Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero is Martin Müller, senior software engineer at Monada Inc and AWS community builder. Martin is an extremely active community member - regularly taking part in user group meetups, writing blog posts, and publishing a weekly newsletter. His GitHub page is full of CDK goodness if you’re looking for reference materials. Thank you Martin for everything you do.

Tutorials

Mike Roberts gave us an article last week on an often hotly debated topic - MonoLambda functions vs single responsibility Lambda functions. He dives deep into use cases, differences, and pros and cons of each approach all while keeping score between the two. It’s a nicely illustrated article as well, which helps explain the differences even better.

In the last issue, AWS announced that Lambda Powertools for Typescript were generally available. Thanks to Matt Morgan, we now have a detailed look at what it offers. He even goes so far as to show code on how to consume the new features. If you haven’t considered adopting this package in your Lambda functions, it might be the time.

Security is always at the top of our minds with cloud development. Lee James Gilmore helps drive the importance with an incredibly in-depth piece on serverless authorization. He leaves no stone left unturned in this piece as he discusses Lambda authorizers and Cognito user pools. He even walks you through implementing a solution and explains every step along the way!

When we talk about sending an email, we think that’s an easy solved problem. But what about personalized emails at scale? Jannik Wempe details how Hashnode has solved this problem with a completely serverless solution. He talks about multiple solutions and the one they ended up going with and all the issues they ran into while implementing.

New Releases

A useful feature was released last week that allows CloudFormation to publish EventBridge notifications when a resource status changes, stack status changes, or drift is detected. This is a particularly handy in production systems to make sure you keep mischief from your development teams at bay.

A new feature in Lambda came out that offers attribute-based access control (ABAC) for API actions. This is an authorization strategy that defines access permissions based on tags. Pretty useful as AWS adoption grows within your company.

A surprising release this past week is a new design system from AWS. This isn’t serverless, but is an interesting release for a typically back-end focused vendor. It provides a set of react components for you to consume and get rolling immediately.

Spotlight

We talk about scaling in this newsletter pretty regularly. One thing we don’t often get insights into is how AWS scales. We know that it does scale, but the details are fuzzy. Julian Wood helps remove some of that shroud of mystery with his post on understanding AWS Lambda scaling and throughput. It shows scaling events with wonderful illustrations and explains exactly how Lambda catches up with bursts of traffic.

Upcoming Events

In a rare lookahead for this newsletter, we have an upcoming serverless conference a couple weeks away. The Moar Serverless!! 2022 conference is a free full-day event on August 11. It features 9 speakers covering the tools and techniques necessary to be successful with serverless today.

Last Words

The rich content that is getting poured out from the community is amazing. The time and effort that goes into it impresses me week after week. Thank you all fro sharing what you’re learning with the community. It is all of us who are helping to establish the best practices and standards for tomorrow’s serverless world.

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