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If you recall, in a previous blog post I discussed AWS Step Functions as a great service for orchestrating your AWS Lambda functions by giving an example. Today, I will show you how you can integrate your API Gateway resource methods with your AWS Step Functions state machines so that you can trigger your state machines with API calls.

Actually the benefits are obvious. Instead of serving our Lambda functions as separate endpoints and orchestrating which one to call and when in our front end; we can use a single endpoint and pass all logic to the back end. Then our back end, in this case our state machine, will execute the functions in sequential or parallel. This method especially suits well to cases when all these function calls are necessary to complete a single business action.

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is one of the first AWS services I started using. It allows you to send automated emails without maintaining your email servers. It is scalable, easy to use with AWS SDKs and cost-effective.

However, you need to do more than verifying your domain on Amazon SES for your emails not to end in your users’ spam folder. In this blog post, I will discuss how you can increase the deliverability of your emails by setting DKIM and SPF authentications on Amazon SES. Read more at Increasing Email Deliverability When Using Amazon SES post.

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.