🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Omid Eidivandi, solutions architect at Groupe La Centrale and an AWS Community Builder. Omid is very active on many communities helping lots of people sharing his ideas and answering questions. He is very energetic and very fun to hang out with. Thank you for everything that you do, Omid!

💯 Spotlight

I love seeing how builders do the same things in different ways. What services would you use to build a chat in AWS? Your answer is probably Amazon API Gateway WebSockets or Momento Topics. Marko Djakovic takes a different approach using AWS IoT Core on his post Building a Cloud Native Serverless Chat on AWS. The post contains a great explanation with a working example you can play around with.

🔥 My Favorite Content

Jimmy Dahlqvist released the second part of his series building a serverless self-service IoT certificate management. On this post he extends his API to handle more endpoints, adds a Lambda layer and makes use of the newly released JSONata and variables support for AWS Step Functions. Jimmy is making use of several AWS services with great explanations on this series, I highly recommend taking a look.

In S3 you can configure events to be sent to Amazon EventBridge, Amazon Simple Queue Service, Amazon Simple Notification Service or AWS Lambda. I’ve usually defaulted to use the Amazon EventBridge integration but in the latest post by Vadym Kazulkin and Firdaws Aboulaye for their series on building a highly scalable image storage solution with AWS Serverless at ip.labs they talk about why you would move to use Amazon SQS instead of EventBridge batching and avoid hitting any limits in downstream services.

Living in a REST API world for such a long time I’ve usually struggled to grasp on the concepts around GraphQL and especially how all of this relates to AWS AppSync. Thankfully, Lilupa Karu explains in detail what GraphQL is and how to use it with AWS Appsync on this post.

💡 Tip of the Week

One of the great things of isolating functionality into microservices is that you can build and scale them differently depending on what they are doing and how they are doing it. As Yan Cui talks about on this post you can use containers for some things, Lambda functions for others and that is completely fine. The idea is to use the right tool for the job to meet the requirements whether that is cost, performance or something else.

🐣 New Releases

If you are using API destinations on Amazon EventBridge, this is a big one. EventBridge will now automatically request a new OAuth token when it is close to expiration. This means you do not have to wait for a token to fail to get a new one therefore reducing delays. I’m not a big Amazon EKS user, what I do know is that managing versions can become a pain. Last week AWS announced the ability to programmatically access the Kubernetes availability, this will really help add more automation to maintain the Kubernetes version on your clusters. This is an area where we don’t see a lot of movement, but last week AWS announced notification action in the AWS Console Mobile App, this will help run DevOps tasks from the mobile app if you don’t have direct access to a machine.

Last Words

As we approach the end of the year I can really say it has been a roller coaster. I really want to thank everybody for all the support. As we look forward to next year I want to emphasize what Allen has said several times, BE KIND, you never know what people are going through and it doesn’t cost you a thing. I am very thankful to belong to this community where everybody is very kind, accepting, helpful, among many other great things. Making one person smile a day can really make a huge difference so let’s keep spreading happiness!

Happy new year everybody!

Andres Moreno