🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Alexander Schüren, a Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS who works for one of my favorite open-source packages out there, the Lambda Powertools for Typescript. What they have done with Lambda Powertools is excellent, and they help serverless builders every day. Alexander, I know I’ve said this to you in person, but I really appreciate all that you do, as it’s something that helps me day in and day out as I’m developing in the cloud. Thank you for everything you do!

💯 Spotlight

AWS Community Builder applications are now open and will close until January 20. Don’t miss out the opportunity to join this group of incredible people. As part of this group you will get access to things like:

• Direct access to other builders, AWS Heroes and AWS employees.
• Sessions to provide feedback around things they are working on.
• Demos of unreleased features.
• AWS Credits.
• Swag.
• Free subscription to CloudAcademy.
• And so much more

If you are looking for quick tips for your application, Stephen Sennet has shared his top 5 tips.

Apply here

🔥 My Favorite Content

When using OpenTelemetry (OTel) with AWS for your observability needs, you’ll often find it necessary to create custom spans to obtain higher-quality data. However, manual instrumentation for adding these custom spans can be quite challenging. Thankfully, last week, Marcin Sodkiewicz shared a post that explains why and how to implement custom instrumentation for the AWS SDK in Go.

Omid Eidivandi talks to us about the AWS Step Functions Distributed Map. If you know me, you know that AWS Step Functions is my favorite service. It provides so much functionality, simplifies troubleshooting and provides “documentation by implementation” since the workflows act as documentation. With the Distributed Map state, AWS unlocked many more use cases for Step Functions by providing even more concurrency than the regular Map state (up to 10,000 concurrent executions) and can help you reduce the chances of hitting the DataLimitExceeded or transition history errors. Read Omid’s post to understand why!

As we’ve learned over the years, AWS Lambda is not the solution for everything. For certain workloads, you will be looking for compute that overcomes Lambda’s limitations. ECS to the rescue! Even with it being more involved than Lambda (VPC and subnet setup), the barrier to entry is still relatively low, as you may see from Sebastian Müller’s post AWS CDK: Serverless Container with Fargate

A video from Lee Hannigan came out last week that shows you how to pre-warm Amazon DynamoDB tables with warm throughput. This is a great feature that was recently released by the DynamoDB team. Warm throughput helps you prevent throttling when you have a special event that might increase your traffic. There is a lot of great information here that will help you understand how to easily set it up to prepare for these types of events. Just a reminder that this feature does have a cost and can be reviewed in the pricing page for DynamoDB.

💡 Tip of the Week

Stephen Sennet makes a second appearance on this weeks issue with a good hot take. We tend to compare ourselves to everyone else. I see people talking about all the nitty gritty pieces of Kubernetes, or how they know all about the AWS Lambda internals, and I usually think I’m not smart enough or really need to dig into all these other things deeper. But the fact is we can’t know everything and these people have chosen to become experts in these areas. Each of us are working in different areas, with different requirements and expectations, so don’t ever feel bad when you see people be experts on things you are not, this just means they have different focuses and requirements.

🐣 New Releases

DynamoDB now allows for a configurable Point-in-time Recovery period. Previously you could only have it set to 35 days, with this new enhancement you can now set the period anywhere from 1-35 days allowing you to better meet your compliance needs.

AWS WAF added new Top Insights Visualizations. This will help you better understand the traffic for your applications to stay protected from any malicious users.

AWS Local Zones have been around for a few years, providing AWS Services at the edge near large populations, industry, and information technology (IT) centers. A new one was released in New York City, providing a range of Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon EBS volume types, Amazon ECS, Amazon Amazon EKS, Application Load Balancer, AWS Direct Connect and Amazon Time Sync. New York City is pretty far for me to make sense to use, but I would like to hear of someone who leverages Local Zones to provide lower latencies to their customers.

Data scientists and ML engineers can now use Amazon Q Developer in SageMaker Studio. I’ve been using Amazon Q Developer to create quick POCs and verify functionality, and it’s really been a helpful tool to speed those up. I don’t personally use SageMaker Studio, but I am happy to see that data scientists and ML engineers will now feel the happiness I feel when I get something working with a few prompts.

Last Words

I can’t believe we are almost halfway through January already. People are getting back to work and pumping out content and features. I’m excited for this year, and all that’s to come for the community and technology. The AWS DA organization keeps taking some big hits, but just like you and me, at some point we decide to part ways with the company we are working with regardless of the amount of time we’ve spent there. I keep learning so much from each and every one of you, and the tech community is stronger than ever. Let’s keep sharing and learning from each other, as this is the best way for us to keep growing professionally.

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 or LinkedIn.

Until next time!

Andres