SDK access for Step Functions, updated SQS Lambda triggers - A Cloud Guru

What’s going on with AWS this week? We’ve got a collection of AWS news goodness, including cross-account SQS Lambda triggers, Cloud Control API gets released unto the world, and Step Functions step up big time.

Want to know more? Read on for the details!

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Trigger Lambda from SQS in a Different Account

Recently, AWS announced that it is now possible for customers to trigger Lambda functions via SQS queues in other AWS accounts.

Previously, we could only trigger Lambda functions from SQS queues in the same account or you had to perform some elaborate shenanigans to get queue messages from account A to account B.

This cross-account access is a welcome feature in that most significant organizations on AWS have many accounts, maybe hundreds of accounts.

And with the message queue design pattern being ever so useful for all sorts of integrations, this new feature should open the door to more efficient and seamless cross-account information flow.

Of course, you’ll still need to grant cross-account permissions for the Lambda function to reach the foreign queue, but once that’s done, you just need to provide the ARN for the queue in the remote account.

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Cloud Control API Now GA

The AWS Cloud Control API has now made it to general availability. The Cloud Control API is a common set of APIs that allows us to programmatically manage AWS services in a common way.

I know what you’re saying, “We already have the AWS SDK for all this. Why do we need this Cloud Control API?”

Well, you’d be correct in saying that this is a bit redundant, but as all the AWS services grew up, consistency in their respective slice of the SDK never seemed a priority. As a result, different services have different syntax for the basic CRUD operations — those being create, read, update, delete, and sometimes list.

The Cloud Control API aims to provide a more efficient developer experience through a common set of verbs, input parameters, output, and error types.

Additionally, the Cloud Control API also includes support for some third-party products and services through the same unified syntax, and AWS has committed that newly released services will have Cloud Control API support at launch.

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Step Functions Unlock the AWS SDK

AWS Step Functions developers now have access to the AWS SDK, expanding the number of supported services from 17 to more than 200 AWS services.

Previously, if you wanted to do something with an unsupported service, you had to build a custom Lambda function and incorporate that into your workflow.

Now, you have access to virtually every service supported by the SDK right in the Workflow Studio or via the Cloud Development Kit or Amazon States Language, if you like that sorta thing. You can even access niche services like Ground Station, Braket, and Mechanical Turk should you have the need for that. This does indeed create some very interesting low-code possibilities…

Save Big with Lambda on ARM

Lastly, we now have an option to run Lambda functions on AWS’s ARM-based Graviton2 processors as opposed to the traditional x86 processor.

If your code uses runtime that supports an ARM-based processor, you might just be able to save up to 34% on your compute costs.

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That, my friends, is all the AWS news for this week. Stay safe, take care of one another, and keep being awesome, cloud gurus!