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The Importance of Proper Serverless API Design

Allen Helton
Better Programming
Published in
7 min readMar 9, 2022

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Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

I was troubleshooting a production issue last week. The issue stated that some shared files weren’t showing up in our application even though they had been shared multiple times.

Seems like a simple enough bug to triage.

I went to CloudWatch to peek at the logs for the lambda that was responsible for sharing files. But there were no errors. Everything seemed to be succeeding without issue.

So I took a look at some of the files that were “missing” in DynamoDB to see if they were in a weird status. Once again, everything seemed to be in place. It made sense why there weren’t any errors in the logs, the data all looked right.

I tried to reproduce it myself. I started over from scratch, but everything seemed fine again. It all showed up for me fine. So I went to the area reported in the bug and sure enough, files were missing.

What the heck was going on?

I spent a lot of time looking at the same 100 lines of code in that lambda file. Just staring at it. Walking through it in my head trying to figure out where it could possibly be going wrong.

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Allen Helton
Allen Helton

Written by Allen Helton

I am an AWS serverless hero with a strong focus on API design and standardization, event-driven architectures, and software automation.

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