Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Alex Debrie, an independent cloud consultant and AWS Data Hero. If you’ve ever taken a look at a little service called DynamoDB, you are sure to know Alex. He literally wrote the book on it. Alex is constantly giving talks, writing blog posts, or offering assistance to developers in the community. He is a perfect example of an engaging contributor to serverless space. Thank you, Alex for sharing your expertise and helping shape serverless to be what it is today.

Tutorials

Kam Lasater starts us off with a walkthrough on how to troubleshoot an elusive Lambda gotcha. He gives us some details on the “not so stateless” part of Lambda when you’re working with files. It’s an informative read with an interesting hacky (his words) solution on how to get around issues with out of memory exceptions.

Serverless case studies are always beneficial to read because you get to see real-world use cases and architectures. Valeria Dibattista tells us her story about how they made an image generation app to process bulk data using a completely serverless architecture. She walks us through the use case and gives an in-depth look at how they designed the system.

Performance often directly correlates with cost in serverless environments. We’re always on the lookout for making our apps faster both to cut costs and to build better end user experiences. Daniele Frasca dives into some latency reducing methods for serverless APIs. He has some great analytic numbers and provides a few options you can take to cut latency down.

Database

I had to do a triple take last week when I saw Jeremy Daly, Rick Houlihan, our serverless superhero Alex Debrie, and Venkat Venkataramani all together to discuss SQL vs NoSQL in the modern data stack. So much content in here it’s hard to summarize into just a couple of bullet points. Absolutely a must watch!

New Releases

NodeJS fans rejoice! The AWS Lambda Powertools for TypeScript went GA for production usage last week. It offers observability features like distributed tracing, structured logging, and async app metrics.

Updates were published to the Serverless Application Lens of the Well-Architected Framework last week. This update brings current best practices into light, which is a huge deal when preparing for production.

Spotlight

With cloud (and serverless) taking a firm hold on many companies, enablement is our next big step. According to Ran Isenberg, a Cloud Platform Engineering team is the way to do it (and I agree). This is an incredibly thorough guide as to what a CPE team is, what they do, and how and when to start one. If your company is looking to get started in the cloud, be sure to give this a read.

Last Words

Thank you to all of our contributors, creating content week after week. You all are what make this community so great. I am always on the lookout for great content, and you guys provide again and again and again. Thank you!

In a fun personal note, I released my 100th blog post last week! It’s been quite the journey and has led me down a path I never thought I’d be on. But I love every second of it.

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