I am a big proponent of the Serverless movement.
The ability to concentrate efforts on only the code and infrastructure concerns which directly add business value is very powerful.
Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) offerings like AWS Lambda impose limitations which help aid in designing more fault tolerant/scalable systems; leaning towards event-driven architectures.
However, there are times when we need to execute behaviour which exceed common-place FaaS duration limits (i.e. AWS Lambda’s 15-minute limit).
In this case we ideally do not want to resort to a lower-level of compute (i.e. a VPS such as EC2), but instead be able to define and run such behaviour alongside our FaaS counterparts.
In this post I would like to discuss a Serverless Framework plugin I have written which aids in bridging this gap, by-way of ECS and AWS Fargate.
Having had great success using AWS Lambda within our insurance product (MyBuilder Plus), late last year we made the decision to move all our web request traffic over to the platform!
However, we noticed when attempting to migrate over one application in particular, that we could not use the latest release of Bref (the PHP runtime) due to a conflict between required Symfony Process component versions.
Ensuring that both the tech team and company as a whole are aware of changes that have just been released is very important.
This keeps everyone in the loop with the work that the tech team are carrying out, and how the system is changing over time.
Last year MyBuilder transitioned away from Jenkins to GitHub Actions to manage our CI pipelines, and in the process was able to revise how we notified interested parties about releases.
Like many developers, over-engineering personal projects in the spirit of learning is something I am well aware of doing.
So, when it came time to decide how we were going to collect RVSP’s for our upcoming wedding I already had ideas.
What resulted was a solution which follows DDD, CQRS, Hexagonal architecture, Event sourcing, and is deployed on AWS Lambda using PHP.
Over the past couple of years I have explored severaldifferent ways in which to solve the problem of allocating Secret Santa’s for members of my family.
Having spent a couple of months recently interested in microcontrollers, I decided that this year I would send out automatically allocated Secret Santas via SMS using a Raspberry Pi Pico/MicroPython and SIM800L GSM module.