Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Ben Moses, principal solutions architect at AWS. Ben gives talks all around the world on serverless and is an active member of the Believe in Serverless community. He is a wealth of knowledge on all things modern, and if you ever get a chance to meet him - take it! Thanks for everything, Ben!

Tutorials

The circuit breaker is a common pattern in distributed systems. Serverless architectures make that a little difficult because it requires some managed state and serverless, well… is stateless. However, Marcin Sodkiewicz showed us all the ways you can implement it, plus shows us his new and improved way. Marcin explains everything beautifully and even has some animated graphics in there to help drive the concepts home.

I saw a funny project last week from Sam Lock. Apparently, he was able to make an API with a backing “database” with API Gateway and CloudFormation. You read that right, the backing for the API endpoints was CloudFormation. Not Lambda, DynamoDB, or Step Functions. CloudFormation. He says it himself in the post - this is not a recommendation for production, but it does get you thinking a little bit differently. I love the creativity here.

Interesting Reads

Ben Pyle was on the AWS Twitch channel last week talking about Rust Lambda functions. Ben has been putting out great Rust content lately and he sums it up so well in this stream. In addition to Ben laying down some fantastic Rust knowledge, the comments on that stream are also really engaging and useful.

I did a livestream with Andres Moreno last week where we were giving honest first impressions of Temporal. Both Andres and I are heavy Step Functions users, so we were doing our best to relate concepts together with Temporal. It’s a bit of a different approach to workflow orchestration, but I’ll be honest - it does a lot of great things.

Spotlight

We’ve been on an event-driven architecture kick this year, for good reason. It’s a great way to scale your applications while improving fault tolerance and performance. Marcia Villalba posted a video last week going through the SAGA pattern - a workflow pattern for handling large, multi-step transactions across microservices. She goes over how you can build this pattern with Step Functions, explains all the components, and provides a working code sample to get started.

Tip of the Week

You might have seen an article explode last week talking about how unauthorized access to an S3 bucket was racking up charges on somebody’s AWS account. Jeff Barr came to the rescue with a statement that should settle us down while we wait for an official report.

Thank you to everyone who brought this article to our attention. We agree that customers should not have to pay for unauthorized requests that they did not initiate. We’ll have more to share on exactly how we’ll help prevent these charges shortly.#AWS #S3

How an empty S3…

— Jeff Barr ☁️ (@jeffbarr) April 30, 2024

New Releases

You can now configure max throughput on DynamoDB on-demand tables. This will help prevent you from getting runaway costs if a table scales up way too much way too fast.

Amazon Q went generally available last week, boasting both developer and business flavors. I’m curious to see how adoption is of these services. I’ve been using it lately and have been really liking it.

Amazon Transcribe can now summarize calls for you. Using GenAI, it can quickly give you bullet points from that hour-long meeting that should have been an email.

EventBridge Pipes can now deliver events through AWS PrivateLink.

Last Words

Would you like to give a talk to the serverless community? Let me know and we can get you scheduled to do a session for the Believe in Serverless community! Any topic, any time, any format (within reason 😊)

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