Serverless

Preamble A couple of summers ago I had what felt like a small idea: ask an LLM to write bedtime stories for kids. Glue images and audio on top. Call it a day. The plan fit in a paragraph. The system as it stands today does not. The prototype was called Fable — a script with two HTTP calls and a folder of .txt files. The current incarnation is Fabble (fabble.me): a serverless app on AWS that generates stories, validates them, illustrates them, narrates them, broadcasts a fresh one every week, and handles payments. Occasionally it writes a story I’m proud to read aloud. ...

Overview Classic Lambda is fantastic when traffic is spiky, the operational budget is close to zero, and paying per invocation makes sense. But there is a point where some workloads start to feel slightly awkward inside the normal Lambda model. Not because they are long-running. Not because they need state. Just because they are high-volume, fairly predictable, and more about sustained compute efficiency than burst elasticity. That is where Lambda Managed Instances becomes interesting. ...

Overview I have accumulated the usual digital junk drawer over the years: manuals for appliances I never remember how to reset notes from talks and courses markdown snippets from side projects receipts and invoices I swear I will organize properly one day little technical writeups saved with filenames like final-v3-real-final.md What I wanted was not full-blown enterprise search. I wanted something much smaller and much more useful: semantic search over my own documents, with a cost profile that does not feel absurd for a personal project. ...

Overview A few months ago, I started a fun project: an AI-powered platform that generates unique bedtime stories for children. The idea was simple: use AWS Bedrock to create personalized stories with illustrations and audio narration, then deliver them via email subscriptions based on age groups. What started as a fully serverless application on AWS eventually evolved into a hybrid architecture, with the frontend running on my home Kubernetes cluster while keeping all the AI processing on AWS. This article tells the story of that journey. ...

Overview Almost a year ago, I moved from the city to the countryside and started a new project: a small greenhouse. Manually managing the watering schedule quickly became a repetitive task, so I decided to merge my passion for technology with gardening. This article describes how I built a smart, automated watering system. Using a Raspberry Pi Pico W, several sensors, and the power of the AWS cloud with its AI models, the system now monitors environmental conditions and autonomously decides the best time to water the plants. ...

Prelude To build a streaming platform, as discussed here - read it if you miss it! - you first need to know what’s behind a streaming. Have you ever notice that streaming from streaming platform constantly adapt to your network, trying to avoid buffering and slowing down of the stream itself? Today it’s pretty hard to have connection problems, but even only 10 years ago this was a problem for many of us. Moreover, have you ever tried to download a video from a streaming resource? From time to time it’s hard to do it, you only get some empty file or “small pieces”, even using downloader extensions… ...

Prelude In the past year, I worked on a project to build an e-learning platform (actually, it’s so much more!). I started using AWS Amplify, and I end up testing so many different services around it. I’ll cover the following topics: Choosing the right AWS services; Designing the application architecture; Developing the backend; Developing the frontend; Deploying the application; I hope this article will be helpful for anyone who is considering building an e-learning platform or something similar. Spoiler is: the platform is not ready yet, but I hope I will have the chance to conclude it by the end of this year 🙏 my time is super limited unfortunately :/ ...

Prelude Hi guys, after a series of back-to-the-future-I-didn’t-have-time-to-write-new-things… I’m back. What happened in the last months… ok, covid19 put the whole world in trouble, I bought an apartment, I opened a company and I resign my contract. Really. Nothing. Special. But TODAY - I wanna talk about a project I have since a while, and I worked on a boring Sunday afternoon: I hacked my blog to let Polly read it for you! 😎 😎 😎 ...

Introduction In the last two weeks, I released a few CDK stacks: I made some experiments around API Gateway and service integration that came out in two serverless forms, the Contact Form and the Upload Form, read to be deployed in your static web page 😎. Actually, with CDK you can do so much more and so much more easily. The last stack I released - a producer-consumer chain presented here - it was a way I used to introduce how you can leverage Typescript inheritance to recycle an old stack and build on top of it. In this last step of this cycle, I will extend this concept once again to build - DRUMROLL - an OCR Serverless solution to be integrated into your application. The use cases are multiple: imagine you want to create podcasts of course lessons on top of your notes, to be able to listen to them during your trip to office or university or whenever you want. Imagine an application to help blind people - like the Be My Eyes app - to read documents without the help of no ones but AWS Services. Well, the use cases are endless so… let’s go! ...

Introduction A few days ago I wrote about a simple stack that leverage API Gateway and Lambda-proxy integration to create a safe upload endpoint to let unknown users push inside a bucket of your choice. The stack I will present today is can be used to build a producer-consumer chain, by implementing the SQS Extended pattern you can find in AWS exams. For the most curious, here you can find the core code. ...