I’ve recently took on a new role as Technical Lead on an Integration Team within a large organisation. I was asked by a semi-technical friend what the team’s products were. I covered them, and recieved the response… “What is a API Gateway?”. So here’s a quick blog post for future reference. An API gateway is the software layer that sits between an API client and an API server. It acts as a proxy, routing requests from the client to the server and returning responses back to the client.…

AWS Lambda is a serverless computing platform that lets you run your code without provisioning or managing servers. Java is one of the supported programming languages for AWS Lambda, which makes it a great choice for many applications. However, to get the best performance from your Java-based AWS Lambda functions, you’ll need to follow a few best practices. In this blog post, I’ll go over some of the most important optimisation techniques for Java on AWS Lambda.…

Before I start, disabling tests as part of your build pipeline is bad - I don’t recommend it. However, in this scenario, sam builds, especially when running sam sync --watch can take a bit of time, and the feedback loop (write some code, and quickly see it running) can be several minutes, rather than seconds (which you would normally see when running unit tests etc). So, when running sam sync --watch you may want to disable running of unit/integration tests to make things faster.…