Robust CI/CD pipelines for serverless applications

The March meetup of AWS User Group Finland drew a strong crowd of 112 attendees, all joining online via Amazon Chime as part of the AWS Community Nordics event series. The evening’s speaker was Ari Palo, Lead Technologist at Alma Media and AWS Community Builder, who presented on building robust CI/CD pipelines for serverless applications – a topic that resonates with pretty much anyone running serverless in production.

Ari walked through the practical side of deploying serverless applications with confidence. He showed how to define infrastructure with AWS CDK, wire up GitHub Actions for the pipeline, and integrate testing throughout the process using the Jest testing framework. A key theme was treating AWS Lambda and other AWS managed services as first-class citizens in your CI/CD flow, rather than bolting testing on as an afterthought. He also covered managing multiple environments and how to handle environment-specific configurations alongside application code deployments.

There was a good discussion around the trade-offs of different approaches. Ari shared his experience from Alma Media on what works in practice versus what looks clean on slides, and attendees chimed in with their own war stories. The Q&A turned into one of those sessions where the community knowledge in the room was just as valuable as the presentation itself.

Even though we were all behind screens, the energy was solid. Over a hundred people showing up on a Thursday evening to talk about deployment pipelines says a lot about where the Finnish AWS community is at. Looking forward to keeping this momentum going.