Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Ashley Peacock, staff engineer, software architect, and book author x2! Ashley is a Cloudflare superfan, with his newest book being all about building serverless apps on Cloudflare. He is an active member of the serverless community, with expertise both in Cloudflare and AWS. Thank you Ashley for everything you do for the community!

Tutorials

Andres Moreno is doing some fantastic work with Amazon Cognito. In his ongoing blog series, Andres breaks down the different types of authentication methods you can use with Cognito, explaining the bits and pieces along the way. Last week, he published an article describing how to use Amazon Cognito with the user-password flow. He explains how the flow works, shows you how to set it up in SAM, and even goes so far as to show you how to use the auth flow in automations.

I am particularly interested in Zied Ben Tahar’s blog post from last week. He wrote about creating a RAG pipeline to learn about media content. His project takes a YouTube video and passes it through a serverless pipeline to transcribe it, create vectors, and update a knowledge base. He then uses RAG with Amazon Bedrock to summarize or ask questions about the video. It’s a brilliant design with dozens of pragmatic use cases. LOVE IT 💙💙

Interesting Reads

The Believe in Serverless podcast is back with episode 2, hosted by Andres Moreno and me. We talk about what the community talked about the prior week, including serverless disaster recovery, cold starts, and function versioning and aliases. We also discuss the livestreams from the prior week, covering the use of GenAI in the healthcare industry, the benefits of gRPC at scale compared to WebSockets, and some differences between Digital Ocean functions compared to Lambda. This podcast is meant to not only be a summary of the community ramblings but also an opportunity to speak more in-depth about modern cloud computing topics in general.

Luca Mezzalira and Raj Saha did a video together last week about how to think like an architect by building mental models. This is a great discussion between two brilliant minds on how to design systems. It goes top to bottom, from selecting managed services to understanding functional and non-functional requirements. This is a must watch for all solutions architects!

I see articles about how great AWS AppSync is all the time. I’ve used it a couple of times on personal projects and I have to admit - it does make building GraphQL APIs pretty easy. But something we don’t talk about very often is unit testing AppSync resolvers. Is it even possible? Thanks to Seth Orell we can see that it is, in fact, possible, just not intuitive. In his post from last week, Seth shows us exactly how to test AppSync JavaScript resolvers and how to get around some of the tricky bits of the service.

Spotlight

Do you think your company is too big or too far into the weeds of its current infrastructure to make a change to serverless? While it might seem that way to some, shifting your organization to a serverless mindset isn’t impossible. Lee Gilmore published a blog post (that could have been a book in my opinion) last week about his role in embracing serverless in a 1951 founded enterprise. There’s so much in this article and it’s extremely well written, I can’t even begin to summarize the content. But you need to set aside some time to read this blog because it shows you that there is hope if you think your company is stuck in its old ways.

Tip of the Week

It might seem counterintuitive, but the difference between a good software engineer and a great software engineer isn’t about technical skill. It’s much more about mindset and mental models. The Serverless Edge shared a great quote on this subject last week.

"What makes a great programmer is not just about technical skill or experience, it's about a mindset, a way of approaching problems, and a commitment to excellence. It's about finding that delicate balance between the need for speed and the need for quality, and it's about… pic.twitter.com/N3xckTQYGD

— The Serverless Edge (@ServerlessEdge) August 1, 2024

New Releases

Some capabilities from Amazon Pinpoint have been split into their own service now called AWS End User Messaging. The goal of this service is to simplify how you manage end user communications. I love the idea and am excited to try it out.

Amazon Bedrock just earned the elusive FedRAMP High authorization. This should clear most compliance bars for those of you waiting to start implementing generative AI into your solutions.

An “un-release”, if you will, came last week for several AWS services. S3 Select, CloudSearch, Cloud9, SimpleDB, Forecast, Data Pipeline, and CodeCommit are no longer taking on new customers. If you already use these services, your service will not be interrupted. This is an interesting action for AWS to take, which typically never deprecates services. I will be interested to see how this plays out over time and if other services will be deprecated if the backlash over these is manageable.

Last Words

I’m back to writing the newsletter every week. I couldn’t be more grateful to everyone who offered help and to each and every one of you - I owe you one. School is starting back up for my 6 year old and I’m about to get back to work. We’re still in the thick of it for my 4 year old and her cancer treatment, but as I said in my July update, the world doesn’t stop. It’s time to get back to a new routine and balance life with the reality that my family has cancer in our lives now.

Community work and content creation has given me solace amidst the curveballs life has thrown at me lately. Helping others learn and grow is a passion of mine, and I find lots of comfort in it. So check out the Believe in Serverless community and the Believe in Serverless YouTube channel for some wonderful talks and podcasts from real-world practitioners sharing lessons they’ve learned from production. It’s a great community full of selfless, genuine people.

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