Serverless Superhero

We have a special superhero for you this week. Today we are highlighting the OG serverless superhero Jeremy Daly. Jeremy is the GM of Serverless Cloud at Serverless Inc., AWS serverless hero and community builder, host of the podcast Serverless Chats, and author of the Off By None newsletter. Without Jeremy, serverless would be nowhere near what it is today. He has helped develop the community and tech around it, not to mention providing incredible thought leadership. He’s also the guy who is making the phrase infrastructure FROM code a legit thing.

If you haven’t checked out his podcast or newsletter, I highly recommend them. They both set the industry standard for quality and content in their respective categories.

Thank you, Jeremy, for making serverless what it is. We all appreciate you.

Tutorials

Starting us off with a bang is Jaymit Bhoraniya, with a top notch writeup on serverless security. He talks about using AWS WAF to prevent malicious attacks in your serverless application. You can never be too cautious when it comes to your security posture, and Jaymit helps us out by showing exactly where WAF fits into your architecture and how to configure it.

Another big priority with serverless development (or cloud, in general) is cost. Gert Leenders puts a spotlight on a typically under-the-radar service that eats costs: CloudWatch. In his post, he shows us how to understand, visualize, and lower CloudWatch costs quickly and easily. He takes a novel approach at tackling the problem that seems genuinely effective.

A common misconception is that if you build a serverless application, it will scale to infinity. That unfortunately is not true. This week I (Allen Helton) published an article on architecting serverless apps to scale the perfect amount. It talks about the different strategies you can take based on the expected level of scale your application will achieve.

Getting started with serverless is well-known to be easy. But Ran Isenberg just made it even easier. In his post, he claims you can have a serverless service up in the cloud in just two clicks using his GitHub template. He explains every piece in detail and shows you how you can extend what he’s done for your project.

Have you ever built an API but when you go to test it you mistype the path and get a generic error message saying the “authorization token is missing”? To some, you might know this as the generic AWS route not found error. To others, it sets you up for an hour of debugging. Wojciech Matuszewski has decided to take matters into his own hands and show us how to provide a meaningful error message when this happens. He gives you a couple options and the pros and cons of each.

Spotlight

There is so much to learn with serverless. It is much more than controlling your infrastructure with IaC and rapidly scaling. As your app grows, so does the range of production-readiness concerns. Marek Kuczynski gave a presentation at The Netherlands AWS User Group last week about the learnings and best practices around serverless at Stedi. He talks about multi-region redundancy, managing an AWS account hierarchy, and other incredibly valuable operational procedures they do over at Stedi.

Last Words

There are many blogs, videos, tutorials, and stories posted every week about serverless. This newsletter strives to bring you the best of the best. Thank you all for bringing high-quality content to the community. You don’t have to do it, but you choose to. And for that, I thank you.

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