Serverless Hero Yan Cui explains when and why you should use API Gateway service proxies, and introduces an open source tool to make it easy to implement. One of the very powerful and yet often under-utilized features of API Gateway is its ability to integrate directly with other AWS services. For example, you can connect API Gateway directly to an SNS topic without needing a Lambda function in the middle. Or to S3, or any number of AWS services.

What is cloud computing? If you’ve been asked this question by a client, you know there isn’t an easy answer—it really depends on who you ask, and every article seems to say it’s something different. But as cloud adoption continues to rise, you’ll likely be asked this question over and over again, and you’ll want a simple answer you can rely on. So we’ve broken it down for you.

When you look at an X-Ray trace for a Lambda cold start, you will see an Initialization subsegment. This subsegment represents “the function’s initialization code that is run before the handler”. This is where the runtime would resolve any dependencies, or initialize global variables. These are executed only once, so they don’t have to run on every invocation. The more dependencies you have, the longer this initialization step takes.

Digital Enterprise Journal’s (DEJ) research shows that organizations view cloud strategies as key areas for using technology to create business value. Organizations are seeing the importance of cloud deployments in each of the following areas of digital transformation - agility (71%), innovation (65%) and cost optimization (61%). The majority of cloud deployments are being conducted in a hybrid model where parts of IT services are being managed on-premises and in private and public cloud(s).

In the first post of our three-part Amazon Redshift series, we covered what Redshift is and how it works. For the second installment, we’ll discuss how Amazon Redshift queries are analyzed and monitored. Before we go deep into gauging query performance on Redshift, let’s take a quick refresher on what Amazon Redshift is and what it does.

In new and quickly-expanding fields like serverless, long-standing experts are few and far between. I am excited to welcome Tim Wagner, the original leader of the serverless movement, to the Stackery Board of Directors. Tim spent six years at Amazon Web Services as the General Manager of AWS Lambda, where he oversaw the team that built the success of serverless as a platform. In many ways, we have them to thank for creating the environment that supports Stackery and the serverless ecosystem.