Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Toli Apostolis, principal engineer at Flipdish and Datadog ambassador. Toli is a wonderful community advocate, speaker, and blogger. His insights are spot on and the way he highlights others for their work is amazing. Thank you Toli for your contributions to the community and for boosting the opinions of others!

Tutorials

The Believe in Serverless community was on fire last week! There were six sessions throughout the week covering a swath of topics. Here are some of my favorites:

Jeremy Edberg and Khawaja Shams talked about the history of AWS Lambda. Both of them have incredibly long tenures with the service and know a lot more about its history than I expected. They cover everything from what the firecracker VM is all the way to identifying problems with how modern compute has evolved. It’s a fascinating conversation full of insights!

Michael Gasch and I got together to talk about event-driven architectures and discuss a very underutilized (in my opinion) feature of Amazon EventBridge - API destinations. Michael talks about theory and gives a bit of history then I hop in and give a demo of an in-depth app that uses API destinations and EventBridge connections every possible way. It’s a fun, dynamic talk that shows how easily you can build complex systems that communicate with 3rd party services.

Finally, I did a super fun demo with Michael Liendo demonstrating the final version of the emoji thrower app Michael and I have been battling back and forth for years on. In case you missed this showdown, in April of 2023 Michael came up with a super cool way to increase engagement in his Apple Keynote presentations. I latched onto the idea and made an extendable version of his app using Google Slides and Momento Topics. We had a few more enhancements from there and now we landed on the final version from last Friday. I love where it ended up!

Interesting Content

I know many developers who always have that nagging feeling in the back of their head saying “this really should be documented.” The truth is, developers generally don’t like documenting stuff - especially things that are changing frequently. That said, Qasim Albaqali wrote a great article on how you can automate documentation then use it to validate schemas in service-to-service communication and generate SDKs from it. This is incredibly practical and something we should all be doing.

I liked this straight-to-the-point article from Omid Eidivandi last week where he talks about things to look out for with infrastructure as code. It’s easy to get your resources deployed into the cloud as you’re building, but if you’re moving accounts, migrating data, or even suffering from the complexities of entropy, IaC might get you dug into a bit of a hole. The points he makes in here hold true no matter if you’re using Terraform, CDK, SAM, or anything else.

Spotlight

I normally share big launches and feature updates in the New Releases section below, but by golly Cloudflare is outdoing itself. Last week, they announced 18 big updates to the workers platform! There’s so much going on at Cloudflare - from improved Node.js compatibility in Workers (their version of Lambda) to getting preview deployment URLs for each Worker version to Queues going GA - they seem to be positioning themselves for serious business.

Tip of the Week

I have to give credit where it’s due. Ro Ndimofor has been out there building fantastic serverless workshops on Educloud Academy for over a year now and they keep getting better and better. Last week gave us a peek at a comprehensive workshop that merges GraphQL APIs. Keep up the great work, Ro!

We’ve been cooking a great microservice workshop with a lot of serverless, containers, JavaScript and rust.

We’ll cover a lot of stuff around
- Merging GraphQL APIs pic.twitter.com/7Ix2G3jY6v

— Ro (@atehrosius) September 15, 2024

New Releases

We already saw the 18 updates for workers from Cloudflare, but they also announced their container platform service is in production. Read that post - the technical know how from these engineers is mindblowing.

Cloudflare also announced Speed Brain, which is an incredibly innovative way to prefetch content based on a user’s likely next move! WOW.

In AWS news, Lambda now supports tagging of Event Source Mappings and Code Signing Config resources.

SNS is now integrated with AWS End User Messaging for sending SMS messages. This brings along features like two-way messaging, rules to block countries, and centralized billing for text messages.

Amazon Titan Image Generator is now adding Content Credentials to images it creates. Think of this as an invisible digital signature stating AI created the image.

Last Words

Raise your hand if you’re ready to try out Cloudflare! With the incredible amount of investment they’re pouring into their services, I’ll be curious what this community looks like a couple years from now.

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