Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Andrea Amorosi, senior SA at AWS and the lead maintainer for Lambda Powertools for TypeScript. Andrea is a huge part of why it’s so easy to build on Lambda and he keeps making it better and better. Thank you for everything you do, Andrea!

Tutorials

The rise in popularity of “Lambdaliths” has opened up a new world of possibilities for app flexibility. Zied Ben Tahar wrote an article last week showing us how to variably deploy a web API to either Lambda or Fargate based on a parameter. Zied walks through the CDK implementation and explains how the Lambda Web Adapter makes it all possible. Very fascinating read!

I really liked an article by Brett Andrews last week on creating CloudWatch dashboards and alarms with CDK. The concept isn’t new, but I love Brett’s take on everything. He differentiates between short and long alarms, builds CDK constructs that wrap all the details, and shows us which metrics to track in what kind of widgets for services like Lambda, DynamoDB, Cognito, and Amplify.

Interesting Reads

James Eastham did a livestream with JetBrains last week talking about improving developer experience with Rust. It’s a really good talk where James walks through the serverless compute landscape, does a bit of Rust coding, and of course, talks about DX. He also goes over the reference site, Serverless Rust, which is the definitive place to get your production-ready Rust knowledge.

I published another non-technical article last week aimed at content creators. Whether you’re brand new at blog writing or have years of experience sharing your knowledge, my blog is a reminder to show your personality. Taking yourself out of what you’re creating might sound like a good idea, but it’s one of the worst things you can do as a content creator. Be uniquely you, share personal stories, and grow yourself and your content.

Tycko Franklin alongside AWS published a blog post last week describing a cool case study with PNNL on how they do disaster response and risk management. It doesn’t go too much into the build itself but gives a great description of their use case and offers a cool architecture diagram of a fully serverless system gathering data from satellites and pushing it into a geoserver. Serverless is in space, guys!

We talk a lot about serverless cost optimization but often repeat the same story over and over. I really liked the talk by Rakesh Sanghvi and Sam Lock last week where they talked about practical ways to save money with serverless extending way beyond “use Lambda Power Tuning”. Their insights come from years of practice and really came together well for some pragmatic advice.

Spotlight

The highlight of last week for me was watching Khawaja Shams talk about multitenancy at global scale. He gave a talk for the Believe in Serverless community pulling from his almost 20 years of experience in and around AWS. He talks about the lessons learned from massive services like S3 and DynamoDB and how these lessons were applied at Momento. This was an extremely informative session delivered in an easy-to-understand, comprehensive way. Loved it!

Tip of the Week

There’s no doubt that event-driven architectures are surging in adoption. David Boyne is at the forefront of all of it making huge, enabling updates to his open-source project EventCatalog to help make it as easy as possible for you to be successful in EDA.

Quick demo of how EventCatalog v2 is looking 👀

This will let you:
⭐️ Document events, commands, channels
⭐️ Document services and domains
⭐️ Add schemas and examples to everything
⭐️ Version everything
⭐️ Add owners and teams to anything
⭐️ And more!

All powered by markdown… pic.twitter.com/IvlEyVyl6f

— David Boyne 🚀 (@boyney123) April 18, 2024

New Releases

AWS Powertools for Typescript recently released a parser for data and event validation. You can use it to validate both custom schemas and a slew of AWS event source schemas as well!

Clause 3 Opus is available on Amazon Bedrock. Get ready for some seriously impressive GenAI capabilities.

Neon, the serverless Postgres service, is now generally available. I did a livestream with Andres Moreno last week where we put it through its paces. It did a pretty good job when used inside of Lambda, I am impressed!

Last Words

There’s lots of content coming from the Believe in Serverless community. If you haven’t joined the Discord server yet, I highly recommend checking it out! There are some fantastic conversations about production-grade serverless builds happening daily, not to mention the plethora of events and sessions every week!

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