Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Jimmy Dahlqvist, Head of AWS at Sigma Technology Cloud. He is an AWS Ambassador, AWS Community Builder and AWS User Group leader. He’s consolidated all that he has learned for over a decade in the serverless handbook. Jimmy is an active community member, constantly sharing and helping other people. Thank you Jimmy, for everything you do for the community!

Tutorials

If you follow David Behroozi you know that he’s been taking a deep dive into Amazon CloudFront. This week he shows us how to use CloudFront as a Lightweight Proxy. I love having the ability to do direct integrations, and being able to do these at the edge is incredible. I’m very interested in what people do with this.

Many applications need streaming capabilities to be able to process a lot of data in real time. Daniele Frasca shows us two ways you can integrate with Apache Kafka and how to integrate to it with Amazon EventBridge.

Security and observability are things I definitely struggle with. This is why I appreciate even more posts like this one by Arun Chandapillai and Parag Nagwekar where they show us how to enable fine-grained access control and observability for API operations in Amazon DynamoDB.

Interesting Content

I love seeing the different ways people setup and secure their environments. Keeping your AWS accounts protected while being able to easily access them is very important to keep developer productivity up while maintaining security. In this post Julian Michel shows us his personal account setup and how he access them.

Domain modeling is a complicated concept that is not immediately intuitive to everybody. In Benjamen Pyle’s new post he gives us a new way to think about domain modeling and bounded contexts by comparing it to a neighborhood. It’s a very clever and simple way to understand bounded contexts better.

Ran Isenberg joined the #BelieveInServerless community to give a talk about Mastering Serverless: Platform Engineering Blueprints for Success. Ran explains the power of a good blueprint to optimize your teams project deliveries and how it simplifies ongoing development by having all the best practices included in projects from day 1. The great thing is he’s opensourced this blueprint for all of us to use with his AWS Lambda Handler Cookbook. I’m still amazed at all the things that are included in this template, you should take a look.

Spotlight

It’s always impressive to see how a service changes over time based on trends and feedback. This is what I’ve seen with Amplify and how it’s changed to become what it is today with the recent release of it’s Gen 2. In his latest post, Michael Liendo talks about his journey with AWS Amplify and how he’s helped shape the outcome by getting in the shoes of the developers using these tools everyday and helping improve their experience.

Tip of the Week

Monitoring your applications is very important to make sure it’s operating as expected and you can proactively detect issues immediately when they happen. One thing that is often overlooked is how much things can scale when working with serverless infrastructures which ends up surprising many people with a big bill. Darryl Ruggles brought this issue up last week and linked an incredible article to show us how to monitor Lambda concurrency and scale capacity.

Building an architecture involving serverless functions has a number of advantages including having no long running resources to manage and being able to scale up and down based on need.

With AWS Lambda this scaling up and down involves dealing with the concurrency limits on…

— Darryl Ruggles (@RDarrylR) May 26, 2024

New Releases

The Amazon OpenSearch Service zero-ETL integration with Amazon s3 is now generally available. As an OpenSearch user, having the ability to reduce the amount of data movement to get this working is a time and money saver.

Amazon EventBridge adds improved filtering capabilities for event matching. I’ve definitely gotten into situations where I simply can’t find a good way to filter an event with the current capabilities. I’m glad to see they are slowly adding more capabilities to allow for more complex filtering scenarios.

I can’t be the only one that has been stuck deleting stacks because you did not empty an S3 Bucket. With this new release from the CloudFormation team you can now force the delete of these stacks when they are in the failed state.

Another great release by the CloudFormation team this week, there is now an integration with CloudTrail to make it easier to find any issues when provisioning your stack by providing a deep-link into AWS CloudTrail.

Last Words

I definitely had major FOMO this week with great events like ServerlessDays ANZ, ServerlessDays Belfast, AWS Summit Los Angeles and more. I did have a chance to attend the MOAR Serverless!! virtual conference this week that had amazing content. There are so much more events scheduled all around the world, so make sure to check and there might be one close to you. I hope you’ve enjoyed having me as your guest writer, it’s definitely been fun digging through all the amazing content published this week.

If you’d like to make a recommendation for the serverless superhero or for an article you found especially useful, send a message to Allen on Twitter, LinkedIn, or email.

Happy coding!

Andres