Jimmy Dahlqvist - Tech blog by AWS Serverless Hero, and AWS Ambassador, Jimmy Dahlqvist. Writing about AWS, cloud, architecture, development, serverless, and everything there is to know about cloud and AWS

PEP and PDP for Secure Authorization with AVP and ABAC

2025-05-06

aws, authz, serverless

Taking our authorization system to the next level! In this third part of our series, we're enhancing our Amazon Verified Permissions (AVP) solution with Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC). By combining RBAC and ABAC, we get a powerful authorization system that can enforce fine-grained access based on user attributes and context - perfect for multi-tenant applications where access control needs to account for more than just roles.

PEP and PDP for Secure Authorization with AVP

2025-02-20

aws, authz, serverless

As authorization needs evolve, managing access efficiently becomes even more crucial. In this follow-up post, we extend our Policy Decision Point (PDP) and Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) solution by introducing Amazon Verified Permissions (AVP) for fine-grained authorization. Instead of storing permissions in DynamoDB, we leverage AVP’s centralized policy engine and Cedar policy language to define and enforce access control dynamically.

PEP and PDP for Secure Authorization with Cognito

2025-01-30

aws, authz, serverless

Authorization is a critical part of securing cloud applications, and understanding the best practices for implementing it can make all the difference. In this post, we dig deep on the concepts of Policy Decision Points (PDPs) and Policy Enforcement Points (PEPs), and how they work together to manage user access efficiently. We dive into a serverless solution using AWS Lambda and API Gateway, implementing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for fine-grained access control based on Cognito User Groups. This solution ensures scalability, low latency, and efficient authorization in serverless environments.

Serverless self-service IoT certificate management - Part 2.

2024-12-22

aws, iot, security, serverless

Secure communication is a important in IoT systems, where certificates and trust play a vital role. In this post we extend the API introduced in part 1, we will add functionality to create device certificates, introduce an inventory, add some event-driven parts, and the possibility to list and get certificates. This hands-on approach is great for learning purposes and development environments, production setups however require robust managed solutions.

Serverless self-service IoT certificate management - Part 1.

2024-11-27

aws, iot, security, serverless

Secure communication is a important in IoT systems, where certificates and trust play a vital role. In this post, I explore the foundations of certificate management, including PKI, certificate chains, and trust. Also I introduce a serverless self-service API using Amazon API Gateway and Lambda for an easy way to create certificates. This hands-on approach is great for learning purposes and development environments, production setups however require robust managed solutions.

Serverless AI powered content moderation service

2024-10-31

aws, ai, security, serverless

In this post, I extend the File Manager service I built previously by adding content moderation capabilities. The original service stores files in S3 and records them in a DynamoDB table, using a serverless, event-driven approach. Now, with AWS GuardDuty and Rekognition, I’ve enhanced the service with malware scanning and image moderation.

The art of surviving re:Invent: Tricks from a eight year veteran

2024-09-25

aws, re:Invent

re:Invent is one of, if not the biggest, tech conferences in the world. Attending re:Invent for the first time can be overwhelming. In this post I try give you some advice how to survive not only re:Invent but also Las Vegas as a first time attendee.

Building a serverless connected BBQ as SaaS - Part 4 - AuthZ

2024-09-20

serverless, aws, saas, IoT

In part four of the series about the world of BBQ, where tradition and technology rarely cross paths. The future of grilling is here, and it’s connected, smart, and runs on the cloud! We look at the key difference between Authentication and Authorization in a SaaS solution. We introduce a new authorization architecture with a centralized Policy Decision Point (PDP) and distributed Policy Enforcement Points (PEPs) implemented serverless with API Gateway and Lambda.

Building a serverless connected BBQ as SaaS - Part 3 - Tenants

2024-08-23

serverless, aws, saas, IoT

In part three of the series about the world of BBQ, where tradition and technology rarely cross paths. The future of grilling is here, and it’s connected, smart, and runs on the cloud! I continue with tenant management using an serverless and event-driven approach with EventBridge, StepFunctions, API Gateway, Lambda, and Cognito User Pools.

How I extend my blog with gamified learning

2024-07-25

aws, event-driven, serverless

One of the major reason that I write all of these blog posts is to help people learn about cloud and AWS. How would you know that you understood what you read and learned from it? In this post I discuss how I introduced gamified learning by adding a quiz from kvist.ai on my blog posts, directly from my CI/CD pipeline running as an event-driven system using Amazon EventBridge and AWS StepFunctions.

Migrating Bioinformatics Applications to SaaS using Amazon AppStream and Sigma Technology

2024-07-24

aws, saas, appstream

For software providers with legacy applications, modernization to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model is an attractive proposition. For these providers, finding customers in new regions and industries, as well as gaining operational efficiency and agility, represents a significant opportunity. For their tenants, the opportunity to alleviate the burden of operating software, and paying only for what they consume, is equally desirable.

Events vs streaming data in AWS

2024-06-27

aws, event-driven, streaming data

Events are changes in a system’s state, often triggering specific actions, while data streams represent continuous flows of data elements over time. Events can form part of data streams, but not all data streams are composed of events, as they may include continuous data points like sensor readings. AWS offers services like Amazon EventBridge and SNS for managing events, Amazon Kinesis for, real-time data streams, and IoT Core that can handle both, making it possible to handle both concepts in cloud.

Building a serverless connected BBQ as SaaS - Part 2 - User Creation

2024-06-12

serverless, aws, saas, IoT

In part two of the series about the world of BBQ, where tradition and technology rarely cross paths. The future of grilling is here, and it’s connected, smart, and runs on the cloud! I continue with user management using an serverless and event-driven approach with Cognito User Pool together with Lambda, EventBridge, and StepFunctions.

Building a serverless connected BBQ as SaaS - Part 1

2024-05-29

serverless, aws, IoT

In the world of BBQ, tradition and technology rarely cross paths. But what if I told you that the future of grilling is here, and it’s connected, smart, and runs on the cloud? In this blog series, I will explore how AWS IoT, serverless, and event-driven architecture enables an automated cooking experience. As a tech-savvy griller, I discover how cloud technology can elevate my grilling game to a whole new level.

Navigating through failures, build resilient serverless systems

2024-04-26

serverless, aws

Serverless and event-driven workloads on AWS are well known for their inherent high availability and scalability, offering a robust platform right out of the box. In the world of cloud, it's well known that everything fails all the time. This reality becomes even more complex when serverless systems interact with non-serverless components. In this post, I'll dig into architecture concepts that can help you handle failures effectively.

Protect API Gateway with Amazon Verified Permissions

2024-04-10

serverless, aws

In this post we'll look at Amazon Verified Permissions (AVP) a serverless service for easy management and enforcement of application permissions, and how to use it to secure Amazon API gateway API together with Cognito User Pools.

Serverless statistics solution with Lambda@Edge

2024-03-19

serverless, aws

AWS offers several great serverless services for data engineering and analytics. In this post I describe my serverless analytics setup for click stream analytics of a static webpage, using Amazon Glue, Athena, Managed Grafana for analytics. Data ingestion and storage with Lamba@Edge, StepFunctions and S3.

My Serverless Handbook - My serverless journey on AWS

2024-02-28

serverless, aws

Introducing My Serverless Handbook. This will be the home to my serverless experience and learnings on AWS. It all started 2015 with the creation of my first Lambda function, now several years later, serverless solutions are still my passion. This is my story, this is my journey, this is my experience!

AWS StepFunctions HTTP Endpoint demystified

2024-02-14

serverless, stepfunctions, aws

Calling an API from AWS StepFunctions has for a long time required us to write a Lambda function to handle that. With the release of HTTP EndPoint there is no need for that anymore. In this post I'll go over the functionality and show how to use it.

Serverless redirect with CloudFront Functions

2024-01-31

serverless, cloudfront, functions

How do we efficiently redirect users from one site to an other? In this post we'll create a solution using serverless technologies to handle this redirect in an efficient way. We'll use AWS, CloudFront, and the new Function KeyValueStore.

Amazon Graviton Three Ways

2024-01-16

serverless, graviton, cost savings

The Frugal Architect. Many workloads can utilize the effective Graviton (ARM) based CPU, Switching to Graviton is often an easy way to save on cost. Graviton delivers the best cost vs performance. This blog post will show the migration process for three different workloads.

Run a java service serverless with ECS and Fargate

2024-01-05

serverless, java, ecs

How to run a Java based service on Amazon ECS using Fargate and Fargate Spot. Cover the foundation and the infrastructure and steps needed to run this workload.

Serverless and event-driven translation bot

2023-12-05

serverless, ai, event-driven

Blog post how I created a serverless and event-driven translation service using AI services from AWS, like Amazon Translate and Amazon Polly. Step by step guide how to create this solution and integrate it with Slack for translations using a slash command.

Protecting a Static Website with JWT and Lambda@Edge

2023-10-04

serverless, security

Post about how to use Amazon Cognito together with Lambda@Edge to add protection and authorization to static content hosted with Amazon S3 and CloudFront.

Previous Next