Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Marko Štrukelj, senior dev at Wieni and AWS community builder. Marko is a great blogger and brilliant engineer. He recently released Lambda Live Debugger, which allows you to debug Lambda functions locally. He is also the brains behind serverless spy, which is an incredibly clever solution to intercept events in your serverless ecosystem allowing you to run unit tests in a way we’ve never been able to before. Thank you for your hard work and amazing ideas, Marko!

Tutorials

Our week starts off with a “short article” from Lee Gilmore where he uses an API test harness for Step Functions end-to-end tests. I’ve been using Step Functions for years and one of the inarguably difficult tasks with it is running complete tests through it where you control what the expected outcome is. I like Lee’s approach in this article, but I might have to have a little discussion with him on how we can improve that design.

I published an article last week sharing how I scaled the growth of the Believe in Serverless community with code. I go into the automation I built behind creating, scheduling, and promoting all the sessions the community puts on every week. The code is open source as well, so you can see exactly what makes that community tick.

Interesting Content

In part 4 of his BBQ SaaS series, Jimmy Dahlqvist shared with us a detailed post on auth. I learned a couple new acronyms in this post, and Jimmy did a great job explaining why a centralized PDP and distributed PEP (those are the new acroynms for me) are important with SaaS. As he always does, he includes a working code repository to go along with the article so you can try it yourself.

I was very interested in the post from Brett Andrews last week talking about ditching API Gateway + Lambda for CloudFront + function url. I’ll tell you this much - Brett did his homework on this one. He explains why he’s moving away from API Gateway, but also explains what you lose and gain from doing the switch. Not only that, he also goes into performance and cost differences between the two options. He makes a great case for CloudFront and function urls, I’m starting to wonder if I should switch over myself.

Daniele Frasca published an article last week about the event bus mesh pattern. It’s a wonderful article that has references to pretty much everything you need to get serious with event-driven architectures. While “event bus mesh” might sound like a funny made up thing, it’s actually a great way to scale systems as they grow. Daniele did a great job explaining everything meaningfully and providing images that help drastically with understanding the concepts.

Spotlight

My favorite content from last week was a live coding session that Andres Moreno and I did for the Believe in Serverless community. We built an RSS feed that shares relevant links from the BIS discord server. It uses AWS AppRunner to host a Discord bot that watches the ongoing conversations. Whenever somebody shares a link, the bot will load metadata about the shared link, pass it to Amazon Bedrock to see if the link is relevant to the community, and if it is, update an RSS feed with the information. It was a really cool project with a super practical outcome. Here’s the link to the RSS feed if you want to see.

Tip of the Week

I absolutely love this new feature from CloudFormation that comments on pull requests in GitHub and gives you the change set of the incoming diff. For repos that automatically sync on pushes to the main branch, this is an invaluable tool to have that will save tons of heartache.

Let's take the new comment on Pull Request feature from AWS CloudFormation for a ride! A thread 🧵

1/ I have a GitHub repo set up with a simple CloudFormation template on the main branch. I've configured CFN to sync from the main branch whenever the template.yaml file is updated pic.twitter.com/9TR33UqZGt

— David Killmon @kohidave@fosstodon.org (@kohidave) September 20, 2024

New Releases

Amazon SES now offers automated complaint rate recommendations which will help raise awareness when your complaint rates go up. The last thing you want to do when sending emails is damage your reputation, and this should help with that.

S3 One Zone now supports KMS with customer managed keys. It’s nice to see this offering from S3 getting more love.

AWS announced their Swift SDK is generally available. It’s now recommended to use for production workloads.

Last Words

Happy fall! For those of us in the northern hemisphere, fall started yesterday. For those in the southen hemisphere - happy spring! May the changing seasons bring you all ideas, creativity, and happiness 😊

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