Ready, Set, Cloud!

🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Dave Hall, AWS training lead at Pfizer, consultant, and AWS Community Builder. Dave is a wonderful resource for anything cloud related and a friendly face always willing to help. Catch him giving a talk for the community this week at re:Invent! Thank you for everything you do, Dave!

💯 Spotlight

I’m a big fan of everything Sheen Brisals does. He has a way of conveying ideas in a way that makes you think about things from a completely different perspective. In a recent talk at QCon, Sheen describes how and why to think, architect, and sustain your serverless apps as set pieces. He has both video and long-form formats of his message, where he talks about complexity, microservices, domain-driven design, and more all while relating it do a movie set. Very clever analogy and fantastic insights from this legend.

🔥 My Favorite Content

I do a lot of orchestrated workflows and am always fascinated different options for top notch orchestrators. Ben Pyle published an article last week exploring Kestra in a serverless API workflow that I really liked. From Ben’s findings, it looks like Kestra has a great way to build and visualize workflows that aren’t tightly coupled with AWS - which seems like a necessity as the tech scene keeps growing. I like Ben’s honest opinions in the article, and his intuition is spot on as always.

I have a very low tolerance for slow build times. I’ve spent way too much time on slow feedback loops that break my focus and greatly increase time to completion for my projects. Luckily, Depot just released Ultra Runners, which deliver up to 40x faster Docker builds and lightning-fast GitHub Actions workflows 🎉. This not only improves your feedback loop times, but also gets your code out the door faster than ever! This Cyber Monday, get ahead of the curve and use code DEPOTFRIENDS24 at checkout for 1 month free on any plan. Offer valid through December 20! Don’t miss out - sign up here. Sponsored

AWS does a pretty good job at keeping Bedrock up to date with high quality models, but there are hundreds of models out there that do a plethora of things. Christian Nuss shared a quick little article showing us how to use Hugging Face models in Lambda in only 3 steps. This has never been something I considered before, I thought the models might be too large for effective Lambda use, but maybe I’m wrong! It’s a neat article nonetheless.

Robert Bulmer built an entire app and wrote an article explaining every last detail of it. The app tracks customer engagements and uses AI to automatically build reports for them. Robert goes through every detail of the app, from the architecture to the data model to API endpoints and security 🔥. This article gives me Lee Gilmore vibes - you can tell Robert and Lee used to work together 😜.

Fun fact - the reason I use JavaScript for everything is because I abandoned .NET (it had 20 second cold starts in Lambda at the time). I know .NET cold starts have gotten significantly faster since my departure in 2019, and it looks like it’s gotten even faster with some work that Jordan González recently did. He wrote a gritty engineering post detailing how he achieved faster .NET cold starts with ReadyToRun compilation. This is some great low-level content!

💡 Tip of the Week

As we prepare for a week most likely full of big generative AI releases and roadmaps, it’s good to remind ourselves that GenAI isn’t perfect and is capable of hallucinations that can put you in a tight spot if you aren’t careful. I get the feeling Matt might have trusted a git command he probably shouldn’t have 😬

ai generated git commands are the easiest way to ruin your day
— matt palmer (@mattppal) November 29, 2024

🐣 New Releases

Last week was full of more exciting releases. I won’t attempt to list them all here but I will share the serverless ones I think are particularly cool. If you want to see everything, I highly recommend you check out AWS News.

S3 now allows you to do conditional writes. No more accidental overwrites of your content!

You can now implement custom orchestration in Bedrock Agents.

Amplify supports passwordless auth via Cognito.

Amazon Q is now context aware in the console. This is a big one for usability of Q when poking around the console.

Last Words

We’re in day 1 of AWS re:Invent! The Believe in Serverless community is doing 10 sessions across Tuesday and Wednesday of this week in Buddy V’s ristorante at the AWS Community Lounge. These sessions are for Community Builders, Heroes, and User Group leaders, but they are being recorded and will be online later this month. If you want to attend in person, please register on re:Meet.

I hope to see as many of you as I can this week! Send me a message somewhere and we’ll set something up!

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