🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Jon Goodall, Lead Cloud Engineer at Logicata, AWS Community Builder, AWS User Group Leader for the AWS Brighton user group and co-hosts the LogiCast AWS News Podcast. Jon is a very fun person to interact with and does a lot to keep the community active, I personally saw him running around all over re:Invent gathering people to take pictures and have conversations. Thank you for all that you do Jon!

💯 Spotlight

Amazon S3 added the ability to do conditional writes, allowing you to prevent objects from accidentally getting overwritten. Terraform took advantage of this feature and made it so you don’t need to create a DynamoDB table anymore. In the post Switching to the Terraform S3 Backend with Native State File Locks , Matt Bacchi goes into all the details to leverage this new feature in the latest version of Terraform.

🔥 My Favorite Content

I was excited when they announced support for HTTPS endpoints in AWS Step Functions. This last re:Invent they extended this capability to be able to invoke private APIs. Benoît Bouré released a post on how to invoke Private API Gateway Endpoints from Step Functions. I really liked this post as it explains how it all works under the covers and provides an example of how to set it all up using the AWS CDK.

I’ve been using Amazon Q Developer a lot lately. It produces valuable artifacts that developers can use immediately. At re:Invent, AWS released several new features for Amazon Q Developer for Tests, Doc and Review. They also announced Transform, which allows the modernization of .NET, mainframe, VMware, and Java workloads. In the post Understanding Amazon Q Developer: Transform, Ryan Gross goes into detail on the capabilities it provides and how Caylent is using it for their client’s modernization journey.

I haven’t done much in Microsoft Azure, but this video by James Eastham motivates me to try it. In this video, James talks about deploying .NET applications into a container in Azure Container Apps, a great abstraction on top of Kubernetes. He does everything using .NET, even the infrastructure as code (IaC) using Pulumi. But worry not, the example includes a version that deploys with Terraform.

The next one is quite a read. The article Advanced Threat Detection with AWS Security Hub and Amazon GuardDuty by Vasileios Sofroni shows you how how to setup Amazon Security Hub and Amazon GuardDuty with code snippets to do it in the AWS CLI, Terraform or the AWS Console. I consider myself to always be on top of security and then I see things like these and realize there is so much more for me to take care of to secure my applications.

I really liked this video by Linda Haviv and Darko Mesaroš in the AWS Developers page. Understanding the difference between TCP and UDP connections is essential to know which one benefits your application and what the tradeoffs are.

I love seeing people’s journeys into technology and the community. This post by Vadym Kazulkin talks about his journey on Becoming an AWS Hero and all that he’s done through the years.

💡 Tip of the Week

Stephen Sennet is on fire, making it to this section two weeks in a row! This week, in a very sarcastic way, Stephen talks about how you can replace all your developers with AI. The fact is, you can’t do this, as huge amounts of oversight are still needed to protect bad or weird things from being introduced by AI. This is one of the reasons I like Amazon Q Developers approach as it provides suggestions that feel like reviewing a PR, where you are looking at all the code changes and can give feedback to have it iterate the solution. These steps are critical to verify all that AI is doing. So please, don’t worry, AI will not take over your job any time soon since it requires a lot of human involvement. It can improve your day-to-day life if you learn how to use all these tools to become more productive in different areas.

🐣 New Releases

AWS keeps expanding its Latin American presence with a new region in Mexico 🇲🇽! This is such a big deal and will open up a lot of jobs in Mexico, but it will also allow for a lot of technological advancements for industries with significant compliance requirements. But not just this, they also added Mexico’s second AWS Direct Connect location in Queretaro

AWS Step Functions now supports 36 new services, including AWS End User Messaging and Amazon Q Apps. Unfortunately, those are the only two services shown in the announcement, and I couldn’t find a full list of the other 36 services.

Amazon Q Developer can now access Cloud Zeros cloud cost optimization platform if you are on the Pro Tier. As we use more fully managed services, the control of how much things cost is falling more into the hands of the engineers. With this integration, Amazon Q Developer can help engineers make more financially responsible decisions.

This announcement is my favorite one of the week! As we move more and more workloads to have a multi-account structure, managing this becomes a pain as you need to keep switching between accounts and losing all the context you previously had. AWS added multi-session support this week. With this, you can now have multiple accounts open simultaneously. I caution everybody, as you can now have multiple accounts open simultaneously, that there is a risk of accidentally changing something in a production account unintentionally, so be extremely cautious when making changes directly in the console.

I hadn’t seen or done anything with AWS User Notifications, but I have seen a lot of announcements around this lately. A new feature added this week gives you the ability to configure AWS User Notifications using AWS CloudFormation to standardize the setup across accounts. It’s fascinating but also scary that you can configure push notifications to the AWS Console Mobile App from CloudWatch Alarms.

Last Words

This week has been packed with so much good content and so many good releases. I can see everything building out for the rest of the year. The AWS Community Builders program applications close today! Make sure to submit your applications here. I am so grateful to be part of this incredible community. I’ve made so many connections, but even better, I’ve made so many friends all around the world. I encourage anybody to apply and see for themselves.

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