🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Emily Shea, head of serverless go-to-market at AWS and phenomenal public speaker. Emily is about the friendliest person you’ll ever meet and has a brilliant head on her shoulders. She truly understands serverless, so if you ever need someone to bounce ideas off of or get a great “why is it this way” answer, give her a shout. Thanks for everythinig, Emily!!

💯 Spotlight

Bold claim alert! My favorite article of the year was published last week. Seth Orell wrote a masterful article called simplicity is an achievement that gave me whiplash I was nodding along so hard 😛. He talks about the progression of tech - how things get more and more complicated until we figure out a way to abstract it to be simple again - and gives a wonderful example to show the concept. He then turns his sights on the future, with VPC specifically and how developers won’t need to know how to use it soon(ish). This article shows a complete understanding of the landscape right now, please read it!

🔥 My Favorite Content

We’ve seen a lot of “being successful with serverless adoption” posts the past few years, but I stumbled across one last week from Volvo that really resonated with me. It’s written from the perspective of a large company that clearly went through some trials and tribulations. It goes through several non-technical aspects of a major tech shift that I feel are much more critical than learning things like “this is how you connect an SQS queue to a Lambda function.” It reminds me a lot of the experience Ben Pyle has been sharing the past couple of years.

Jimmy Dahlqvist always publishes practical content you can pick up and start using in a few minutes. Last week he shared an image moderation workflow he built to extend the file management service he made last year. The workflow adds GuardDuty Malware detection, uses StepFunctions and Rekognition for moderation, and multiple S3 buckets to show different stages of file management. If you’re looking to build a real, production-level file management system, start here.

I love creative use cases that solve everyday mundane problems. Gabriel Koo published an article last week detailing a very clever solution to a problem I didn’t know I had. He created an iOS shortcut to extract links from IG posts to let you one-click open them. Apparently Instagram does not let you click on links directly, which is a major UX issue. But with creative use of the tools available on iOS and a Lambda function, he was able to get around it. So smart!

The behind the scenes content we get on Cloudflare infrastructure always pique my interest. Last week, Shivang Sarawagi wrote a fascinating article on why Cloudflare does not use containers in Workers. It’s essentially a breakdown of how their compute spins up new function instances so fast and the trade-offs that were made to get it. This is a great explainer of some of the limitations of Workers and also how it’s so dang fast.

💡 Tip of the Week

My thought from social media isn’t a tip so much as it is a conversation starter. We all agree that test-driven development (TDD) is great and really the way we should be slinging code, but do we actually do it? I used to make a (true) joke that I always squashed commits when merging my feature branches so nobody could tell I wrote the code first and tests in a later commit 😬. This makes me curious, what do you do?

TDD stands for “Tests During Development” /meme changemymind

— John Arundel (@bitfield) November 3, 2024

🐣 New Releases

Get ready, some big service announcements are about to drop from now until re:Invent. Here’s a few exciting serverless ones from last week.

Amplify Hosting now integrates with S3 for easy static site hosting. It could do this before, but I think this is another way to connect to a static site you already have deployed.

Building on Lambda with VSCode just got better. AWS released an enhanced experience with their extension that greatly simplifies the UX. Very cool, I’m going to have to try this out.

A new AppSync Events service just released, abstracting away tons of management around WebSockets. Best part? You don’t need GraphQL to use it! Stay tuned here, I’ll be diving into this one in the upcoming weeks.

Lambda now supports the Fault Injection Service, which lets you “chaos monkey” yourself. You can add latency, modify outputs, and inject integration errors.

CodeBuild now supports automatic retries on failure. Pretty nice quality of life upgrade here.

Last Words

Re:Invent is 28 days away! I hope I will have the opportunity to go this year. As I write this newsletter, I’m sitting in another airport waiting to take another flight to go visit my daughter in another hospital. A lot of things in my life are uncertain right now, and I have to go where I’m needed the most. If you do end up seeing me at re:Invent, things are going in the right direction. If you don’t - don’t assume the worst, perhaps the timelines just didn’t work out in our favor.

Either way, with Thanksgiving coming up in the US, I wanted to let each and every one of you know I am thankful for you. Thankful for the opportunity to land in your inbox every Monday with my musings, thankful for the chances to get on a livestream and learn something with you, and thankful for the ongoing support y’all have provided me this year. 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