Authenticating to MongoDB Atlas with AWS Outbound Identity Federation
Service-to-service authentication usually means managing credentials somewhere. Secrets Manager, client credentials flows, rotation policies. AWS IAM Outbound Identity Federation change this by letting your workloads prove their identity with short-lived JWT tokens from STS In this post we look at how Outbound Identity Federation works, verify tokens with a quick API Gateway setup, and then connect to MongoDB Atlas using its native OIDC support. No database passwords, no rotation, just standard OIDC tokens that any service can verify.

Building a Serverless AI Bartender
What started as a New Year's party project turned into a full serverless application. I needed a way to stop being the human drink menu at parties, so I built an AI bartender that lets guests browse cocktails, place orders, and chat with an AI that actually knows the menu. The stack covers Aurora DSQL, AppSync Events, Lambda streaming, Strands Agents with Bedrock, and more.
Building a Serverless AI Bartender - Part 1: Stop Being the ...
Mixing cocktails at home is fun. Mixing cocktails for a room full of guests is how you end...
Building a Serverless AI Bartender - Part 2: Guest registrat...
Having a digital menu is a great start, but a bar isn't really a bar if your guests can't ...
Building a Serverless AI Bartender - Part 3: The AI Chat Age...
In the final part of this series, I build the AI chat agent that actually makes this a bar...

How to re:Invent
I have attended re:Invent every year since 2016 and collected a fair amount of tips and tricks on how to survive not only the conference but also Vegas as a city. This series breaks it all down into four episodes, covering travel and accommodations, session planning, the reserved seating game, and packing and survival tricks for the week. Prepare to walk a lot, get very little sleep, gain a ton of learning, and meet some new friends.
How to re:Invent, Episode 1 - Vegas, Travel, and Accommodati...
Planning your first trip to AWS re:Invent can be daunting, especially when navigating Las ...
How to re:Invent, Episode 2 - Session Planning
Planning your AWS re:Invent schedule can be just as overwhelming as navigating Vegas. In t...
How to re:Invent, Episode 3 - Reserved Seating
Getting into the sessions you really want at AWS re:Invent can make or break your week. In...
How to re:Invent, Episode 4 - Packing and Survival Tricks
Packing right and surviving the week on-site can be the difference between an amazing re:I...

Extending My Blog with Translations by Amazon Nova
Reaching a global audience often means providing content in multiple languages. In this post, I explore how I extended my event-driven blog pipeline with automated translation capabilities using Amazon Nova Pro, enabling my technical content to reach readers in German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese.

Extending My Blog with Proofreading by Amazon Nova
Writing technical content as a non-native English speaker often means spending significant time proofreading for spelling and grammatical errors. In this post, I explore how I extended my existing event-driven blog CI/CD pipeline with automated proofreading using Amazon Nova and Amazon Bedrock, seamlessly integrating AI-powered text correction.

PEP and PDP for Secure Authorization with AVP and ABAC
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.

Events vs streaming data in AWS
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
