Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Robert Slootjes, director of platform technology at ID&T and AWS Community Builder. Robert is an active member of the community, regularly engaging with community builders about all things serverless and sharing blogs on dev.to. Thank you for everything you do, Robert!

Tutorials

David Behroozi shared a clever post last week about how he uses CloudFront functions as a REST API. The article walks through a short build where he sorts JSON objects by a given property. He shows how using CF functions is much faster and cheaper than using Lambda, and speculates this might be a better way to do simple tasks in Step Functions than creating a new Lambda function. Great thought process!

Yan Cui shared an article last week on how to handle execution timeouts in AWS Step Functions. He mainly talks about several options when the entire execution run times out compared to an individual task timeout. It’s a good distinction to make that leave a lot of builders out of luck if left unaccounted for.

Interesting Reads

Two weeks ago I did a livestream walking through Neon, a new serverless Postgres service. Last week I summarized my findings and gave my first impression of the service. Overall I’m really happy with it, and am pleased to say that I believe this is actually a serverless service!

April SaaS month in the Believe in Serverless community wrapped up last week with a fantastic presentation by Jason Wadsworth about how to add paid features to your serverless apps. The session focused on tips and tricks for implementing user tiers in your application and was filled with gold. If you’re looking to take your side hustle to prime time, you absolutely need to watch this session from Jason.

I had Tobenna Nwokike on the Ready, Set, Cloud podcast to talk about the life-changing tech boom in Nigeria. We cover everything from how people are getting involved in tech, how it’s impacting the culture, to how much serverless is being used. It’s a fascinating conversation that I had an absolute joy recording.

Yan Cui had Brian LeRoux on the Real-World Serverless podcast last week talking about a lot of the “what’s next in serverless” topics. They go from Lambdaliths and single-purpose functions to building a faster AWS SDK to infrastructure from code. There’s a lot of great topics in this episode from some very, very smart folks!

Spotlight

When thinking about design patterns that sound great in theory but end up overly complex and a nightmare to manage in practice, I usually think of CQRS. It’s a pattern I’ve tried to implement myself but felt like there wasn’t a great, polished way to do it with serverless. But once again, Lee Gilmore has proved me wrong and showed us how to easily implement serverless event sourcing and CQRS. In typical Lee fashion, this post is thorough, provides a meaningful code sample, and explains the concepts extraordinarily well. I might just have to try this pattern out again after reading this.

Tip of the Week

I really liked the positioning from The Serverless Edge last week on the cost of cloud-native computing and serverless.

Many companies still claim that “the cloud is expensive” and “we can do it cheaper”.
I hope their shareholders don’t educate themselves on the actual cost of cloud-native and serverless. That would make for uncomfortable meetings......https://t.co/UO8njj9qwe

— The Serverless Edge (@ServerlessEdge) April 25, 2024

New Releases

Amazon Bedrock released Titan Image Generator and watermark detection APIs last week. The image generator was announced at re:Invent in preview and has now made it to GA.

Meta Llama 3 models have made it to Bedrock. Along with the ability to import custom models.

The NoSQL workbench utility got a revamped operation builder UI, which should hopefully make it even easier to design and build your DynamoDB tables.

Last Words

Last week was the AWS Summit London and I had some serious FOMO. Looks like there were some amazing talks and hopefully they were recorded and will be available online soon. I’ll keep you all posted as we find out.

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