Event driven architecture and the adoption of serverless

This week's newsletter is authored by James Eastham.

Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Rahul Nath. Rahul is a Senior Developer at Oztix in Australia and content creator who regularly publishes high quality videos on YouTube.

Rahul’s videos have a .NET focus, but his playlists on AWS Lambda, AWS Lambda Powertools and AWS DynamoDB are fantastic for all aspiring serverless developers.

Thanks for being awesome Rahul, and teaching me a lot! You’re a huge asset to the community, keep smashing it.

Tutorials

Richard Davison, creator of the LLRT runtime for Lambda, recently appeared on the Believe in Serverless live stream. Whilst I think LLRT is an awesome idea for Node based Lambdas (plus, who doesn’t love more Rust in the world) this talk only covered the internals of the runtime. Thankfully, Matteo Depascale has our backs. In this article Matteo walks through using the LLRT runtime in Lambda, alongside Terraform as the IaC tool of choice.

The Leanser package from Serkan Özal is a useful package that allows you to cleanup resources on AWS Lambda container shutdown.

Interesting Content

The legendary Gregor Hohpe released a new article on the AWS DevOps blog on Refactoring to Serverless: From Application to Automation. It’s a great read, and something I’ve thought about a lot in recent times. To take a quote from the article; “With the AWS CDK, you can use the same programming languages for both application and automation code, allowing you to switch easily between the two.”. In serverless applications, infrastructure code is application code. Using the same language for both just makes sense.

AWS released their quarterly in case you missed it (ICYMI) post on the AWS Compute Blog. This covers all the recent announcements in the world of serverless.

Spotlight

The videos from GoTo EDA Day 2024 in London have started to hit the GoTo YouTube channel. I was lucky enough to attend in person, and wanted to share a couple of my favorite talks. The legendary duo of Sheen Brisals and Sarah Hamilton talked about Operating an EDA with Quality in Mind. This is a great talk about some of the operational parts of building event driven systems, something that isn’t talked about enough. David Boyne gave the opening keynote, discussing how [complexity is the gotcha’ of event-driven architecture]. I’d recommend keeping your eye on the full YouTube playlist for the rest of the talks arriving.

Tip of the Week

This tweet (and corresponding post) from Yan Cui really resonated with me. Particularly “There is often the sense that going serverless means going microservices and event-driven architectures, too. That’s NOT TRUE! They are related but ultimately separate design choices.”. So often articles compare serverless vs microservices vs event-driven architectures when actually these are all separate decision (how you run it, how you structure your teams, how you systems integrate).

Yan goes on to cover best practices for teams looking to adopt serverless.

"I'm sorry, but the way you adopt serverless is wrong"

In this new post, I talked about one of the biggest mistakes teams make when they migrate to serverless and offered some thoughts on how to mitigate it.

Hope you like it!https://t.co/y8BdMs1pdL #aws #serverless
— Yan Cui (@theburningmonk) July 3, 2024

New Releases

Last Words

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!

James