🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Guille Ojeda. Cloud Software Architect at Caylent, AWS Community Builder, creator of the Simple AWS newsletter and Spanish content booster with the creation of Donde Aprendo AWS where people can link to their content to provide a centralized source for Spanish content. Thank you for all that you do, Guille!

💯 Spotlight

An early release of Sheen Brisals’ new book Speak Effectively at Conferences is out. Make sure to grab an early copy and keep track of Sheen’s progress as he continues writing the following chapters. Speaking at conferences requires a specific set of skills that need to be learned and exercised. Having a book like this to help you get a boost in this area is very helpful and I am sure this will open up many speaking opportunities for people.

🔥 My Favorite Content

Marko Djakovic keeping his promise and giving us a version of his serverless chat bot now using the newly released AppSync Events. It’s unfortunate the workarounds that have to be done because of the lack of features.

Deno has been around for a while, and to run it, you’ve usually been directed to use a custom runtime. For Zac Charles, that was not enough. Zac’s post Run TypeScript & Deno Natively in AWS Lambda explains how to run Deno using a Lambda layer and one environment variable.

I’ve been using AWS IAM Identity Center to manage my accounts. I try to keep everything separate in their own accounts to ensure I’m not mixing responsibilities, you know, for when one of my side projects picks up and makes me millions. There is more to this service than just separating concerns, it also provides a layer of security. In the post Securing Multi-Account AWS Environment with AWS IAM Identity Center, Vasileios Sofroni goes into details on the AWS IAM Identity Center and how to setup a Zero Trust architecture for your accounts.

Authentication seems simple from the outside, after all, it’s just two strings to get a bit back, right? That is not entirely true and the fact is, there are many different ways to handle authentication. Rajdeep Saha, shares with us the differences between API Key and OAuth for securing your APIs.

It’s very nice to be able to do most of my work without having to leave VSCode. A recent update to the AWS Toolkit for VSCode adds major enhancements for local development of AWS Lambda functions, allowing you to step through the code by running a local invocation of the function, deploying it, invoking the function remotely and watching all the logs. Julian Wood explains these new enhancements and demos all of the functionality in this video.

Things are changing quickly for distributed databases with the introduction of super accurate clocks. Watch AJ Stuyvenberg’s video, GPS clocks are changing databases (again) to understand why clocks haven’t been trusted in the past and how this is slowly changing with recent innovations.

Heeki Park talks to us about the trade-offs when building serverless APIs on AWS. This post covers things like code structure, principle of least privilege (POLP), code sharing, etc.

💡 Tip of the Week

I liked this illustration shared by Julia Furst showing the expectation vs reality of giving a presentation. I have given several presentations and couldn’t agree more, your demo doesn’t flow as well, you ramble on a slide more than you should. And understanding these things are what differentiates a good presenter. Being able to know how to course correct on the fly while sticking to the message you want to deliver to your audience is a good skill to have.

🐣 New Releases

This first announcement is the big one this week. Amazon EventBridge can now trigger AWS Services in other accounts. This will help streamline communication between accounts and potentially remove several resources to achieve this. But you really have to be careful not to misuse this and heavily coupling your applications.

The new region in Mexico is already getting new releases, with two happening this week. Amazon EFS and AWS Backup are now available in this region.

Amazon CloudWatch steps it up and now allows to trigger alarms on 7 day old data, increasing it from 24 hours.

Even though I don’t operate in the GovCloud on a daily basis anymore, I still get excited with announcements like this one from DynamoDB. The Warm Throughput DynamoDB feature is now available in GovCloud. The gap between the commercial cloud and GovCloud are getting smaller. It sucks that EventBridge is still massively behind.

Last Words

It’s very tough to summarize the whole newsletter in a few sentences as the content flowing in is very sparse. We are talking about security, APIs, public speaking, clocks, so so many good things happening in tech right now. Next week, I’m going to be visiting Allen, so the next issue might involve a bunch of farming tips… we’ll see.

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 X or LinkedIn.

Until next time!

Andres