🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Hazel Saenz, a Cloud Software Architect at Caylent, AWS Serverless Hero and AWS User Group Leader. Hazel constantly shares her knowledge by speaking at events and writing blog posts. I feel very fortunate to work with such an incredible person. Thank you for all that you do for the community, Hazel!

💯 Spotlight

James Eastham keeps taking tech video production to the next level, making them so fun to watch. In his latest video Stop Letting External Events Control your System (Do This Instead), James shows us the importance of Anti-Corruption Layers (ACL) to protect and decouple yourself from the data structures that are controlled by external systems. You want your business logic to be meaningful for what you are running. Decoupling from your dependencies using anti-corruption layers is very important for as something as simple as maintaining the ubiquitous language already defined. Still, it can also protect you from significant issues you do not control.

🔥 My Favorite Content

Luc van Donkersgoed doubled down this week. The first one asks the question Are humans the limiting factor in AI-assisted software development?. There are interesting points made by Luc in this post. The other post talks about how AWS is on its way to full IPv6 support by seeing more and more AWS services support it. There is still a lot of work and obstacles to getting there, but the future looks promising.

The post Do you need P? Systems Correctness Practices at AWS by Marcin Sodkiewicz opened up my eyes to a world I am not very familiar with. Marcin talks about how AWS ensures reliability through TLA+ and P programming language and other approaches. While these processes seem incredible, it feels like its tooling is not very friendly for quick adoption yet.

My fellow Caylien Jeremy Yelle gives an Introduction to Amazon States Language. In this post, Jeremy shows us core concepts around using ASL and offers good examples. Understanding these concepts when learning Amazon Step Functions is critical, as things can get rather complex, and not understanding ASL can produce headaches for your teams.

Self-promotion time. Last week, I did a live stream to see How far can I get in an hour with Serverless Framework?. It had been a while since I’ve used it, and I was surprised at some of the functionality. I especially liked the serverless dev command, which deploys your application, but by doing some magic, it points all the requests back to your local code, making all your changes testable WITHOUT A DEPLOYMENT! They are building some cool stuff that I wasn’t aware of, I recommend taking it out for a spin if you haven’t yet.

Chris Ebert shows us how to build an AI Agent with AWs Bedrock for U.S National Parks. This post goes into great detail about AI Agents and has thorough explanations and examples throughout the post.

Ran Isenberg shows us 5 Serverless Architecture Patterns You Should Stop Using (And What to Do Instead). It’s great to see how we’ve all transformed our best practices as we build more complex systems or learn more about the technology. One of the worst things we can do is to keep doing something just because it’s the way it’s been done. We’ll become irrelevant if we don’t improve our practices and apply what we’ve learned.

💡 Tip of the Week

You rarely need root access to your accounts, so having a user with this level of access produces more harm than benefit on a daily basis. That is why I really love the introduction of centralized root access, which allows you to completely delete root-level access to your accounts and only enable it when necessary. I recently did this for my accounts, and it is a very simple task with a very high impact.

Did you know that you can centralize root access for your AWS Organization's member accounts? 🔐

This means that none of your member accounts needs dedicated root credentials anymore, which also implies that you don't need to maintain dedicated MFA for these accounts! pic.twitter.com/BvYcRjfeia

— Tobias Schmidt (@tpschmidt_) February 16, 2025

🐣 New Releases

AWS Network Load Balancer now supports removing availability zones. I don’t regularly use NLB’s in my day to day, but can see a lot of people benefiting from this as workloads change and with that so do network definitions.

Amazon ECS now enables you to update services from short to long ARNs. I honestly didn’t know you could have short and long ARNs for ECS, if you were like me, here is a brief explanation. Since November 2018 AWS introduced new ARNs for ECS that allowed enhanced ability to tag resources in your cluster. Since April 2021 you are automatically opted in to the new format, which explains why I didn’t know about this since my ECS usage is after that date. With this new update, if you want to update existing ECS resources to the long ARN format, you do not have to re-create the service.

Amazon OpenSearch Serverless expands support for time-series workloads up to 100TB. I’m not sure what the limit was before, but all I can say is, that is a whole lot of data.

AWS AppSync enhances resolver testing with comprehensive context object mocking. I really love this capability as it will allow developers to create more reliable services, but, I just keep getting sad that AppSync gets all of the love while API Gateway seems to have been forgotten for about 3 years now.

Cool, another AppSync release! AWS AppSync GraphQL introduces operation-level caching for faster GraphQL API responses.

Amazon DynamoDB now supports auto-approval of quota adjustments. I really like this for emergency scenarios, but I would caution people from using this without a second thought. Most quotas are set for a reason and if you need to adjust one, I would first recommend verifying if there is something you can improve in your design.

Announces AWS CloudFormation support for AWS Transfer Family web apps. Still haven’t been able to play around with this functionality, maybe I should do a live stream around this. I’m glad to see that CloudFormation support is included now.

Last Words

The temperatures are rising in El Paso, and this means yard work begins! While energy consuming, I really enjoy fixing up my yard and working hard to have a green and vibrant backyard. This week I’ve also restarted my live streams on Believe In Serverless!! Be on the lookout for the next one on February 27th. If you are interested in giving a presentation, demo or a live stream, please reach out and we can get you on the schedule.

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