TL;DR style notes from articles I read today.

Lessons learned — a year of going “fully serverless” in production

• API server on serverless leads to automatic scalability, high availability and reduces costs dramatically.
• Deploying a Lambda function has a 52Mb limitation. Mitigate this by including only the required dependencies and trimming their size by excluding unused files.
• For background jobs such as file processing, keep a set of dedicated Lambda functions that are not part of the API server.
• A good approach to logging is to stream the Lambda logs into a dedicated Lambda that is responsible for sending it to the 3rd party logging service. 
• When it comes to environment variables, don’t commit your secrets to source control.

Full post here, 6 mins read

6 things I’ve learned in my first 6 months using serverless

• Ditch Python, switch over to Node. It makes everything much more maintainable and logical.
• The middle layer has to go. It acts as a web server on Lambda, which is both wrong and terrible.
• Try Vue when dealing with messy code. Vue compiles all your goodness into an index.html and bundle.js files, primed for uploading to S3.
• Learn to love DynamoDB. When you get it right, the NoSQL database provides blistering performance, massive scale, and practically no administrative overheads.
• Serverless Frameworks are awesome. A simple sls deploy wields enormous power, bundling up your code and shipping it directly to AWS Lambda.
• Authorization is king and JWT makes all other types of auth look overcomplicated.

Full post here, 10 mins read

5 tips for building apps with the Serverless framework and AWS Lambda

• Serverless works well with a microservice-style architecture. You should limit the scope of services and functions you use.
• Lambda functions shouldn’t persist any data or session information in the environment beyond the lifetime of a single request.
• However, Lambda might reuse your function instances to make performance optimizations. So, you should optimise for your functions for reuse.
• Cold starts are a problem with AWS Lambda. Reduce latency by keeping containers warm.
• Use dependency injection to make your functions easily testable. Write integration tests, both locally and on deployments.

Full post here, 6 mins read

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