Serverless Superhero
Our serverless superhero this week is Andrew Robinson, lead software engineer at Tyler Technologies. Andrew is a true rockstar fullstack developer - a real unicorn - with exceptional abilities in both the front-end and back-end. He is active in the Believe in Serverless community and is always generous with his time, helping whoever needs something big or small. Thank you for everything you do, Andrew!
My Favorite Content Last Week
Every time I see a new post from Elias Brange, I know I’m in for a treat. He’s a fantastic problem solver who makes sound solutions to problems I didn’t think were solveable. For example, his post last week talks about how he natively mocks API calls with a Lambda extension. It’s actually an incredibly clever way to hook into development flows for end-to-end tests without risking issues in production or adding complex branching logic for testing. I love the practicality of this solution without adding a ton of overhead.
To take Elias’ solution to the next level, check out what Lee Gilmore wrote last week. He wrote a guide showing you how to configure CDK apps across environments like prod, test, dev, etc… What Lee talks about in the solution is so simple it makes you think “why didn’t I think of this before?” Combining this strategy with what Elias wrote is just… 🤌
Ever feel like managing cloud costs is just… too much? Yeah me too, that’s why we go serverless! But for the times when you can’t, Archera is there to help. Their platform has a knack for breaking down your cloud usage across providers, flagging cost-saving opportunities, and catching weird cost spikes before they get out of hand. It not only shows you where your budget’s going but also helps you make decisions with forecasting tools that keep up with your growth. Think of it as that person on your team that watches everything you do to keep you from overspending, but without the confrontation. Sounds nice, right? Learn more. Sponsored
If you’re loving the idea of using extensions, Jeremy Daly broke his blog silence last week with a neat idea he calls Lambda tail warming. When you really don’t want cold starts but insist on using Lambda, you have a few options - most of which were written about by Jeremy years ago. But we’re smarter and more adapted these days. Jeremy writes about the new way he’s been using to keep functions warm by building an extension that hooks into Lambda lifecycle events. Super smart idea and cost effective, too.
At the tail end of 2024, we don’t have a lot of excuses for not implementing OTel in our apps. And to make sure you can’t say “I can’t do it at the scale my app operates,” Marcin Sodkiewicz wrote an incredible article addressing just that. His AWS and OTel collector architecture blog walks through several types of telemetry data collection and gives you the pros and cons of each one. It’s fascinating to see how the architecture changes as the complexity and size of the app grows. Very cool and useful for pretty much everybody reading this right now.
My favorite non-technical article last week was from Eyal Estrin talking about the qualities of a good cloud architect. He has lots of good points that I completely agree with. Spoiler alert - it’s not always about being the most technical. Conveying ideas, understanding different disciplines, and balancing requirements based on project needs and not personal beliefs are just a handful of key differentiators between a good and a great architect.
Spotlight
Attention CDK users! A vulnerability was found back in June that could possibly expose you to an account takeover risk via shadow resources. This looks to affect up to 1% of people and is easily avoidable by upgrading to CDK v2.149.0 or higher. The article is an interesting read about how the CDK works and breaks down the vulnerability. Even if you don’t use the CDK - this is a good read to avoid certain security risks in the future.
Tip of the Week
It’s so interesting to watch the tech industry cycle. We invest all this time and energy to make things better and we eventually get to a point where entropy has taken us to a point where things are too complicated and we start over. Apparently this is happening in the front end world right now - seems like Netflix had a 50% reduction in their Time to Interactive (TTI) metric by ditching React and going with vanilla JS and html.
Netflix sees a 50% reduction in load time after getting rid of React pic.twitter.com/4EqraZweNo
— Harish Garg (@harishkgarg) October 27, 2024
New Releases
The AWS Console Mobile app just got seamless links to AWS services and resources. This means if someone sends you a link to a resource and you click it on your phone, the mobile app will open it up for you. Pretty cool.
Amazon Bedrock got some cool Anthropic updates including Claude 3.5 Sonnet (new), computer use, and 3.5 Haiku. I’m particularly interested to see how people will build with the computer use capabilities. There’s so much (scary) potential there.
Last Words
On a personal note, my daughter is still in the thick of her battle with cancer. We’re traveling around the country participating in different clinical trials to get her leukemia down to manageable levels before we do a bone marrow transplant. It’s the heaviest burden I’ve ever imagined, but I wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you for your selfless kindness and unprecedented support. It has truly been a light when all around us is dark. 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
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