Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Richard Davison, the creator of the Low Latency Runtime for AWS Lambda. Richard is a Senior Partner Solutions Architect at AWS and is the subject of our spotlight video on LLRT below! Thank you Richard, for everything you do for the community!

Tutorials

In their insightful article, Ran Isenberg and Shani Adadi Kazaz discuss best practices for accelerating development with serverless blueprints. They emphasize the importance of standardization and scalability, integrating blueprints with CI/CD pipelines for efficient deployment, and leveraging Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like AWS CDK. The authors also highlight the benefits of unified observability for real-time insights and advocate for a modular, hexagonal architecture to maintain clean, testable code. These practices collectively ensure robust, scalable, and maintainable serverless applications.

In his video on Evolutionary Serverless: what the @#% is Clean, Hexagonal, and Onion Architecture, Lee James Gilmore provides an excellent overview of evolutionary architecture and its development. He delves into hexagonal, onion, and clean architectures, emphasizing the need for adaptable, modular, and testable designs to handle constant change. Lee showcases examples of Lambda function architectures, advocates for clean code patterns, and discusses the importance of simplicity in serverless solutions, demonstrating how to easily swap out components using modular approaches.

Interesting Reads

In the second part of “Building a Serverless Connected BBQ as SaaS,” Jimmy Dahlqvist focuses on user creation, authentication, and authorization. The article details setting up AWS Cognito User Pools with custom attributes for tenant-specific information and using DynamoDB for additional metadata storage. This approach simplifies user management and ensures scalability. The architecture integrates a Lambda function triggered post-user confirmation to update user data and trigger events. Additionally, the post introduces a React-based dashboard for user interaction and Amplify for user login/signup.

Fellow AWS Community Builder Corentin Doue highlights the Top 12 Common SQS Errors that he’s come across (and their solutions) and includes reference to his open source library of API, Event and SQS contracts which includes some useful CDK snippets.

Spotlight

In the live stream from the Believe in Serverless community, Richard Davison discusses his custom JavaScript runtime, LLRT (Low Latency Runtime), built for AWS Lambda to address the need for faster and more efficient serverless applications. He explains the limitations of existing languages in Lambda, introduces LLRT’s principles of startup time, performance, and efficiency, and demonstrates its significant speed and cost benefits over Node.js. Using Rust and QuickJS, LLRT achieves minimal cold start durations and efficient execution, making it ideal for latency-critical applications.

Tip of the Week

For this issue’s Tip of the Week, I just want to re-highlight the awesome Believe in Serverless community. They have weekly events from AWS and Serverless experts. It’s definitely worth checking out… and they have shiny new social media accounts now too!

Hello world! 💙

— Believe In Serverless (@believeinsls) June 13, 2024

New Releases

It was a pretty quiet week in the world of serverless releases, but AWS CDK version 2.146.0 was released… which made some very minor improvements. 🤷‍♂️

Last Words

It’s been almost exactly a year since I, Matt Martz, did the first guest post for Allen’s newsletter. I’m happy to be back, but wish it were under better circumstances. Allen is an awesome human being and I wish him and his family the best.

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

Happy coding!

Martz