🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Andres Moreno, someone who I know you know. I’m breaking my own rule of never naming somebody my serverless superhero twice, but Andres deserves it. Not only is he an exceptional Principal Architect at Caylent, he’s also a remarkable human being. He’s helped me get through my recent trauma in a number of ways, including taking over this newsletter while I was grieving and helping me out around my house when I couldn’t do it on my own. If you don’t already know Andres, please connect with him. We all could learn a little something from his zest for life and unbounded generosity. Thanks for everything, buddy 💙

💯 Spotlight

I don’t like putting the spotlight on myself, but I wanted to make sure everybody saw my ask for help last week. I’m back at work after almost two months of leave and while I felt ready, I also wasn’t ready. I need your help to make sure I come back strong. Thank you all!

🔥 My Favorite Content

I always love how thorough Jimmy Dahlqvist is with his posts. Last week, he published an article about using Amazon Verified Permissions for permission mapping. The article is full of useful visuals that show how everything works and he also gives a super useful guide on Cedar. This is full of production-readiness-know-how and I love it.

It’s so cool to see how James Eastham is evolving as a content creator. His videos continue to get more and more engaging while going deeper into tech… without getting more technical. His video last week on what tests you SHOULD be writing in event-driven systems is funny, educational, and captivating. Not to mention genuinely helpful. Keep up the great work, James!

I read a refreshing take on a write-up of a side project. Chase Douglas shared his experience building his own serverless password manager, but rather than going over code and explaining the details of the architecture, he focused on his decisions, difficulties, and observations. From someone at Chase’s level of experience, the advice in there is solid gold. Plus he shared some of his concerns with Aurora DSQL in an accompanying Bluesky thread.

Danielle Heberling shared a simple but powerful design that uses uses AWS Fargate on a budget. Her design takes advantage of Fargate Spot, which runs on compute that can be taken over at any time (with a 2 minute warning). She talks about how she has configured it to turn on/off at specific times and how to shut off gracefully in the event of an interruption. And of course, she shares her code on how to do it.

💡 Tip of the Week

Few people have a vision for EDA like David Boyne. I am really impressed with what he’s doing with EventCatalog and even more impressed at his grasp of all these concepts and how to improve them.

🐣 New Releases

AWS is shutting off Amazon Chime. No more new customers as of last Wednesday. That said, the Chime SDK will still be functional if you’re using that 👍

On a lighter note, Amplify Hosting announced support for IAM roles for SSR apps, which is a big boost in security in a handful of areas.

Last Words

As of last week, I’m officially back full time. It’s been an emotional rollercoaster over the past year and it will take me a while to feel like anything is “normal” again. But I’m happy to be back to the swing of things and bringing you this newsletter every week. Thank you again Andres for making it so this has gone almost 3 years in a row without missing a week.

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, LinkedIn, or email.

Happy coding!

Allen