Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Rakesh Sanghvi, director of enterprise architecture at Curantis Solutions. Rakesh is an active member of the Believe in Serverless community and an all-around wizard at serverless cost optimization. Don’t miss his session tomorrow at 2pm CDT / 19:00 UTC on saving money with serverless, check out the Believe in Serverless site for more details! Thank you for everything you do, Rakesh!

Tutorials

I published an article last week that took me way longer than it should have. It’s about creating 30-second timers in AWS. Cron jobs and the EventBridge scheduler only go down to 1-minute intervals, but if you need something more frequent than that, you’re on your own to find a solution. I cover what I considered in my approach and what I ended up going with for a cost-effective solution.

You know what developers hate to build as much as unit tests? Reports. Even though we don’t like them, they’re still a very important part of any production-ready software. Ben Pyle wrote a great article on this topic, specifically about reporting with serverless. He describes three fundamental patterns with pros and cons of each. These are incredibly useful if you’re looking for a pattern you can plug into your existing application.

Interesting Reads

The LLRT runtime made waves for a few weeks then the hype died down a little bit. To bring some of the excitement back, Efi Merdler Kravitz wrote a post describing how he built a Lambda extension on LLRT to register analytics without slowing down performance. This is a fascinating article, covering everything from how extensions work to comparing latency with Rust.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a new feature making it easier to connect API Gateway and Amazon Verified Permissions (AVP). Honestly, I didn’t know what AVP was, so I chose to skip over learning too much about it. Jimmy Dahlqvist has changed my mind though. He wrote a walkthrough of how to set up AVP with API Gateway and Cognito and showed me that there’s a managed way to do something I’ve been doing by hand for years. This is a great visual tool to see what you can do with it and how easy AWS has made building safe permissions in your APIs.

As much as I like to pretend I don’t like the CDK, it’s actually pretty cool. Lee Gilmore wrote an article last week teaching us about CDK Aspects and why they are powerful, and I must say that I’m impressed. Lee tells us what an Aspect is and shows us exactly how to build one with a meaningful example. This has some huge benefits in enterprise development, we should all be using these!

Episode #6 of the Ready, Set, Cloud podcast was released last week. In this episode, I chat with Raphael Manke about the value of in-person meetups. The world has gone virtual and that’s not always a good thing. We talk about the differences between in-person and virtual meetups, some of the many successes we’ve had from it, share a few of our favorite stories, and much more.

Spotlight

Marcia Villalba makes incredible content. Last week, she published a video describing the automation she built to dub video with AWS Step Functions and AI. The video itself doesn’t go into the code, those videos are separate in an attached playlist. But rather this video describes in detail the architecture and trade-offs made behind something so complex. It’s an incredibly interesting video and I learned so much from it. Not only is this a very cool project, but it also demonstrates several core patterns in serverless architectures. Amazing work, Marcia!

Tip of the Week

I posted a brain teaser on Twitter last week to test your knowledge of Amazon EventBridge. I got some varying results and lots of interesting discussion. If you’re curious about the answer, check the retweets - I shared it a couple of days later.

Here's a brainteaser for you. How many messages are billed in EventBridge in this scenario? pic.twitter.com/BZPyo2R9z3

— Allen Helton (@AllenHeltonDev) April 10, 2024

New Releases

Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock now support Claude 3 Haiku. This means you can connect Claude 3 easily to your company data sources for RAG pipelines. I’ve been liking Claude more and more, it seems to reason better than many of the other available LLMs.

AppSync now forwards application request headers to custom authorizer functions. Honestly, I’m surprised it didn’t do this before - but better late than never!

A big announcement for Lambda function urls - CloudFront now supports Origin Access Control (OAC) for them! OAC can be used to authenticate access to function urls to make sure access comes through designated CloudFront distributions. Big win!

Step Functions announced an optimized integration for MediaConvert. This allows you to do video transcoding jobs directly in your workflows. As someone who has used MediaConvert in production before, anything to simplify this task is a huge boost to productivity!

Last Words

I’ve started live streaming! If you’re interested in seeing me learn some new things and throw down some code, tune in on Fridays at 1pm CDT / 18:00 UTC on Twitch. I’m definitely still learning about the streaming process, but there’s nothing like learning in public!

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