Serverless Deployments of Python APIs

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If you are like me, you were starting to get comfortable with the idea of deploying your applications to cloud instances such as EC2s on AWS or droplets on DigitalOcean, when people started to shift away from cloud instances and embrace containers. Maybe now you are getting into containers and Docker, and as is to be expected, the tech world is making a move once again, this time to severless computing. Impossible to ever catch up, right?

In this article I'm going to tell you what a serverless architecture can offer you that the more traditional approaches cannot (and more specifically how it is possible to run your Python web applications without a server!). At the time I'm writing this, AWS has by far the most mature serverless platform, with the Lambda, API Gateway and DynamoDB triad of services at the forefront, so this is the platform I'm going to concentrate on.

AWS Serverless

How to Retry with Class

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Highly distributed applications that consist of lots of small services talking among themselves are getting more and more popular, and that, in my opinion, is a good thing. But this architectural style brings with it a new class of problems that are less common in monolithic applications. Consider what happens when a service needs to send a request to another service, and this second service happens to be temporarily offline, or too busy to respond. If one little service goes offline at the wrong time, that can create a domino effect that can, potentially, take your entire application down.

In this article I'm going to show you techniques that can give your application some degree of tolerance for failures in dependent services. The basic concept is simple: we make the assumption that in most cases these failures are transient, so then when an operation fails, we just repeat it a few times, until it hopefully succeeds. Sounds easy, right? But as with most things, the devil is in the details, so keep reading if you want to learn how to implement a robust retry strategy.

How to Retry with Class