AWS Architecture Blog
Let’s Architect! Open-source technologies on AWS
We brought you a Let’s Architect! blog post about open-source on AWS that covered some technologies with development led by AWS/Amazon, as well as well-known solutions available on managed AWS services. Today, we’re following the same approach to share more insights about the process itself for developing open-source. That’s why the first topic we discuss in this post is a re:Invent talk from Heitor Lessa, Principal Solutions Architect at AWS, explaining some interesting approaches for developing and scaling successful open-source projects.
This edition of Let’s Architect! also touches on observability with Open Telemetry, Apache Kafka on AWS, and Infrastructure as Code with an hands-on workshop on AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK).
Powertools for AWS Lambda: Lessons from the road to 10 million downloads
Powertools for AWS Lambda is an open-source library to help engineering teams implement serverless best practices. In two years, Powertools went from an initial prototype to a fast-growing project in the open-source world. Rapid growth along with support from a wide community led to challenges from balancing new features with operational excellence to triaging bug reports and RFCs and scaling and redesigning documentation.
In this session, you can learn about Powertools for AWS Lambda to understand what it is and the problems it solves. Moreover, there are many valuable lessons to learn how to create and scale a successful open-source project. From managing the trade-off between releasing new features and achieving operational stability to measuring the impact of the project, there are many challenges in open-source projects that require careful thought.
Heitor Lessa describing one of the key lessons: development and releasing new features should be as important as the other activities (governance, operational excellence, and more).
Observability the open-source way
The recent blog post Let’s Architect! Monitoring production systems at scale talks about the importance of monitoring. Setting up observability is critical to maintain application and infrastructure health, but instrumenting applications to collect monitoring signals such as metrics and logs can be challenging when using vendor-specific SDKs.
This video introduces you to OpenTelemetry, an open-source observability framework. OpenTelemetry provides a flexible, single vendor-agnostic SDK based on open-source specifications that developers can use to instrument and collect signals from applications. This resource explains how it works in practice and how to monitor microservice-based applications with the OpenTelemetry SDK.
With AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry, you can collect data from your AWS resources.
Best practices for right-sizing your Apache Kafka clusters to optimize performance and cost
Apache Kafka is an open-source streaming data store that decouples applications producing streaming data (producers) into its data store from applications consuming streaming data (consumers) from its data store. Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) allows you to use the open-source version of Apache Kafka with the service managing infrastructure and operations for you.
This blog post explains how the underlying infrastructure configuration can affect Apache Kafka performance. You can learn strategies on how to size the clusters to meet the desired throughput, availability, and latency requirements. This resource helps you discover strategies to find the optimal sizing for your resources, and learn the mental models adopted to conduct the investigation and derive the conclusions.
Comparisons of put latencies for three clusters with different broker sizes
AWS Cloud Development Kit workshop
AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is an open-source software development framework that allows you to provision cloud resources programmatically (Infrastructure as Code or IaC) by using familiar programming languages such as Python, Typescript, Javascript, Java, Go, and C#/.Net.
CDK allows you to create reusable template and assets, test your infrastructure, make deployments repeatable, and make your cloud environment stable by removing manual (and error-prone) operations. This workshop introduces you to CDK, where you can learn how to provision an initial simple application as well as become familiar with more advanced concepts like CDK constructs.
This construct can be attached to any Lambda function that is used as an API Gateway backend. It counts how many requests were issued to each URL.
See you next time!
Thanks for joining our conversation! To find all the blogs from this series, you can check out the Let’s Architect! list of content on the AWS Architecture Blog.