Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is William Collins, director of tech evangelism at Alkira, Inc, AWS community builder, and host of The Cloud Gambit podcast. William does great work for the community and is a fantastic educator. He has a brilliant mind that can clearly articulate ideas in an easy way. Thank you for everything you do, William!

Tutorials

The scatter/gather pattern is a common but complex architectural pattern. Simply put - it’s a pattern that fires off a task to many workers then consolidates results and does something with them. Yan Cui wrote an article last week on the best way to implement this pattern in AWS. Of course, the answer is always “it depends”, but Yan covers two ways to effectively implement scatter/gather and talks about the tradeoffs between amount managed by AWS and cost. I love this article and the way the thought process is presented.

In a rare and exciting stream, Khawaja Shams broke out his old programmer’s hat and did a live coding session to benchmark Momento Topics latency across AWS regions. He demonstrates how to use the Momento SDK to publish and subscribe to a topic in EC2 and highlights how fast the service actually is (spoiler alert - it was averaging around 35ms). If you haven’t given this outstanding service a try yet or are wondering if it fits your use case, give this video a watch.

AWS released a video last week on disaster recovery patterns for serverless applications. The video shows you how to include backups in your system and how to restore them (the hard part) in a production scenario. To me, this tutorial connects the dots of some missing pieces in a complete disaster recovery plan.

Interesting Content

We all know everything fails all the time. But do we do anything about it? Usually no, because it’s tricky or time-consuming. If that’s your mentality, you should give Marcin Sodkiewicz’s video from last week a watch. In it, he talks about failure-aware event processing in AWS with lessons he’s learned from his time as a principal engineer at RyanAir. He talks about idempotency, ordering, retrying, testing, and of course, observability. Great talk!

There are few people I trust more than Lee Gilmore when it comes to anything in the cloud. His content is always well-researched, presented in an easy-to-understand manner, and above all else, thorough. Last week he published 15 quick tips for AWS CDK engineers which serve as a reminder for things to look out for when using the CDK. These really are quick little tips and are so easy to implement in your code base. If you aren’t doing what Lee suggests in here, it might be time to consider an update to your processes!

Spotlight

Cloudflare has been making some big moves and has been gaining lots of momentum recently. Last week, they published a blog updating us on the backbone behind their connectivity cloud. I saw this post and was excited to see how the magic of their seemingly instant-across-the-globe availability works. Surprisingly, that’s actually what the post was about. The authors go into exactly how Cloudflare is improving their network speeds to be faster than the public internet and describes the measures they’re taking for redundancy and fault tolerance. This is a fascinating, highly technical article that’s sure to get your week off to a motivating start.

Tip of the Week

Eric Johnson shared a cool tip about scaling Fargate to zero in event-driven architectures last week. It’s a cool tip, but I also found some insightful conversation between Eric and Sheen Brisals in the comments. It’s great to see the convergence of serverless and containers into one “event-driven” ecosystem.

Ok, to expand on EDC -> Event driven containers. Did you know that you can deploy a task to Fargate with 0 capacity. Then invoke the task from #StepFunctions as a RunTask, #EventBridge as a target, or from #Lambda using the SDK.

The task will spin up, do the work, the shut down…

— Eric Johnson (@edjgeek) August 9, 2024

New Releases

It was a light week for serverless releases. But one was pretty exciting 👇

Titan Image Generator v2 was released for Amazon Bedrock last week, bringing with it image conditioning, image guidance with color palette, background removal, and subject consistency. The blog post looks very interesting and I might have to try this one myself.

Last Words

Are you working on something cool and want to share it with the community? Let me know! We can get you in front of the Believe in Serverless community to share in any format you’d like, just send me a message.

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