Pythian Blog: Technical Track

AWS Serverless Application Repository Now Generally Available!

by Pythian Marketing on Feb 27, 2018 12:00:00 AM

We all know what it’s like to feel the pressure of competing demands fighting for our time. When faced with fast-approaching deadlines it’s critical that the time we spend be focused on providing value. Anything that can help us move faster is our friend. That’s why I’m excited that the AWS Serverless Application Repository is now available to the general public. The AWS Serverless Application Repository is a collection of code samples, components, and complete applications that can be quickly deployed into AWS. If you’ve ever used a configuration management repository, like Puppet Forge or Ansible Galaxy, then the AWS Serverless Application Repository should feel somewhat familiar. The concept is simple. Community members write and publish applications that can then be discovered in the AWS Serverless Application Repository. Each application can be configured by the end user and automatically deployed to their environment. The idea is that common solutions can be packaged up as serverless applications and quickly re-used. As consumers of this service, we all can avoid reinventing the wheel, rapidly stand-up proven solutions, and get on with delivering value to our respective stakeholders. That’s a pretty powerful tool if you ask me.

It's my first time here, what's good?

I took a stroll through the repository search page and my first impression was that it’s pretty tough to find the popular applications that people are finding useful. I was hoping to see a better-curated list of applications with the ability to sort by popularity, but the only options available are a search bar and a tagging system. The search is self-explanatory, but the tags deserve an additional comment because there’s no tag cloud or structured list of tags. You either need to get lucky and guess a tag when you search or click on a tag in an application you’ve found to bring up similar applications. It’s worth noting that some applications don’t have any tags, while others have several. There’s some room for improvement here. [caption id="attachment_103504" align="alignnone" width="1600"] The AWS Serverless Application Repository discovery page with search bar and tiled/paginated results. 17 pages!?![/caption] I searched for “datadog” to see what was available and was pleased to see a few options including parsers to pull both RDS enhanced metrics and VPC flow data from Cloudwatch logs and send them to Datadog to be included with your other metrics. I think that’s pretty nifty. In this case, there are other solutions available to get these metrics into Datadog, but these applications are a great example of what is possible with the AWS Serverless Application Repository.

A Promising Future

So far the repository is a bit light on available applications, but I expect this to change quickly as teams begin adopting serverless technologies and begin leveraging them to reduce the amount of time and money they spend on managing infrastructure. Don’t be afraid to dive in and start exploring though because there are definitely some gems. Let me know what applications you’d like to see added to the AWS Serverless Application Repository and sound off below with your thoughts and questions!
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Topics: Technical Track Cloud Redshift

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