Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Karl Robinson, CEO of Logicata and AWS Community Builder. Karl hosts the LogiCast AWS News Podcast and runs the AWS Brighton user group. Needless to say, Karl has deep roots in the community and works tirelessly to help others learn and keep their skills sharp. Thank you Karl, for everything you do for the community!

Tutorials

There’s no argument that event-driven architectures are rapidly increasing in adoption and the content we’re seeing week over week reflects that (in a good way). James Eastham shared a video that has been a long-lasting question of mine: how do you build request/response integrations in an asynchronous world? Things like data enrichment or centralized validation often wrinkle the ease of asynchronous programming. But does it have to? James explains in his video that HTTP requests are not your only option. It’s a great watch with tons of valuable information.

Have you ever built a multi-tenant SaaS application and become flustered at the complexity of managing tenant-specific resources? Yeah, me too. Luckily, Jason Wadsworth shared an article about a new way he’s started implementing to step toward better tenant provisioning. I like his new approach, and it reminds me of what Post NL does with their tenancy model.

I wrapped up a serverless trivia game I’ve been working on last week. In my live coding session, I show you how to use Neon, Momento, and Next.js to build a fullstack serverless application without using AWS. This was a fun little stream where viewers could interact live with the trivia game as I was building it to answer questions about the cloud.

Interesting Reads

Over the weekend, Luc van Donkersgoed published an instantly viral blog titled “Dear AWS, please let me be a cloud engineer again”. This statement piece shares Luc’s opinion on the extreme focus AWS has put on generative AI. He pulls all the punches, bearing exactly what is on his mind on the topic, offering his take on the influx of generative AI features and services compared to serverless features. Whether or not you agree with everything Luc says, this is an important blog post because it gets us talking. The community has been murmuring for a while now, and this piece seems to have made the community voice much louder on the matter - which ultimately will lead to change. What kind of change? No idea. But something’s gonna happen.

Introducing business logic into a generative AI workflow has proven to be less trivial than one would have hoped. But according to Ran Isenberg that’s what agents are for. Ran wrote an article showing us how to create an Amazon Bedrock agent to call your Lambda functions and run business logic as a result of natural language conversation. He goes through building an agent with Lambda Powertools for Python and offers his opinions on the ease of use. It looks pretty easy to get something up and running! To me, this feels a lot like building an Alexa skill - identifying intents and routing them to specific behaviors with bespoke request/response schemas.

Not serverless, but something we do on a daily basis - Kevin Swiber gave a talk for the Believe in Serverless community on Building REST APIs developers love. Kevin shares what to consider when thinking about API governance, how to scale consumption of your APIs, and tips on how to make your API successful in the community. This goes far beyond “structure your paths like this” and is much more of a meta approach to designing APIs for public consumption.

Spotlight

There’s been a lot of “{insert thing here} is dead” posts lately. Honestly, that’s always true, but it feels more noticeable lately. Last week, Shawn Wang posted an article stating that DevRel is dead. DevRel, or developer relations, or developer advocacy, is a practice we’ve been seeing more and more of over the past couple of years. As the world becomes more dependent on software, more software companies emerge, as do developer advocates to inform the masses that their software exists. While I don’t disagree with many of the arguments Shawn makes in his post, I don’t feel like it’s fully on the mark. I loved reading it and certainly had some existential thoughts as I worked my way through it. But I’d be curious to hear your opinions on the matter.

Tip of the Week

One of the things I say a lot about serverless services is that if something can simply “do it for me” I’m all for it. This thought on Twitter from Mitch_jz caught my attention last week because it extends past what I normally associate with serverless. It seems like he’s looking for managed UI components that wrap serverless service capabilities. It’s an interesting thought and makes me wonder if the demand is evolving.

Im looking for a serverless contact form solution.

I want to:
📨Receive the form by mail,
👮‍♂️Have basic security (body validation, rate limiting),
🔎Not expose critical info client side,
🦥Not go trough the hassle of coding and hosting a backend service.

Any solutions?

— Mitch_jz (@Mitch_jz) July 12, 2024

New Releases

Reminder, for an easy, customizable feed of AWS updates, check out aws-news by Luc van Donkersgoed.

AWS announced App Studio last week, claiming this GenAI service can create enterprise-grade applications with natural language. I have mixed feelings about this release - mainly around the practicality of it long term. I’m curious to hear what you all think about it. To me, it feels like PartyRock has grown up.

Secrets Manager just open-sourced the Secrets Manager agent. I love the initiative and the performance improvements this can open up for developers.

Amazon Q gained a huge context window upgrade last week with the addition of the workspace context. Now when you add @workspace to a message when chatting with Q, it will ingest all the code, config, and project structure of your open workspace in your IDE and use it to answer questions like “@workspace what does this repo do?” 🔥

Last Words

I owe a world of thanks to all of you for the support during my daughter’s battle with cancer. The kind words, check-ins, donations, and shared stories have helped my family and me more than you can imagine. I am so incredibly grateful for all of you and am touched by how much you care. Thank you.

I’m still accepting guest authors for this newsletter while I am on leave from work. If you want to write an issue, please reach out to me in a DM or email. Thank you to the authors who have kept this going in my absence - Andres Moreno, Ben Pyle, Michael Liendo, Matt Martz, Lee Gilmore, and James Eastham. Not only have you kept the newsletter going, but you’ve also been guinea pigs for me as I enhance my newsletter service to validate, enrich, and send newsletters from multiple authors.

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