Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is David Behroozi. He is the creator of Speedrun, a tool that allows you to get the full power of AWS from your GitHub markdown documentation. David worked for AWS for almost 10 year working for the Amplify and Cognito teams. David helps answer a lot of questions that are brought up by the community and is also taking deep dives and providing clever solutions using serverless technologies. Thank you David, for being a big contributor for the community.

Tutorials

Seeding data is not always as straightforward as we think, this becomes necessary when you have a lot of automation and use ephemeral environments for your serverless applications. Lee James Gilmore published an article called Auto-populate DynamoDB Table with Data, where he shows us how to do this using TypeScript and the AWS CDK. I love how straightforward he makes this look and the thorough example he provides.

Jimmy Dahlqvist has a very popular presentation about his serverless solution to a perfect BBQ. He is now starting a series titled Building a serverless connected BBQ as SaaS where he is going to be showing us how everything is built. In this first part he introduces us into the hardware pieces.

AWS released the Converse API for Bedrock this week. Dennis Traub posted the first part of his series where he’s going to be showing us how to use these APIs for text based models.

Interesting Reads

Sending messages to a Dead Letter Queue when errors happen is a common practice in serverless applications. Many AWS services have DLQ integrations built in, Step Functions do not have this functionality out of the box. In his latest post, Pubudu Jayawardana gives us two options for how to integrate DLQ’s into your Step Function workflows.

Last week the CloudFormation team released a feature to force delete stacks. Using this functionality causes orphaned resources to stay in your account. I personally do not like to have lingering resources all over the place and like to keep my accounts clean. Sam Lock shows us a different way to handle the resources when you had a delete failure, in his post Preventing A Buildup of CloudFormation Orphaned Resources.

If you are part of the serverless community chances are you saw this thread by Chris Munns. Like with any organizational changes people start to freak out and it’s no different for all the ones happening in AWS right now. Benjamen Pyle shares his opinion in his post Does Serverless Still Matter?. Things are changing and they are changing fast, but serverless is now in a different part of the lifecycle which requires changes, but this techonology and mindset are here to stay.

Brandon Strittmatter gives us a very detailed comparison between Aurora Serverless and Neon in his post The Evolution of Serverless Postgres. A few weeks ago we did a live stream in the #BelieveInServerless community where we tried Neon and evaluated it’s “serverlessness” and it feels a lot more serverless than all the other Postgres databases I’ve seen out there. I also agree with Brandon in that the pricing structure is more transparent and makes it easier to start using it because of their free tier.

Spotlight

If you are reading this, you probably know Allen and know he is a very kind person willing to go out of his way to help people in the community. He has gotten the toughest news a parent can get, his 3 year old daughter has been diagnosed with leukemia. Allen has shared the details of all that he and his family is going through in this post.
I’m incredibly impressed and grateful for how the community has responded and shown their support to them.
I am still in disbelief that all of this is happening, it was a little bit over a month ago I was having dinner at his house and Olivia would stand next to me to “scare me”, I would jump out of my seat and shout and she would crack up laughing, just a few weeks after that her life took a whole different turn.
Allen, I know you were probably cringing reading this and taking note of all my grammatical errors and fully expect a PR with feedback for me in a bit. But right now I want you to know that you have the communities full support during all of this. The community you’ve dedicated countless hours to, the community you’ve been helping and growing throughout the years. Just know there is a lot of people praying and sending you their best so that Olivia gets better soon.
I love you man, stay strong we are here with you every step of the way.

Tip of the Week

I think most of us struggle with Amazon State Language for Step Functions, which is why I always appreciate good thorough examples on how to do things. Clare has created a very thorough guide where she shows complex workflows integrating with Bedrock.

I just published a complete guide to serverless Gen AI prompt chaining with Bedrock and Step Functions 🚀 Write prompt templates, chains, loops, if-thens, model response validations, and call other AWS services, all with the Amazon States Languagehttps://t.co/XhjvqIYQci

— Clare Liguori (@clare_liguori) May 30, 2024

New Releases

AWS AppsSync can now trigger Lambda Functions asynchronously. Why is this important? Michael Liendo explains this in more detail in this short video.

Amazon Cognito extends the token enrichment capabilities to now support complex custom attributes like arrays, maps and JSON Objects. It’s great to see that there is more investment going into making this service better now that they’ve updated their pricing structure.

AWS released the Converse API which is essentially an interface to be able to interact with different AI models with Bedrock using the same APIs. I have seen the struggle of trying to find the parameters a specific model needs, this will greatly simplify these interactions enhancing the developer experience when working with Bedrock.

The Lambda Powertools team keeps rocking it! They’ve now added support to simplify the creation of Agents for Amazon Bedrock, yet again boosting developers productivity.

We can now get better observability metrics from Amazon EventBridge Scheduler. This way you can keep track of your quotas and adjust proactively before you hit any limits.

Last Words

It’s been a tough week to process all that has been happening to our friend Allen. Please keep him and his family close to your hearts so they can get through this. Thank you for everybody that’s reached out offering to help, I really appreciate everybody’s support.

Andres