Earlier this year I wrote a post about launching Unofax. That was a team effort with my partner. I did the first 20% and she did the crucial 80%. Since then, we've launched another business: Unopost.com.au. It's a similar idea applied to a different market: postal mail instead of faxes.
Lambda Web Functions bill for the CPU you actually use, and queue consumers spend most of their time waiting on something else. So is an SQS consumer cheaper as a Web Function than as a regular Lambda function?
In my notes on Lambda Web Functions I mentioned that the
runtime contract is: Lambda import()s /var/task/index.js, then waits for
something to accept a TCP connection on AWS_LAMBDA_HTTP_ENDPOINT. The
launch says Web Functions are Node.js only, which I took as a personal
challenge.
AWS launched Lambda Web Functions a few hours ago. You give it a Node.js app that listens on a port and Lambda runs it as-is behind an HTTPS URL, with many concurrent requests per execution environment and billing for the CPU time you actually use rather than wall-clock. There's no handler and no JSON event. I deployed one, poked around inside it, and here are my notes. tl;dr: It feels like taking the best of AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Run and Cloudflare Workers and stuffing them together in a cohesive service.
AWS just announced that S3 event notifications now include the system-generated tags attached to the bucket responsible for the notification. This sounds like a small change, but it will enable some useful patterns. It's also at least the third example of an AWS service offering value-add through tag enrichment.
The release notes were a bit light on details, so I verified for myself what tags are (and more importantly: are not) included in events. I also want to take this as an opportunity to promote EventBridge for S3 object notifications, as it's not used nearly enough.
AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity seems to have a new, barely-documented, policy
condition key. It's called sts:RoleAuthorizedByIdp and if you're anything like
me (my condolences), that name will pique your interest. It's not super useful
today (unless you're running an OIDC IdP), but its utility will grow as adoption
improves over time. So here's what I've learned so far.
Earlier today, AWS IAM Identity Center launched the ability for server-side applications to assume roles on behalf of their users. This is a big deal, I've wanted this exact kind of functionality for years. The docs are pretty sparse on how it works and what the events look like in CloudTrail, so here are my field notes, recommendations on whether you should use it today and feature requests for whichever AWS service team is working on this.
AWS launched Lambda MicroVMs earlier today. They're quite cool, and I imagine they'll become quite popular quite quickly. Here are some notes on things I've discovered about them today.
Amazon has deprecated CloudTrail Lake as of 1st June 2026 for new customers. I assume this is due to lack of uptake. I never got around to properly using it, and I'm a CloudTrail fan! So I can only imagine not many others used it. In its place, Amazon recommends that we "explore CloudWatch". I explored CloudWatch and came away quite disappointed.
I've been interested in micro-transactions for about as long as I can remember. I've wanted to sell something for a tiny amount of money ever since I learned about PayPal's micro-transaction support via NearlyFreeSpeech, the hosting provider. I've finally done it, by combining some of the oldest and newest tech I can think of: faxes and AI.