Are you looking to learn Serverless but need a little help in where to start? One of the best ways to get your head around a new technology is to dive in and build some example projects. But what are some nice and simple serverless beginner projects?

In today’s article we’ll go through three different simple examples of serverless functions you can build using AWS Lambda for your first trial with serverless.

By the end of this article you should have an overview of three serverless beginner projects, the steps you’d need to create them, and some ways that you can later extend them to learn more. 

Ah Serverless… it’s the golden child of software engineering right now, and the internet is full of Serverless and AWS Lambda success stories. But actually the golden child of software engineer is harbouring a few secrets…

Yep, that’s right, Serverless isn’t as good as the marketing pages lead you to believe. That’s not to say Serverless is bad technology — I absolutely love Serverless. But on a few occasions whilst working with it, I felt kinda duped.

By the end of this article you’ll understand some of the limitations of AWS Lambda and how some features like, DDOS and memory leaks really work. 

So you’re new to AWS Lambda and secrets management? Maybe you’ve just joined a team that’s using KMS and you want to know more about how KMS and Lambda work, or maybe you’re looking to use KMS as your preferred choice for Lambda secrets management.

Whatever your reasoning for investigating AWS KMS with Lambda, today we’re going to cover the in’s and out’s of how the two technologies work together, and show you how you can use them.

By the end of this article you’ll understand what KMS is, how KMS works with AWS Lambda and the alternatives to using KMS for AWS Lambda functions. 

I remember staring at the AWS Lambda console for the first time and feeling overwhelmed. There were so many things happening: qualifiers, actions, triggers, permissions. It’s like the cockpit of a fighter jet in there. And with new features the Lambda interface has only become more complicated.

But when you understand the different parts of the AWS Lambda console and everything you can achieve with Lambda it opens up your perspective and builds your confidence. When you know what all the parts do you can then focus your attention only on the features that matter for you.

By the end of this article you will be more confident using AWS Lambda after we explore and understand the AWS Lambda console. 

Have you ever wondered what a queue is or how you could implement a queue in AWS? Perhaps you’re considering using a queue for a solution that you’re working on but you’re not fully sure how the pieces fit together?

If that’s you — you’re in the right place! Today we’ll remove the mysticism of queues in AWS. But how will we remove the mysticism? By walking step-by-step for how to configure an SQS queue and use Lambda to process it.

By the end of this article you’ll understand what a queues is, why you might need one and how to setup one up SQS and Lambda.

The marketing around Serverless likes to make it out like “spinning up” a function is a simple task with no other dependencies. However, Serverless functions have to be triggered somehow. And one of your options is to use AWS Lambda with an ALB.

But if you’ve just learned AWS Lambda and want to set it up with an ALB you’re about to run face first into a ton of new jargon: target groups, listeners, listener rules, ports etc. So if you’re not already familiar with AWS ALB and it’s various ideas you’re going to need to get up to speed.

By the end of this article you’ll understand the main concepts related to AWS ALB’s so that you can expose your Lambda function publically. 

Recently I’ve been experimenting with Github Actions as a CI tool, specifically for setting up AWS Lambda on Github Actions.

Container based CI is awesome. And I’m really excited about the community that is building up around it. I hope with container based CI we spend less time fighting CI, and more time building apps.

But until we get there — I’ll try and make the CI fighting a little less painful by giving you a head start. And in this case, we’ll be pushing zipped artifacts for AWS Lambda on Github Actions.

AWS Lambda works by associating artifacts with the running Lambda exectuion. Therefore it’s quite common to zip our artifacts and upload them onto S3 to be used by Lambda. Today I’ll walk you through a quick three step method to upload zipped artifacts onto AWS for later use with AWS Lambda.