In this video, you'll discover how to leverage pre-traffic hooks and deployment strategies to avoid production failures, ensuring your serverless applications roll out without hidden errors.

You'll see a hands-on walkthrough deploying a .NET CRUD API with safer, automated rollbacks, and learn when to use pre-traffic hooks versus traffic shifting and alarms. 

0:00 The hidden risks in CI/CD
1:18 Containers vs Lambda deployment safety
2:16 Using Lambda aliases & versions
3:36 CodeDeploy and pre-traffic hooks
5:03 Implementing a pre-traffic Lambda function
6:38 Defining CDK deployment groups
7:47 Simulating and catching deployment errors
8:49 Rollbacks and deployment validation
10:00 Best practices and closing thoughts

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When a CI/CD pipeline shows green but a Lambda deployment is broken in production, the root cause is often configuration issues that unit and integration tests miss. Using Lambda aliases and versions together with AWS CodeDeploy and CloudWatch alarms enables safer canary-style rollouts. A pre-traffic hook — a separate Lambda function invoked by CodeDeploy before shifting traffic — can proactively test the new version with realistic payloads and automatically trigger a rollback if anything fails. The full setup is demonstrated using AWS CDK with .NET, showing how a missing environment variable causes the pre-traffic hook to catch the bad release before any real traffic is affected.

Stop Your Bad Lambda Deployments Before They Hit Production