Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Ben Ellerby, founder of Aleios and AWS Serverless Hero. Ben is a fantastic speaker and brilliant mind in the world of serverless. If you ever get a chance to meet up with Ben, take it - he’s awesome! Don’t miss him at EDA Day London in May. Thanks for everything, Ben!

Tutorials

Many of us know what WebSockets are, but not as many of us know how to implement them or even what options are available if you want to build with them. Yan Cui published an article last week on four ways you can implement WebSockets using serverless. He goes over the details of API Gateway, AppSync, IoT Core, and Momento Topics and shows you from a builder’s perspective what to expect from each one. For additional reading, I wrote something back in October that describes the differences between real-time notification protocols to help you decide which one you should be using from a technical requirements perspective.

Interesting Reads

Ran Isenberg published an article last week about embracing a FinOps mindset. This is an interesting article, particularly around the strategies your organization should adopt to prevent runaway costs as you scale. There’s a balance between what Ran is talking about in his article and moving fast. I’m sure we all remember the Prime video story from last year where they moved quickly to get to market then changed everything after they got some real-world data. As with all things, it depends.

I was on Johannes Koch’s show last week where I spoke about the CI/CD pipeline of Ready, Set, Cloud and how I’ve built in tons of automations over the years to enable me to scale content creation. I go into detail about how serverless has allowed me to essentially create an AI marketing team that does literally all the work for me, including cross-posting my content, doing text-to-speech for blogs, and even writing and publishing Twitter messages for weeks after I launch a new post.

Have you ever wanted to start a SaaS offering from one of your side projects? Of course you have, we all have! Last week on the Believe in Serverless live stream, Anubhav Sharma and Ujwal Bukka told us exactly how to do it. They go over things like tenant isolation, identifying costs, and how to implement advanced security tactics to keep your SaaS apps scalable and safe. They even provide a workshop so you can get hands-on.

Spotlight

This week’s spotlight isn’t serverless related at all. In fact, it has nothing to do with tech. Sheen Brisals wrote an article on the ethics of social media connections and followers and I have to say, this was probably the most important thing I’ve read in a while. In an age where social media presence seems to dominate everything we do, it’s easy to get absorbed in it and be influenced by follower counts and what we consider “social media etiquette.” Sheen’s post is a reminder to pull back a bit and think about how you’re acting, what you’re seeing, and noticing the behaviors we may subconsciously be doing. Thank you for this, Sheen!

Tip of the Week

When you hear something enough times, you start taking it seriously and in some instances start following it blindly. Time and time again we hear that developers should approach coding from a DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) standpoint and generalize and abstract as much as you can so you don’t have to type it again. I like Tomasz Lakomy’s perspective from last week on the matter.

Getting rid of "DRY at all costs" mindset is one of the most liberating feelings a developer can have

— Tomasz Łakomy (@tlakomy) April 5, 2024

New Releases

AWS launched AWS Deadline Cloud, which, believe it or not, is a render farm service intended for rendering high-quality videos.

AppSync increased the default service limit of the request token rate from 2,000 to 5,000 and introduced three new quotas - rate of inbound messages per API per second, rate of outbound messages per API per second, and rate of connection requests per API per second.

Bedrock announced support for Mistral large. This LLM has a 32K token context window, is fluent in 5 languages, and is useful for tasks that require substantial reasoning capabilities.

Lambda now supports Ruby 3.3 as an official runtime.

Last Words

Are you looking for an opportunity to talk, stream, or write a blog post but don’t know how to get started? Let me know! I’m here to help and get you on whatever stage you’re looking for. Just shoot me a DM or an email!

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