Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Marc Schröter, CEO of globaldatanet. Marc regularly shares information on serverless on Twitter and LinkedIn, sparking innovation and inspiration in others. He founded the largest serverless conference in the world - Serverless Summit which is happening on November 16-17th of this year. It’s people like Marc that help drive the inspiration of others to go and shape the community we have today. Thank you Marc, for all you do for serverless.

Tutorials

Idempotency is one of the AWS serverless design principles. If you are unfamiliar with the term, or feel like you only kinda get it, Adrienne Tacke gave us the most clear, informative, and entertaining talks on idempotency I have ever seen. Adrienne is a wonderful storyteller and helps cut through the confusion on what exactly idempotency is, why it’s important, and how to implement it.

We hear a lot of talk about “lift and shift” when companies want to migrate their applications to the cloud. Typically this means taking the software running on servers in data centers and making them run on VMs with a cloud vendor. But Marcia Villalba has another idea. She shares how you can lift and shift a MERN stack to the cloud to run completely serverless. This is a great walkthrough showing you exactly what you need to do to migrate your app.

I’m a big fan of peeking behind the curtain to see how AWS services work. Last week we got a great in-depth analysis of how DynamoDB scales and operates. Now, we’ve seen videos about DynamoDB many times, but this one is different. Shwetang Oza and Robert McCauley give us an incredible amount of detail in an easily digestible format. They cover EVERYTHING related to how DynamoDB works in an information dense session.

New Releases

DynamoDB got a high value feature last week, allowing you to import data into a new table directly from S3. This is particularly useful for disaster recovery scenarios or for converting legacy ETL data into your app.

Spotlight

Software is all about iteration. Last week I (Allen Helton) talked about my serverless journey and how we came to build two production apps by starting over with purpose. Do it, do it right, do it better. Build with the knowledge you have now. Make it better with the experience you gained from the first time around.

Last Words

People consume their content in different forms. Some people are readers, some like listening to podcasts, and others like to watch videos. This week we had a high volume of great quality videos and I thank everyone who spent their time creating the content. You get a little something different with each medium you consume your content which makes this issue particularly fun.

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