On my post called Secure API Gateway with Amazon Cognito using SAM I talked about different Auth terms and walked through a setup to use the Client Credentials Flow, but Cognito recently introduced pricing changes for machine-to-machine authentication that will make this cost us and my main goal is to do this while staying in the free tier for personal projects that will not be generating any income. That is why in this post I am going to setup Amazon Cognito using a different flow called user…

I create a lot of APIs, these are for blog posts, for playing around with new functionality or tools that I’ve created for myself. All of these have been created without authentication in place. Not securing APIs can create data exposures for you, but it can also pose a financial risk to your accounts if a malicious user gets your endpoints. This is why I want to secure any API I create but I want this to be with minimal setup so that it’s simple to replicate many times.

Last month I wrote a post about getting rid of Lambda Layers by using ESBuild. What I quickly learned is that the Metadata attribute has to be copied and pasted for EVERY Lambda function in your stack. I tried using the Global section in the SAM template and it turns out it’s not supported. I started thinking about how I could reuse the same configuration across my template and found that YAML already has a functionality that does this called YAML Anchors and Aliases. In this post I will…

As you start setting patterns and best practices within your projects at some point you will want to share these to simplify the lives of other developers.
SAM allows you to initialize projects by using the init command and selecting a template for your project. SAM has built-in templates to generate simple Hello-World starter projects (you can find the list of templates here). These will help you get started and get familiar with how to structure your serverless applications but as your…