Making Sure Events Don’t Drop In The AWS Cloud

one of the most critical aspects of an event-driven system is making sure that events don’t fall on the floor

there are two general paths to take here:

• make sure unhandled events can be replayed
• make sure that unhandled events can be resent

#cloud #devops

@marknca tweeted at 09-Feb-2022, 00:40

for most use cases, replaying or parking events is a more elegant solution

• there are use cases where resending unhandled events is the better path, it entirely depends on what the event is describing

let’s look at a two ways to implement this @awscloud…

#cloud #devops

@marknca tweeted at 09-Feb-2022, 00:40

@awscloud the first: dead-letter queues in Amazon Eventbridge

the docs are up at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/userguide/eb-rule-dlq.html

#cloud #devops

@marknca tweeted at 09-Feb-2022, 00:40

@awscloud EventBridge dead-letter queues (DLQ) are actually SQS queues under the covers

you don’t have to worry about that but it’s handy to know, because it does open up some possibilities

EventBridge DLQ can be used when EventBridge can’t fire a trigger for an event

#cloud #devops

@marknca tweeted at 09-Feb-2022, 00:40

@awscloud by default, EventBridge will try to send an event again for up to 24 hours or 185 times…whichever comes first

when that happens, EventBridge can drop the event to a DLQ

• you can send them to the DLQ directly on 1st fail too

#cloud #devops

@marknca tweeted at 09-Feb-2022, 00:40

@awscloud events in the DLQ can then be drained directly from an @awscloud Lambda function or you could use your own logic to handle them

…use Lambda

more at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/userguide/eb-rule-dlq.html#eb-dlq-resend

#cloud #devops

@marknca tweeted at 09-Feb-2022, 00:40

@awscloud so a DLQ will help you park events in order to resend them

the 2nd pattern is to use EventBridge’s archive feature…yes, it has an archive feature

the docs are up at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/userguide/eb-archive.html

#cloud #devops

@marknca tweeted at 09-Feb-2022, 00:40

@awscloud the archive is another event target. it has a configurable retention period after which events are deleted

once events are in the archive, you can use the replay feature to…um…replay them

docs at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/userguide/eb-replay-archived-event.html

#cloud #devops

@marknca tweeted at 09-Feb-2022, 00:40

@awscloud now the DLQ is a lot more flexible and should be your go-to when trying to avoid dropping events

…but the archive is really interesting. the replay feature is good for series of events over a set timeframe. for some use cases, this is the way to go

#cloud #devops

@marknca tweeted at 09-Feb-2022, 00:40

@awscloud regardless of the approach, most event-driven solutions don’t want to lose events

making sure that your design can deal with those unhandled events effectively is critical to a reslient design

#cloud #devops

@marknca tweeted at 09-Feb-2022, 00:40

@awscloud this is also another example of why you should be reading the docs when you using any cloud service

honestly, I had no idea that the archive feature existed in EventBridge. glad i stumbled across it today!

/ #cloud #devops

@marknca tweeted at 09-Feb-2022, 00:40

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