🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is David Victoria, Senior Cloud Architect at Caylent, public speaker, AWS Ambassador, AWS Community Builder and AWS User Group Leader. As you can see David stays quite busy. He is also a big voice for the Latin American community. He helps organize all sorts of events, allowing other community members to speak as well as providing networking opportunities for people to share their knowledge and ideas. We really appreciate all that you do for the community David!

🙏

Allen, the creator of this newsletter and my best friend, has been going through what no parent should be going through. He has lost a child. This is something that has been very hard to process, and I am very grateful to see all of the support the community has shown to Allen and his family.
Having the opportunity to have spent time with Olivia I wanted to share some things about her. Olivia was such an incredible girl, she had so much energy from such an early age. She was always running and jumping around, carrying chickens, turkey and even goats. Always having a lot of fun. She would always be making you smile, trying to scare you and cracking up with such a beautiful laugh. I feel very fortunate to have been able to know Olivia and that my kids were able to have a lot of fun with her.

In her memory Allen and Mallory are going to build a memorial garden for Olivia. A community garden that they’ve been planning for years. If you are looking for ways to support the Helton family, they’ve set up a GoFundMe page to help cover the costs to be able to execute this project.

🔥 My Favorite Content

Being able to directly integrate services without a Lambda function in the middle is something I really like as it reduces the amount of code you need to write. There are many ways to go functionless to handle different types of integrations, in the post Being Functionless: How to Develop a Serverless Mindset to Write Less Code!, Sheen Brisals presents different ways to embrace and apply the low-code mindset, some of the trade-offs of doing this and examples of where you can apply this mindset.

Everyday I’m hearing more about Apache Iceberg tables and how it’s getting more integrations to get data in this format for your data lakes. One of the things that AWS has released to lower the barrier to entry for this is their Zero-ETL integrations that allows you to effortlessly replicate data into different storages. Zied Ben Tahar released a post called replicate data from DynamoDB to Apache Iceberg tables using Glue Zero-ETL integration. On this post Zied gives us a step to step guide on how to set this up and includes a fully functional example on GitHub.

Matteo Depascale has been releasing several bite sized LinkedIn posts that are very valuable and I wanted to highlight a couple of them here. On the first one Matteo talks about what happens when SQL databases get overwhelmed with writes?, this post goes over what happens, what the critical issues are, how your system reacts and some possible solutions to avoid having these issues. The second post I want to highlight gives a technical breakdown of how SSO authentication works. It covers the details of how all of this works and demystifies some of the magic we all just live with every day.

Technological constraints you had yesterday might not be a constraint today. Sometimes decisions made in the past to solve for a limitation you had don’t apply anymore, and you keep doing the same things over and over again because it’s been done that way. Doing this might affect the future maintainability of your application as things are being done in a more complicated way than it should given the technological advancements. On his post Architecture is a game of constraint satisfaction, Gregor Hohpe talks about why we should “rethink old ways of working in the face of shifting constraints” and goes over several examples of constraints we’ve overcome.

We all know that one of the more complicated things in software is documentation. The reason for this is that it usually goes stale very quickly. This is because maintaining documentation is a pain and people tend to forget or not prioritize it. When working with DynamoDB and creating your data models keeping this documented in a way that people understand it and it doesn’t go stale is very complicated. On his latest post A Novel Pattern for Documenting DynamoDB Access Patterns, Tycko Franklin shares how he has been documenting his data models using JSON. This is a very convenient way to keep this documentation as it can sit very close to the application/service within the same code repository.

🐣 New Releases

I’m glad to see people taking time to spend with the family during the holidays as this week I didn’t see any major announcements.

Last Words

Allen’s commitment to the community is pretty incredible, as he is processing and grieving he still wants to get all of the top content produced to everybody. This is why I’ll be taking care of the newsletter while he takes the time he needs. I’m always impressed with this community and the incredible support you all give even when it’s not related to tech, thanks to all of you and all of your support.

Until next time!