DiggyDB – Amazon Route53 as a blazingly fast and reliable database

Building further upon a “wild story” by Corey Quinn, Nicholas Martin describes how to (ab)use DNS TXT records by storing data in them, as if it were a database: When you think about it, DNS configuration is actually a very rudimentary NoSQL database. You can view and modify it at any time quite easily through …

Bref – Serverless PHP Functions on AWS

Bref comes as a Composer package and helps you deploy PHP applications to AWS and run them on AWS Lambda. Bref uses the Serverless framework to configure and deploy serverless applications. Being the most popular tool, Serverless comes with a huge community, a lot of examples online and a simple configuration format. After installing an …

Using AWS’ “Server­less Image Han­dler” to roll your own Image Transform Service

Ama­zon AWS has offered a Server­less Image Han­dler for a while that allows you to spin up an AWS Lamb­da func­tion to cre­ate your own pri­vate lit­tle image trans­form ser­vice that is inex­pen­sive, fast, and is front­ed by the Cloud­Front con­tent deliv­ery net­work (CDN). Whenever an image is uploaded to the bucket, a Lambda function …

Secrets in Serverless

Good post on how and where to store your secrets when working in a Serverless / Cloud Environment — something I was wondering about myself a little while ago Serverless applications and cloud functions often need to communicate with an upstream API or service. Perhaps they require a username and password to connect to a …

LocalStack – A fully functional local AWS cloud stack

At work we’ve been using several separate docker images – such as instructure/fake-s3 and airdock/fake-sqs, orchestrated by docker-compose – to run a few of the Amazon Web Services locally. LocalStack provides the whole lot in one: LocalStack provides an easy-to-use test/mocking framework for developing Cloud applications. Currently, the focus is primarily on supporting the AWS …

MoonMail – Send e-mail marketing campaigns using AWS, SES, and Lambda

Send email marketing campaigns with Amazon SES. Let Amazon Lambda compose email by email and literaly scale it to infinite. With MoonMail you can: create & edit lists of recipients (email addresses) and store them within a DynamoDB. Create & edit html email marketing campaigns, send them and track their opens and clicks. MoonMail → …

Building an image processor on AWS Lambda using The Serverless Framework

Good writeup on setting up an image processor using The Serverless Framework, a thing comparable to the aforementioned apex (and with an awfully generic and confusing name imho 😉). When a user uploads a file an ObjectCreated event is produced and a Lambda function is invoked. The Lambda function calls Amazon Rekognition to detect the …

30K Page Views for $0.21: A Serverless Story

Pete built the Fantasy Movie League Lineup Calculator. In July it got about 30K pageviews, resulting in a $0.21 bill from Amazon AWS: The Lineup Calculator is comprised of a set of AWS Lambda functions. Boiling what I’ve done down to its essentials, I’m using Lambda as a free batch server where I’m well below …