Learning Objectives & Key Takeaways
0 / 4 Completed- Understand AWS & DevOps core architecture and runtime execution model
- Audit real-world latency, throughput benchmarks, and memory footprint
- Implement zero-downtime deployment patterns with resilience guards
- Verify code snippets and architect blueprints against production SLOs
- Changing a DynamoDB partition or sort key forces CloudFormation to replace the table, not update it.
- HTTP API Lambda integrations add one IAM permission statement per route by default, which can exceed the function policy limit.
- Grant DynamoDB access with grantReadWriteData instead of hand-written IAM policies to stay least privilege.
- Always run cdk diff before cdk deploy so a schema change never surprises you again.
- A public API Gateway endpoint from a tutorial stack is a real liability until authorization is added.
A Flash Sale, a Schema Tweak, and a Table That Vanished
The order history service for a mid-sized e-commerce platform was a clean little CDK stack: one Lambda function, one REST API, one DynamoDB table keyed on orderId. During a post-Diwali flash sale, the team decided customers also needed to query orders by customer email, so an engineer added a sortKey to the existing table definition and ran cdk deploy without reading the plan first.
CloudFormation does not know how to add a sort key to a live table in place. When a partition key or sort key changes, DynamoDB tables are not updated, they are replaced, which means the old table is deleted and a new empty one is created under the same logical ID. Because the table had no explicit removal policy set, the default behavior kicked in and years of order rows disappeared in the time it took the deploy to finish.
- What You Will Build Today
- Setting Up and Deploying the Stack
- The Complete Stack and Handler
- Permission Pitfalls Nobody Warns You About
- Testing, Observing, and Tearing Down Safely
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