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When you build a new application, developing a secure, scalable user pool and authorization mechanism is a necessity and it takes time and effort to build. Sometimes, it even delays the development of the core features of your application that will bring the actual value to your business.

Amazon Cognito provides a scalable and secure user pool that you can create and use in your mobile and web applications. It provides a hosted user interface and SDKs for sign in and sign up actions. It has many features such as sending verification emails, SMS messages to your users. In this blog post, I will discuss how you can create an Amazon Cognito User Pool to use as an authentication mechanism in your applications. Read more at An Introduction to Amazon Cognito User Pools post.

While our serverless applications grow day by day; the need to orchestrate our Lambda functions may become an issue. We might need to execute some functions sequentially and one of our functions might get output of another function as input. Similarly, some functions might require to be executed in parallel. In these cases, AWS Step Functions can help us to coordinate our Lambda executions as components of our distributed applications and microservices.

In this blog post, I will make an introduction to AWS Step functions with a simple case. I will try to show how we can define sequential and parallel executions, as well as intermediary states to transform one state’s output to pass another state as input. Read more at Orchestrating AWS Lambda Functions Using AWS Step Functions post.

AWS CloudFormation is the foundation of operational excellence on AWS. We code our infrastructure as JSON or YAML templates and test it as much as we need before deploying to production. We manage our infrastructure as code.

However, some new AWS resources may not be supported by AWS CloudFormation at the time they are launched. As of today, an example of this is the Elastic GPU resource. The solution is to define a custom CloudFormation resource and attach it to an AWS Lambda function which launches these resources. The Lambda function should also be in the same template. So let’s talk about how to do this in this blog post. Read more at Provisioning Custom CloudFormation Resources Using AWS Lambda post.

Amazon Route 53 offers domain registration services and if you would like to keep your domains together like I do, you can transfer your current domain names easily.

In the past, I bough some domains from GoDaddy and generally use Amazon Route 53 as my DNS service. It is time to renew some of our domains and I decided to move them to AWS as they are extended 1 year automatically after the transfer. This will allow me to manage my domain names, as well as the services behind them all together on AWS. I will describe the process as a reference. Read more at Transferring Domain Registrations from GoDaddy to Amazon Route 53 post.

AWS API Gateway provides us to develop our own RESTful APIs and trigger AWS Lambda functions upon HTTP requests. I often use this architecture in my serverless applications and developed many APIs for my clients. With the help of API Keys and Usage Plans, we can define maximum request quotas and manage request rates while sharing our API with others.

Although API keys can never be considered as a full security measure as we often store these keys in client applications calling the API, usage plans can provide us to limit the API access and be sure that usage does not exceed tresholds we define. Read more at Controlling API Usage with API Keys and Usage Plans on AWS API Gateway post.