We reached 100 serverless issues!

Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Jason Wadsworth, chief architect at Armanino LLP and AWS Community Builder. Jason writes thoughtful serverless content on his blog and is active member of the tech community - supporting others, sharing content, and answering questions all around serverless. Thank you for everything you do, Jason!

Tutorials

APIs make the world turn. Prioritizing your API by strongly defining the paths, request and response schemas, and what status codes you can expect are crucial to building something delightful for your integrators. Ran Isenberg published an article last week on how you can generate Open API documentation with Lambda Powertools to help with your API-first development cycles. His approach promotes a code-first implementation, which I don’t personally endorse, but am aware that’s what many of you prefer 😊

Any time I see an article that promotes Step Functions, I’m excited to learn something new. Benoît Bouré did just that with his article on building event-driven apps with AppSync, EventBridge, and Step Functions. His article walks you through creating a GraphQL mutation that invokes a Step Function workflow and uses a subscription to update the status of a long-running job. He makes it look so easy!

Arpad Toth always has the coolest, most practical blog posts. Last week he published an article how to automatically disable S3 public access when someone turns it on. His solution is fully serverless and event-driven, allowing you to react in real-time to changes in the system, minimizing the time you have a public bucket.

Interesting Reads

Omid Eidivandi’s post last week is fascinating. He wrote about how you can use Amazon Bedrock for suspicious message detection. Omid uses a storage-first pattern with chat messages that pipe from a DynamoDB stream to Step Functions to analyze conversations and flag them if they might be spam. This is a very cool and practical build!

Have you been wanting to use Postman but all your automation and test suites are tied up in other API clients? No worries! If you’ve been a user of SoapUI, Insomnia, Thunder Client, or Hoppscotch, it’s never been easier to migrate to Postman. Simply export your data, come over to Postman and hit import, then begin your migration! Postman will automatically convert your other API client files into collections and requests for you! Excited? So are we! Learn more Sponsored

I published an article last week talking about how I built automatic click-tracking and community spotlights for this newsletter. I built a redirect service taking inspiration from Elias Brange and Jimmy Dahlqvist and adapted it to automatically update links in the newsletter so I can easily figure out which content you like the best. It’s a pretty fun walkthrough, I really enjoyed building it.

Did you know your CI/CD pipeline can be serverless? I had a suspicion but had no idea the extent you could build it out. Johannes Koch had Matt Martz on his show to talk about Matt’s fully serverless CI/CD pipeline and how he uses GenAI as part of the process. This is an exceptionally cool video showing you the possibilities you have at your fingertips when it comes to your deployments.

Spotlight

I have my eggs in a handful of baskets, one of them being event-driven architectures (EDA). In modern cloud development, it’s hard to escape events, choreography, and loose coupling between services. Something I hadn’t thought of before was approaching EDA with event-first design. Similar to API-first design, event-first approaches it from a slightly different angle. James Eastham released a new video talking all about it, how to approach it, and the different ways to carry data from publisher to subscriber 🔥

Tip of the Week

We’re always so hyper-focused on tech that we often forget the real challenges of building software: people. Lee Gilmore gives us a good reminder of that last week.

People and Processes are the tough challenges in my experience with change, Technology is easy.
— Serverless Advocate 🥑 (@LeeJamesGilmore) February 23, 2024

New Releases

Lambda now supports .NET 8 in all regions except China and GovCloud. This update has already been rolled out to CDK, SAM, the CLI, and Lambda Powertools for .NET!

Reminder if you’re looking for all AWS releases and not just the cool serverless ones, you can visit aws-news for a one-stop shop.

Last Words

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been 100 issues! This newsletter has come a long way since the first one went out on April 4, 2022. Lots of automations, community member highlights, and powerful lessons have been shared over the past two years. I’m proud to bring this to you all week after week as part of your content consumption. Thank you for making this newsletter what it is today, you all are amazing 💙

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