🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Marc Brooker, VP and Distinguished Engineer at AWS. Marc has played a significant role in not only shaping the serverless services we know and love, but also in the education of countless developers on how these distributed systems are built at massive scale. He recently did a deep dive on Aurora DSQL that makes your head 🤯. Thank you for everything you do, Marc!

💯 Spotlight

We are about to see a bunch of re:Invent recaps all across the internet. To start us off, I want to share Ran Isenberg’s recap where he covers the event from a serverless perspective. He tells us about the new features released prior to re:Invent as well as the ones that were announced during the week - all from a serverless perspective. It’s a great consolidation of the exciting new things now at our fingertips.

🔥 My Favorite Content

The internet was buzzing with excitement about the Aurora DSQL announcement. Steve Sanders quickly jumped on a POC with it to see if it works with modern TypeScript tooling. No spoilers from me, but Steve did a great job showing how to set everything up and get working yourself.

The keynote from Werner Vogels is always filled with impactful tidbits and insights. I like what Eyal Estrin did last week where he simply distilled the keynote into short, simple points. It has key takeaways and some good screenshots from the talk. For bonus points, he’s also linked to the keynote on YouTube.

We got an outstanding article from David Boyne last week on managing accidental complexity with event-driven architectures. He gives us three guardrails to keep you from painting yourself into a corner with EDA. It’s a great read with nice illustrations. This coincides nicely with the emphasis from Werner in his keynote.

Back on the DSQL hype, Ben Pyle did a fantastic job giving both objective and subjective observations on the service. His post, titled first impressions of AWS DSQL with Lambda and Rust shows us everything you need to know about usage with the service. He covers getting setup with Rust, which tools to use for a seamless experience, performance, and his overall likes and dislikes. Read this one!!

💡 Tip of the Week

Coming off of a week with unbeatable networking with our peers, I want to take a moment to share a message from Matt Palmer about cherishing the moments we have with the people we’re with 💙

You'll never be on the same team twice pic.twitter.com/8v5Sj7Wqr7

— matt palmer (@mattppal) December 8, 2024

🐣 New Releases

Obviously there were tons of great releases last week. If I tried to list them all out, you might be reading this newsletter for days! I’ll share the ones I found particularly exciting and will leave you to browse AWS News to find the rest of them.

EventBridge and Step Functions can now integrate with private APIs.

Brand new foundational models from AWS named Nova are available in Bedrock. These seem to be the go-forward models that will be pushing the bar from AWS.

A cool new serverless, distributed SQL database named Aurora DSQL was announced in preview.

DynamoDB Global Tables launched multi-region strong consistency in preview.

S3 launched a new table bucket type along with S3 Metadata.

The Amazon Bedrock Marketplace was announced, bringing 100 new foundational models to Bedrock.

Last Words

Re:Invent was as crazy busy, exciting, and thrilling as ever. The Believe in Serverless community held 10 community sessions (videos will be posted soon), the BIS party was bigger and funner than ever, and the strength and support of the people involved continues to amaze me. I am so happy to have connected with so many of you, as always you made last week an unforgettable experience 💙

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