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Designing a Serverless Real-Time Chat with AWS WebSockets

I want a clean, feasible plan for building a real-time chat service on AWS. Just an architecture I can deploy, test, and iterate on. Goals Real time. Messages appear for all clients in the same room. Serverless scale. Handle spikes without manual intervention. Cost aware. Pay only when used. Simple to operate. Clear metrics, alarms, and dead-letter handling. Architecture Core pieces Amazon API Gateway WebSocket API Routes: $connect, $disconnect, $default, and sendMessage. AWS Lambda

Monday, October 13, 2025 Read

Adding Cognito

Why do I torture myself? Not only do I hate frontend code, I hate trying to handle user authentication. It feels like anything I can think of doing is not secure enough or so complicated I can’t wrap my head around it. I once was told that for something like user security you shouldn’t try to do it yourself, you should allow those who specialize in it to handle it. So here I go, I’m going to try to use Amazon Cognito to do just that form me.

Thursday, March 3, 2022 Read

Writing Mocha 1

Let’s get started with Mocha Be forewarned this post is going to be a brain dump as I work through this information. I have never wrote Mocha before, and to be honest I have never been good about TDD. I always write my code and then go back and write my tests. This is mainly because I am not always sure what I expect to get out of my code until it’s too late. However, with this project I am trying to push myself to work on myself just as much create something in my head from start to finish.

Wednesday, March 2, 2022 Read

S3 Object Creation

Whoops Ever gone down that path of trying to be too smart for your own good? Yeah that happened to me this time. I want to start out by saying, I am not a frontend developer, so some of the “normal” things that they would expect are still beyond my knowledge. But the thing that really bit me in the butt may not have been the frontend code. So let me give you the backdrop here.

Tuesday, March 1, 2022 Read

Designing the Front End Part 1

Choosing my framework So I am a gluten for punishment some times. I do not enjoy front end designing at all. I also don’t take the time to layout a workflow, or any form of design structure. So where do you start if you don’t even know how your site is going to behave? How do you know if you are going to get the right framework? IDK. I just grabbed the one I like the most. I grabbed Vue JS 3 because the last time I tried to build a front end it was very easy to use. The library sets everything up for you, it’s very responsive in nature, and since I already knew about it, that helped.

Wednesday, February 9, 2022 Read

Getting Started

Going over board So, for those that don’t know. I love Terraform . And when you are building your infrastructure it’s easy to take things too far. I am not sure if I did, but sure enough, the first place I started with Terraform was not actually the IaC that will be running any code. I started with building out the GitHub repo, and AWS IAM permissions with Terraform . And no, not the AWS IAM permissions to run the code either… I defined the AWS IAM permissions for GitHub to be able to plan and build the infrastructure. If you want to know more about what I am doing with that, feel free to look at GitHub Infrastructure.

Saturday, February 5, 2022 Read

Video Streamer GitHub Terraform

GitHub Terraform Thank you for your interest in the possible mundane of how I setup my repository for the video streamer. So how did I do it? It’s pretty straight forward. I started by defining the GitHub repository. I turned off most of the features as if those features are not on, I will be less likely to get distracted and playing with them. For example, I turned off the wiki for it since I would spend time keeping it up to date as I made small modifications during a time where the code will change a lot. And honestly, that’s what this blog will be for at this time. I can document what and why I am doing things so that I am not going into the detail of how or support with the wiki.

Saturday, February 5, 2022 Read

Video Streamer Project

Premise The premise of my idea here is to actually make an open source, cloud native, and serverless competitor to Float Plane. Do I think this will take off and fly? No, but I wanted to explore more AWS services, and give myself something to do that was not work. I greatly admire what LMG and Float Plane is doing with their software. It really feels like they are caring for their creators. Granted, I may not see the dark side as I just sit here looking in without paying for any of the content there.

Saturday, February 5, 2022 Read