🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Philipp Krenn, DA and community team lead at Elastic. Philipp really understands the hard part of serverless data, and can explain it exceptionally well! In case you missed it (like I did), Elastic serverless went GA a couple of weeks ago, and Philipp has been all over the hype train. He’s been teaching developers like a pro - even hopping on a livestream with me to explain a bit about how it works. Thank you for all your hard work, Philipp!

💯 Spotlight

There was obviously a ton of stuff going on at AWS re:Invent a couple of weeks ago. It’s so hard to keep up with not only the announcements, but the incredibly detailed talks about our favorite serverless services and launches. Julian Wood has done us all a solid and curated a playlist of serverless talks from the conference so we don’t miss out on anything. Thank you for putting in the work, Julian!

🔥 My Favorite Content

Mid-to-late December is a great time of year because developers are putting recent launches from AWS to the test and reporting their findings. Such is the case with a short post from Paul Santus last week where he shares his results testing the scale up speed of Aurora Serverless v2. You may or may not know, Aurora Serverless v2 recently launched scale to zero, so Paul did a test to see what the coldest of cold starts looks like.

You can already feel the AWS influence over at Stripe 😂 Ben Smith posted a video last week talking about how to build event-driven architectures with Stripe. There’s a lot of great information in there about EDA in general, but also some nuggets of info around building with Stripe specifically - something I know many of us micro-SaaS devs are all too familiar with.

Event sourcing is generally regarded as a highly-complex pattern with fewer practical use cases than you think. But spend six minutes with Yan Cui in his video explaining why you need it and how to avoid common pitfalls and you might just be convinced to try it out. As always, Yan does a fantastic job explaining the concept in an easy to understand way with meaningful examples. Pass this video around your dev team this week, it’s great stuff.

💡 Tip of the Week

Is it weird if I link to myself for the tip of the week? No, right?

Anyway, I finally got a chance to try out Step Function JSONata and variable support and was blown away at how much simpler it made my state machines. There’s definitely some “unlearning” that you have to do, but once you change your thinking a little bit of how to move data around, it is absolutely amazing. I have to give a shout out to that entire team for a job well done 🤩

🐣 New Releases

As you might expect, the week after re:Invent is usually a bit slow for new releases. That said, we did get CloudWatch Logs Live Tail added to VSCode via the AWS Toolkit extension. This now allows us to view log streams directly in our IDE, hopefully shortening the feedback loop for developers.

Last Words

With 2025 knocking on our door, what are you plans for the new year? Starting something new? Finally gonna take the plunge and get that cert you’ve been putting off? Let me know! If there’s any way I can help, I’d love to.

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