a specific IAM user or role. You can view last accessed information for IAM on the Access Advisor tab in the IAM console. Using this information, you can remove IAM policies and access from your IAM roles.

IAM access advisor

IAM access advisor

When creating and editing policies, you can validate them using IAM Access Analyzer, which provides over 100 policy checks. It generates security warnings when a statement in your policy allows access AWS considers overly permissive. Use the security warning’s actionable recommendations to help grant least privilege. To learn more about policy checks provided by IAM Access Analyzer, see “IAM Access Analyzer policy validation”.

With AWS CloudTrail, you can use CloudTrail event history to review individual actions your IAM role has performed in the past. Using this information, you can detect which permissions were actively used, and decide to remove permissions.

AWS CloudTrail

AWS CloudTrail

To work out which permissions you may need, you can generate IAM policies based on access activity. You configure an IAM role with broad permissions while the application is in development. Access Analyzer reviews your CloudTrail logs. It generates a policy template that contains the permissions that the role used in your specified date range. Use the template to create a policy that grants only the permissions needed to support your specific use case. For more information, see “Generate policies based on access activity”.

IAM Access Analyzer

IAM Access Analyzer

Conclusion

Managing your serverless application’s security boundaries ensures isolation for, within, and between components. In this post, I continue from part 1, looking at using temporary credentials between resources and components. I cover why smaller, single purpose functions are better from a security perspective, and how to audit permissions. I show how to use AWS SAM to create per-function IAM roles.

For more serverless learning resources, visit https://serverlessland.com.

Building well-architected serverless applications: Managing application security boundaries – part 1

Post Syndicated from Julian Wood original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/building-well-architected-serverless-applications-managing-application-security-boundaries-part-1/

This series of blog posts uses the AWS Well-Architected Tool with the Serverless Lens to help customers build and operate applications using best practices. In each post, I address the serverless-specific questions identified by the Serverless Lens along with the recommended best practices. See the introduction post for a table of contents and explanation of the example application.

Security question SEC2: How do you manage your serverless application’s security boundaries?

Defining and securing your serverless application’s boundaries ensures isolation for, within, and between components.

Required practice: Evaluate and define resource policies

Resource policies are AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) statements. They are attached to resources such as an Amazon S3 bucket, or an Amazon API Gateway REST API resource or method. The policies define what identities have fine-grained access to the resource. To see which services support resource-based policies, see “AWS Services That Work with IAM”. For more information on how resource policies and identity policies are evaluated, see “Identity-Based Policies and Resource-Based Policies”.

Understand and determine which resource policies are necessary

Resource policies can protect a component by restricting inbound access to managed services. Use resource policies to restrict access to your component based on a number of identities, such as the source IP address/range, function event source, version, alias, or queues. Resource policies are evaluated and enforced at IAM level before each AWS service applies it’s own authorization mechanisms, when available. For example, IAM resource policies for API Gateway REST APIs can deny access to an API before an AWS Lambda authorizer is called.

If you use multiple AWS accounts, you can use AWS Organizations to manage and govern individual member accounts centrally. Certain resource policies can be applied at the organizations level, providing guardrail for what actions AWS accounts within the organization root or OU can do. For more information see, “Understanding how AWS Organization Service Control Policies work”.

Review your existing policies and how they’re configured, paying close attention to how permissive individual policies are. Your resource policies should only permit necessary callers.

Implement resource policies to prevent unauthorized access

For Lambda, use resource-based policies to provide fine-grained access to what AWS IAM identities and event sources can invoke a specific version or alias of your function. Resource-based policies can also be used to control access to Lambda layers. You can combine resource policies with Lambda event sources. For example, if API Gateway invokes Lambda, you can restrict the policy to the API Gateway ID, HTTP method, and path of the request.

In the serverless airline example used in this series, the IngestLoyalty service uses a Lambda function that subscribes to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. The Lambda function resource policy allows SNS to invoke the Lambda function.

Lambda resource policy document

Lambda resource policy document

API Gateway resource-based policies can restrict API access to specific Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), VPC endpoint, source IP address/range, AWS account, or AWS IAM users.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) resource-based policies provide fine-grained access to certain AWS services and AWS IAM identities (users, roles, accounts). Amazon SNS resource-based policies restrict authenticated and non-authenticated actions to topics.

Amazon DynamoDB resource-based policies provide fine-grained access to tables and indexes. Amazon EventBridge resource-based policies restrict AWS identities to send and receive events including to specific event buses.

For Amazon S3, use bucket policies to grant permission to your Amazon S3 resources.

The AWS re:Invent session Best practices for growing a serverless application includes further suggestions on enforcing security best practices.

Best practices for growing a serverless application

Best practices for growing a serverless application

Good practice: Control network traffic at all layers

Apply controls for controlling both inbound and outbound traffic, including data loss prevention. Define requirements that help you protect your networks and protect against exfiltration.

Use networking controls to enforce access patterns

API Gateway and AWS AppSync have support for AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) which helps protect web applications and APIs from attacks. AWS WAF enables you to configure a set of rules called a web access control list (web ACL). These allow you to block, or count web requests based on customizable web security rules and conditions that you define. These can include specified IP address ranges, CIDR blocks, specific countries, or Regions. You can also block requests that contain malicious SQL code, or requests that contain malicious script. For more information, see How AWS WAF Works.

private API endpoint is an API Gateway interface VPC endpoint that can only be accessed from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). This is an elastic network interface that you create in a VPC. Traffic to your private API uses secure connections and does not leave the Amazon network, it is isolated from the public internet. For more information, see “Creating a private API in Amazon API Gateway”.

To restrict access to your private API to specific VPCs and VPC endpoints, you must add conditions to your API’s resource policy. For example policies, see the documentation.

By default, Lambda runs your functions in a secure Lambda-owned VPC that is not connected to your account’s default VPC. Functions can access anything available on the public internet. This includes other AWS services, HTTPS endpoints for APIs, or services and endpoints outside AWS. The function cannot directly connect to your private resources inside of your VPC.

You can configure a Lambda function to connect to private subnets in a VPC in your account. When a Lambda function is configured to use a VPC, the Lambda function still runs inside the Lambda service VPC. The function then sends all network traffic through your VPC and abides by your VPC’s network controls. Functions deployed to virtual private networks must consider network access to restrict resource access.

AWS Lambda service VPC with VPC-to-VPT NAT to customer VPC

AWS Lambda service VPC with VPC-to-VPT NAT to customer VPC

When you connect a function to a VPC in your account, the function cannot access the internet, unless the VPC provides access. To give your function access to the internet, route outbound traffic to a NAT gateway in a public subnet. The NAT gateway has a public IP address and can connect to the internet through the VPC’s internet gateway. For more information, see “How do I give internet access to my Lambda function in a VPC?”. Connecting a function to a public subnet doesn’t give it internet access or a public IP address.

You can control the VPC settings for your Lambda functions using AWS IAM condition keys. For example, you can require that all functions in your organization are connected to a VPC. You can also specify the subnets and security groups that the function’s users can and can’t use.

Unsolicited inbound traffic to a Lambda function isn’t permitted by default. There is no direct network access to the execution environment where your functions run. When connected to a VPC, function outbound traffic comes from your own network address space.

You can use security groups, which act as a virtual firewall to control outbound traffic for functions connected to a VPC. Use security groups to permit your Lambda function to communicate with other AWS resources. For example, a security group can allow the function to connect to an Amazon ElastiCache cluster.

To filter or block access to certain locations, use VPC routing tables to configure routing to different networking appliances. Use network ACLs to block access to CIDR IP ranges or ports, if necessary. For more information about the differences between security groups and network ACLs, see “Compare security groups and network ACLs.”

In addition to API Gateway private endpoints, several AWS services offer VPC endpoints, including Lambda. You can use VPC endpoints to connect to AWS services from within a VPC without an internet gateway, NAT device, VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect connection.

Using tools to audit your traffic

When you configure a Lambda function to use a VPC, or use private API endpoints, you can use VPC Flow Logs to audit your traffic. VPC Flow Logs allow you to capture information about the IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in your VPC. Flow log data can be published to Amazon CloudWatch Logs or S3 to see where traffic is being sent to at a granular level. Here are some flow log record examples. For more information, see “Learn from your VPC Flow Logs”.

Block network access when required

In addition to security groups and network ACLs, third-party tools allow you to disable outgoing VPC internet traffic. These can also be configured to allow traffic to AWS services or allow-listed services.

Conclusion

Managing your serverless application’s security boundaries ensures isolation for, within, and between components. In this post, I cover how to evaluate and define resource policies, showing what policies are available for various serverless services. I show some of the features of AWS WAF to protect APIs. Then I review how to control network traffic at all layers. I explain how Lambda functions connect to VPCs, and how to use private APIs and VPC endpoints. I walk through how to audit your traffic.

This well-architected question will be continued where I look at using temporary credentials between resources and components. I cover why smaller, single purpose functions are better from a security perspective, and how to audit permissions. I show how to use AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) to create per-function IAM roles.

For more serverless learning resources, visit https://serverlessland.com.

Scaling Neuroscience Research on AWS

Post Syndicated from Konrad Rokicki original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/scaling-neuroscience-research-on-aws/

HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia has an integrated team of lab scientists and tool-builders who pursue a small number of scientific questions with potential for transformative impact. To drive science forward, we share our methods, results, and tools with the scientific community.

Introduction

Our neuroscience research application involves image searches that are computationally intensive but have unpredictable and sporadic usage patterns. The conventional on-premises approach is to purchase a powerful and expensive workstation, install and configure specialized software, and download the entire dataset to local storage. With 16 cores, a typical search of 50,000 images takes 30 seconds. A serverless architecture using AWS Lambda allows us to do this job in seconds for a few cents per search, and is capable of scaling to larger datasets.

Parallel Computation in Neuroscience Research

Basic research in neuroscience is often conducted on fruit flies. This is because their brains are small enough to study in a meaningful way with current tools, but complex enough to produce sophisticated behaviors. Conducting such research nonetheless requires an immense amount of data and computational power. Janelia Research Campus developed the NeuronBridge tool on AWS to accelerate scientific discovery by scaling computation in the cloud.

Color Depth Search Example fly brains

Figure 1: A “mask image” (on the left) is compared to many different fly brains (on the right) to find matching neurons. (Janella Research Campus)

The fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) has about 100,000 neurons and its brain is highly stereotyped. This means that the brain of one fruit fly is similar to the next one. Using electron microscopy (EM), the FlyEM project has reconstructed a wiring diagram of a fruit fly brain. This connectome includes the structure of the neurons and the connectivity between them. But EM is only half of the picture. Once scientists know the structure and connectivity, they must perform experiments to find what purpose the neurons serve.

Flies can be genetically modified to reproducibly express a fluorescent protein in certain neurons, causing those neurons to glow under a light microscope (LM). By iterating through many modifications, the FlyLight project has created a vast genetic driver library. This allows scientists to target individual neurons for experiments. For example, blocking a particular neuron of a fly from functioning, and then observing its behavior, allows a scientist to understand the function of that neuron. Through the course of many such experiments, scientists are currently uncovering the function of entire neuronal circuits.

We developed NeuronBridge, a tool available for use by neuroscience researchers around the world, to bridge the gap between the EM and LM data. Scientists can start with EM structure and find matching fly lines in LM. Or they may start with a fly line and find the corresponding neuronal circuits in the EM connectome.

Both EM and LM produce petabytes of 3D images. Image processing and machine learning algorithms are then applied to discern neuron structure. We also developed a computational shortcut called color depth MIP to represent depth as color. This technique compresses large 3D image stacks into smaller 2D images that can be searched efficiently.

Image search is an embarrassingly parallel problem ideally suited to parallelization with simple functions. In a typical search, the scientist will create a “mask image,” which is a color depth image featuring only the neuron they want to find. The search algorithm must then compare this image to hundreds of thousands of other images. The paradigm of launching many short-lived cloud workers, termed burst-parallel compute, was originally suggested by a group at UCSD. To scale NeuronBridge, we decided to build a serverless AWS-native implementation of burst-parallel image search.

The Architecture

Our main reason for using a serverless approach was that our usage patterns are unpredictable and sporadic. The total number of researchers who are likely to use our tool is not large, and only a small fraction of them will need the tool at any given time. Furthermore, our tool could go unused for weeks at a time, only to get a flood of requests after a new dataset is published. A serverless architecture allows us to cope with this unpredictable load. We can keep costs low by only paying for the compute time we actually use.

One challenge of implementing a burst-parallel architecture is that each Lambda invocation requires a network call, with the ensuing network latency. Spawning several thousands of functions from a single manager function can take many seconds. The trick to minimizing this latency is to parallelize these calls by recursively spawning concurrent managers in a tree structure. Each leaf in this tree spawns a set of worker functions to do the work of searching the imagery. Each worker reads a small batch of images from Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). They are then compared to the mask image, and the intermediate results are written to Amazon DynamoDB, a serverless NoSQL database.

Serverless architecture for burst-parallel search

Figure 2: Serverless architecture for burst-parallel search

Search state is monitored by an AWS Step Functions state machine, which checks DynamoDB once per second. When all the results are ready, the Step Functions state machine runs another Lambda function to combine and sort the results. The state machine addresses error conditions and timeouts, and updates the browser when the asynchronous search is complete. We opted to use AWS AppSync to notify a React web client, providing an interactive user experience while remaining entirely serverless.

As we scaled to 3,000 concurrent Lambda functions reading from our data bucket, we reached Amazon S3’s limit of 5,500 GETs per second per prefix. The fix was to create numbered prefix folders and then randomize our key list. Each worker could then search a random list of images across many prefixes. This change distributed the load from our highly parallel functions across a number of S3 shards, and allowed us to run with much higher parallelism.

We also addressed cold-start latency. Infrequently used Lambda functions take longer to start than recently used ones, and our unpredictable usage patterns meant that we were experiencing many cold starts. In our Java functions, we found that most of the cold-start time was attributed to JVM initialization and class loading. Although many mitigations for this exist, our worker logic was small enough that rewriting the code to use Node.js was the obvious choice. This immediately yielded a huge improvement, reducing cold starts from 8-10 seconds down to 200 ms.

With all of these insights, we developed a general-purpose parallel computation framework called burst-compute. This AWS-native framework runs as a serverless application to implement this architecture. It allows you to massively scale your own custom worker functions and combiner functions. We used this new framework to implement our image search.

Conclusion

The burst-parallel architecture is a powerful new computation paradigm for scientific computing. It takes advantage of the enormous scale and technical innovation of the AWS Cloud to provide near-interactive on-demand compute without expensive hardware maintenance costs. As scientific computing capability matures for the cloud, we expect this kind of large-scale parallel computation to continue becoming more accessible. In the future, the cloud could open doors to entirely new types of scientific applications, visualizations, and analysis tools.

We would like to express our thanks to AWS Solutions Architects Scott Glasser and Ray Chang, for their assistance with design and prototyping, and to Geoffrey Meissner for reviewing drafts of this write-up. 

Source Code

All of the application code described in this article is open source and licensed for reuse:

The data and imagery are shared publicly on the Registry of Open Data on AWS.

ICYMI: Serverless pre:Invent 2020

Post Syndicated from James Beswick original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/icymi-serverless-preinvent-2020/

During the last few weeks, the AWS serverless team has been releasing a wave of new features in the build-up to AWS re:Invent 2020. This post recaps some of the most important releases for serverless developers.

re:Invent is virtual and free to all attendees in 2020 – register here. See the complete list of serverless sessions planned and join the serverless DA team live on Twitch. Also, follow your DAs on Twitter for live recaps and Q&A during the event.

AWS re:Invent 2020

AWS Lambda

We launched Lambda Extensions in preview, enabling you to more easily integrate monitoring, security, and governance tools into Lambda functions. You can also build your own extensions that run code during Lambda lifecycle events, and there is an example extensions repo for starting development.

You can now send logs from Lambda functions to custom destinations by using Lambda Extensions and the new Lambda Logs API. Previously, you could only forward logs after they were written to Amazon CloudWatch Logs. Now, logging tools can receive log streams directly from the Lambda execution environment. This makes it easier to use your preferred tools for log management and analysis, including Datadog, Lumigo, New Relic, Coralogix, Honeycomb, or Sumo Logic.

Lambda Extensions API

Lambda launched support for Amazon MQ as an event source. Amazon MQ is a managed broker service for Apache ActiveMQ that simplifies deploying and scaling queues. This integration increases the range of messaging services that customers can use to build serverless applications. The event source operates in a similar way to using Amazon SQS or Amazon Kinesis. In all cases, the Lambda service manages an internal poller to invoke the target Lambda function.

We also released a new layer to make it simpler to integrate Amazon CodeGuru Profiler. This service helps identify the most expensive lines of code in a function and provides recommendations to help reduce cost. With this update, you can enable the profiler by adding the new layer and setting environment variables. There are no changes needed to the custom code in the Lambda function.

Lambda announced support for AWS PrivateLink. This allows you to invoke Lambda functions from a VPC without traversing the public internet. It provides private connectivity between your VPCs and AWS services. By using VPC endpoints to access the Lambda API from your VPC, this can replace the need for an Internet Gateway or NAT Gateway.

For developers building machine learning inferencing, media processing, high performance computing (HPC), scientific simulations, and financial modeling in Lambda, you can now use AVX2 support to help reduce duration and lower cost. By using packages compiled for AVX2 or compiling libraries with the appropriate flags, your code can then benefit from using AVX2 instructions to accelerate computation. In the blog post’s example, enabling AVX2 for an image-processing function increased performance by 32-43%.

Lambda now supports batch windows of up to 5 minutes when using SQS as an event source. This is useful for workloads that are not time-sensitive, allowing developers to reduce the number of Lambda invocations from queues. Additionally, the batch size has been increased from 10 to 10,000. This is now the same as the batch size for Kinesis as an event source, helping Lambda-based applications process more data per invocation.

Code signing is now available for Lambda, using AWS Signer. This allows account administrators to ensure that Lambda functions only accept signed code for deployment. Using signing profiles for functions, this provides granular control over code execution within the Lambda service. You can learn more about using this new feature in the developer documentation.

Amazon EventBridge

You can now use event replay to archive and replay events with Amazon EventBridge. After configuring an archive, EventBridge automatically stores all events or filtered events, based upon event pattern matching logic. You can configure a retention policy for archives to delete events automatically after a specified number of days. Event replay can help with testing new features or changes in your code, or hydrating development or test environments.

EventBridge archived events

EventBridge also launched resource policies that simplify managing access to events across multiple AWS accounts. This expands the use of a policy associated with event buses to authorize API calls. Resource policies provide a powerful mechanism for modeling event buses across multiple account and providing fine-grained access control to EventBridge API actions.

EventBridge resource policies

EventBridge announced support for Server-Side Encryption (SSE). Events are encrypted using AES-256 at no additional cost for customers. EventBridge also increased PutEvent quotas to 10,000 transactions per second in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland). This helps support workloads with high throughput.

AWS Step Functions

Synchronous Express Workflows have been launched for AWS Step Functions, providing a new way to run high-throughput Express Workflows. This feature allows developers to receive workflow responses without needing to poll services or build custom solutions. This is useful for high-volume microservice orchestration and fast compute tasks communicating via HTTPS.

The Step Functions service recently added support for other AWS services in workflows. You can now integrate API Gateway REST and HTTP APIs. This enables you to call API Gateway directly from a state machine as an asynchronous service integration.

Step Functions now also supports Amazon EKS service integration. This allows you to build workflows with steps that synchronously launch tasks in EKS and wait for a response. In October, the service also announced support for Amazon Athena, so workflows can now query data in your S3 data lakes.

These new integrations help minimize custom code and provide built-in error handling, parameter passing, and applying recommended security settings.

AWS SAM CLI

The AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) is an AWS CloudFormation extension that makes it easier to build, manage, and maintains serverless applications. On November 10, the AWS SAM CLI tool released version 1.9.0 with support for cached and parallel builds.

By using sam build --cached, AWS SAM no longer rebuilds functions and layers that have not changed since the last build. Additionally, you can use sam build --parallel to build functions in parallel, instead of sequentially. Both of these new features can substantially reduce the build time of larger applications defined with AWS SAM.

Amazon SNS

Amazon SNS announced support for First-In-First-Out (FIFO) topics. These are used with SQS FIFO queues for applications that require strict message ordering with exactly once processing and message deduplication. This is designed for workloads that perform tasks like bank transaction logging or inventory management. You can also use message filtering in FIFO topics to publish updates selectively.

SNS FIFO

AWS X-Ray

X-Ray now integrates with Amazon S3 to trace upstream requests. If a Lambda function uses the X-Ray SDK, S3 sends tracing headers to downstream event subscribers. With this, you can use the X-Ray service map to view connections between S3 and other services used to process an application request.

AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation announced support for nested stacks in change sets. This allows you to preview changes in your application and infrastructure across the entire nested stack hierarchy. You can then review those changes before confirming a deployment. This is available in all Regions supporting CloudFormation at no extra charge.

The new CloudFormation modules feature was released on November 24. This helps you develop building blocks with embedded best practices and common patterns that you can reuse in CloudFormation templates. Modules are available in the CloudFormation registry and can be used in the same way as any native resource.

Amazon DynamoDB

For customers using DynamoDB global tables, you can now use your own encryption keys. While all data in DynamoDB is encrypted by default, this feature enables you to use customer managed keys (CMKs). DynamoDB also announced support for global tables in the Europe (Milan) and Europe (Stockholm) Regions. This feature enables you to scale global applications for local access in workloads running in different Regions and replicate tables for higher availability and disaster recovery (DR).

The DynamoDB service announced the ability to export table data to data lakes in Amazon S3. This enables you to use services like Amazon Athena and AWS Lake Formation to analyze DynamoDB data with no custom code required. This feature does not consume table capacity and does not impact performance and availability. To learn how to use this feature, see this documentation.

AWS Amplify and AWS AppSync

You can now use existing Amazon Cognito user pools and identity pools for Amplify projects, making it easier to build new applications for an existing user base. AWS Amplify Console, which provides a fully managed static web hosting service, is now available in the Europe (Milan), Middle East (Bahrain), and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Regions. This service makes it simpler to bring automation to deploying and hosting single-page applications and static sites.

AWS AppSync enabled AWS WAF integration, making it easier to protect GraphQL APIs against common web exploits. You can also implement rate-based rules to help slow down brute force attacks. Using AWS Managed Rules for AWS WAF provides a faster way to configure application protection without creating the rules directly. AWS AppSync also recently expanded service availability to the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Middle East (Bahrain), and China (Ningxia) Regions, making the service now available in 21 Regions globally.

Still looking for more?

Join the AWS Serverless Developer Advocates on Twitch throughout re:Invent for live Q&A, session recaps, and more! See this page for the full schedule.

For more serverless learning resources, visit Serverless Land.