Serverless Superhero

This week our serverless superhero is Nadtakan Futhoem an AWS Community Builder and senior software engineer at Tyler Technologies. Nadtakan has recently been gathering the great minds and sorting out migrating existing DynamoDB tables to global tables without data loss. A solutions architect at heart, Nadtakan isn’t afraid of a challenge and loves diving into the deep end to help others. Thank you for your contributions, Nadtakan!

Tutorials

For a quick guide on setting up an asynchronous endpoint from API Gateway to SQS to Lambda, David Brackin has you covered. He goes step by step using the serverless framework on how to integrate API Gateway with SQS with a custom authorizer.

Everything is better with a real world example. Lee James Gilmore walks us through building a serverless B2B application using an example of a luxury car business. It is captivating and includes useful pieces of information like how to incorporate API keys, usage plans, and Cognito.

Events are notoriously difficult to test and troubleshoot. But Siarhei Kazhura and Riaz Panjwani are here to help with their post on how to test EventBridge events using AWS Step Functions. Their solution builds a synchronous workflow triggered by an API endpoint that will test your asynchronous workflows. Pretty helpful for CI/CD!

New Releases

For those of you who don’t already use the NoSQL Workbench tool for DynamoDB, it’s time to get acquainted. For those of you who do use it already, it just got better. It now supports control plane operations like CreateTable, UpdateTable, and DeleteTable straight to your AWS account.

AppSync users rejoice! AWS recently expanded the GraphQL utility helper library with two new features: $util.autoKsuid and $util.log, which do exactly what you’d think. While this feels like a small update, it does imply that there will be more updates coming in the future.

Spotlight

There are no doubts that serverless is a smart way to go in many use cases. Anna Geller explains from a different perspective 7 reasons why serverless encourages useful engineering practices. She walks through why serverless development is more secure than traditional programming and other practices it encourages rather than forces on you.

Last Words

A big shoutout to all the new AWS heroes who were named this past week, including our issue #8 serverless superhero Kristi Perreault. Tremendous effort everyone, and thank you so much for your consistent contributions to the community.

Thank you for the first 10 issues of Serverless Picks of the Week! It’s a fun little anniversary and I hope you have enjoyed it as much as I have.

If you’d like to make a recommendation for the serverless superhero or for an article you found especially useful, send me a message on Twitter, LinkedIn, or email.

Happy Coding!

Allen