API gateways are part of every modern microservice architecture. As their name already suggests, they are the gateway into your system; everyone who wants to access your service has to go through a gateway. In 2019, AWS announced HTTP APIs for its API Gateway (APIG) service. This was a big step to add more flexibility and lower latency to APIG. Before this release, you could only build REST APIs with APIG, which only helped when you wanted to create an API based on the REST architecture.

Amazon Kinesis is the real-time stream processing service of AWS. Whether you got video, audio, or IoT streaming data to handle, Kinesis is the way to go. Kinesis is a serverless managed service that integrates nicely with other services like Lambda or S3. Often, you will use it when SQS or SNS is too low-level. But as with all the other services on AWS, Kinesis is a professional tool that comes with its share of complications.

The simple query service (SQS) was one of the first services AWS offered. It’s a managed queuing service that lets you take pressure from your downstream services. You put your items on the queue, and other services can pull them whenever they have the capacity to work on them. It’s a managed service, so you don’t have to install or maintain the software yourself; you just configure a queue and start pushing to and pulling from it. So SQS is very simple to get started with.

Step Functions, the serverless finite state machine service from AWS. With DynamoDB, Lambda, and API Gateway, it forms the core of serverless AWS services. If you have tasks with multiple steps and you want to ensure they will get executed in the proper order, Step Functions is your service of choice. It offers direct integrations with many AWS services, so you don’t need to use Lambda Functions as glue. This can improve the performance of your state machine and lower its costs.

DynamoDB, the primary NoSQL database service offered by AWS, is a versatile tool. It’s fast, scales without much effort, and best of all, it’s billed on-demand! These things make DynamoDB the first choice when a datastore is needed for a new project. But as with all technology, it’s not all roses. You can feel a little lost if you’re coming from years of working with relational databases. You’re SQL and normalization know-how doesn’t bring you much gain.

Since our latest update, Dashbird also gives you insights into HTTP API Gateway. Let’s look at the differences between REST vs. HTTP; HTTP API Gateway pricing, integrations and monitoring.

The Simple Notification Service, or SNS for short, is one of the central services to build serverless architectures in the AWS cloud. SNS itself is a serverless messaging service that can distribute massive numbers of messages to different recipients. These include mobile end-user devices, like smartphones and tablets, but also other services inside the AWS ecosystem. SNS’ ability to target AWS services makes it the perfect companion for AWS Lambda.

In this article, we’ll deep dive into all the basics to help you decide if AWS RDS is the right decision for your architecture and help you hit the ground running if you do end up AWS RDS. For many decades now, relational databases (RDS) have been the place to store your data. They are pretty flexible often use some kind of SQL dialect, which is one of the main languages taught in computer science classes, and widely understood by the average developer.

Load balancing is a significant part of every internet-facing software, and with Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), AWS offers a set of load balancers for every use case. Since our latest update, Dashbird also gives you insights into these ELB services; let’s look at them and see how they can be used in a serverless environment.

TL;DR: Dashbird launches observability for five new AWS services (ELB, SNS, RDS, OpenSearch, and HTTP API Gateway) to allow for a faster, more secure, and smoother serverless observability experience. Dashbird, the leading monitoring platform for serverless AWS applications, announces five new AWS integrations.