How to use esbuild to transpile and bundle your TypeScript Lambda functions in a Serverless Framework project — all without using any plugins! — esbuild is a JavaScript bundler written in Go by Evan Wallace which has risen in popularity recently due to its extremely fast speed, simplicity of use and, well, all-around better-ness when compared to older generation transpilers and bundlers like aging Webpack or Babel.

How to create and access DynamoDB tables for local development in a Serverless Framework project — all without using any plugins! — In this article, I’ll demonstrate a way to use DynamoDB Local (via Docker) together with the Serverless Framework. We’ll create a bootstrapping script which will read our serverless.yml file to create DynamoDB tables locally for use in unit tests — all without using any additional plugins. Using CloudFormation syntax, we'll…

Deploying and connecting to an AWS Elasticsearch cluster from AWS Lambda using the Serverless Framework — In this article, I’ll demonstrate one approach for deploying an Elasticsearch domain to AWS using the Serverless Framework tooling without using any plugins. Using CloudFormation syntax, we’ll create the Elasticsearch cluster and then show how to make authorized requests to it using AWS Signature 4 signed requests. The article assumes…

How I develop AWS Lambda functions locally using a test-first approach — In this article I share an approach I use regularly to develop AWS Lambda functions (and other serverless projects) locally. It assumes a basic familiarity with AWS Lambda or a similar “serverless” service. The article will first introduce the approach, and then walk through a short example making use of…

Setting the burst and rate throttling limits on an AWS API Gateway REST API’s Stage without any 3rd-party plugins using Serverless — In this article, we’ll look at how one can set the default method burst and rate throttling limits on an AWS API Gateway REST API’s Stage without using any 3rd-party plugins or dependencies. We’ll assume at least some familiarity with Serverless and AWS CloudFormation.

An adventure in getting Chrome (read: Chromium) to run “serverless-ly” from compiling it to deploying it on AWS Lambda. — TL;DR Headless Chrome is a thing. You can run it on AWS Lambda (with some effort). This article walks you through how to compile and run it on Lambda. I created the serverless-chrome project so that you can immediately start using headless Chrome on Lambda instead of reading the rest of…

Deploying function code from S3 allows for substantially larger deployment packages when compared to directly uploading to Lambda. — Over the past few months I’ve been spending a lot of time on projects like Serverless Chrome and on adventures recording video from headless Chrome on AWS Lambda. Consequently, I’ve had to worry about the size of my Lambda function deployment packages. When compressed, Headless Chrome itself gobbles up 48…