🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Greg Olmstead, Security Architect at Bloomberg LP. Greg is a fantastic public speaker and wonderful contributor to the serverless community. He’s active in the Believe in Serverless Discord server, where he’s generous with his time and expertise, offering his advice from years of practical experience. Thank you for everything, Greg!

💯 Spotlight

Clever solutions to tricky problems are my all-time favorite. Pubudu Jayawardana came up with something last week that fits that bill and made me go “that guy is smart!” He devised a way to call API Gateway exclusively through Amazon Cloudfront. As I was reading the article, I started thinking of ways I could poke holes in the solution - but as I read more, he brought them up and addressed them. This feels like a bulletproof build if you really need to limit where your invocations are coming from. Great work, Pubudu!

🔥 My Favorite Content

Have you ever heard of “alert fatigue”? It’s when you get pings and alerts about something so frequently that you instinctively tune them out and eventually stop looking at them. Which is not a good thing. But a post from Lee Gilmore last week might help with this. He showed us how to use composite alarms in Amazon CloudWatch. Lee explains these alarms use logic and aggregation to notify you when things are actually on fire - eliminating noise and reducing alert fatigue. The article explains the concept beautifully, how to build them with helpful architecture diagrams, and shares example code.

Not directly serverless, but definitely could be, have you seen the work coming from Postman around AI? Sterling Chin published a video about how he recreated Deep Research using Postman Flows. Postman Flows is a low-code workflow builder with reusable components and direct integrations with a ton of LLMs. This is opening the door to strong, cloud-agnostic agentic workflows and I think I see the start of something really powerful here.

I feel like MCP came out of nowhere. Nobody has been talking about it and then last week, everybody is. I liked Marcos Henrique’s post about how to use Step Functions, Bedrock, and MCP to analyze retail feedback. The post is short and sweet, but provides a meaningful example of what feels like is going to be the next major adoption in development with AI.

Evandro Pires shared an article last week about an English learning app he built for his kids. He makes heavy use of serverless and event-driven architectures to translate, generate pictures, and create pronunciations for English flashcards for his kids. All he needs to do is feed his app some words, and everything else is hands free. Extremely cool and practical build!

💡 Tip of the Week

I saw a post from Yan Cui last week that hit close to home. I worked at a job that never gave me access to the AWS Billing console. I was frequently asked for cost analysis and forecasts, but was never given the right tools for success. Everything was a shot in the dark. Give your devs access to see how much they’re using, people!

🐣 New Releases

Congratulations to all the new heroes and AWS Community Builders! This is an exciting time of year with lots of motivation just bursting from the seams. I’m excited to work with you all and learn from you!

The Step Functions Workflow Studio is now available in VS Code. It was previously available via AppComposer, but now stands on its own with asl files. This is a great update!

More VS Code updates - you can now live tail Lambda logs directly in the IDE.

Bedrock Data Automation is generally available. This is a feature that generates insights from multi-modal (text, images, audio) content.

Secrets Manager increased their throughput limits to 10K/sec for GetSecretValue and 40K/sec for DescribeSecret.

Last Words

Spring is in the air (in Texas, at least). Do you have any inspiration you’d like to share? Are you building something and what to bounce ideas? Let me know - I’m always happy to help and would love to help share what you’ve made.

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