Serverless Superhero
This week’s serverless superhero is AJ Stuyvenberg, serverless engineering lead at DataDog and AWS Community Builder. Whenever AWS releases a new serverless feature and DataDog immediately supports it, you can thank AJ. He is a brilliant engineer that helps us consume the latest and greatest as fast as possible. He writes high quality content on his blog and engages frequently in serverless conversations on Twitter. Thank you AJ, for all your contributions to the community!
Tutorials
Arpad Toth starts us off with a wonderful post on authorizing requests with Lambda@Edge. He guides us through how to build an authorizer to validate requests to a Lambda function url. He covers the bulk of the implementation and also shows us how to navigate some gotchas when dealing with computing on the edge.
Alex Debrie published an article on how to use a cache to accelerate DynamoDB (or replace it). He covers not only the performance boost but even the scalability and cost benefits you gain when implementing a cache. It’s a thought provoking article that reaches deep on technical detail but presents it in an easy to consume manner.
A more complicated event-driven pattern with huge benefits is event sourcing. Valentin Beggi, Charles Géry, Juliette Fournier, and Thomas Aribart share with us a new open source typescript library from Kumo that attempts to abstract the complexities away. This library provides a set of classes and methods to help implement an event sourcing pattern that plugs right into DynamoDB. Seems like it has a lot of merit and could potentially make this difficult pattern more attainable for many devs.
Another cool library recent released is the Amazon .NET Lambda Annotations nuget package. Anita Andonoska walks us through how it works, describes a couple of the available annotations, and tells us tips and tricks for making sure it works properly. Great resource if you’re working with Lambda and .NET!
Alex DeBrie breaks down 3 choices that determine the perfect caching strategy Caching is fast (hello, sub-millisecond p99 response times). Caching is also fun (nothing is more fun than delighted users and repeat customers). But caching is tricky, meaning the right caching strategy is key. Determining strategy starts with 3 simple questions: where, when, and how? Read Alex’s full thoughts on the Momento blog. Sponsored
New Releases
By now you’ve likely heard of Momento. They are the first completely serverless cache available on the market. Last week, they went generally available and are ready for you to implement them in your apps. It’s free to try and you can implement it in only 5 lines of code, which is just crazy! Congratulations to the founders Khawaja Shams and Daniela Miao and the rest of the Momento team!
Spotlight
A frustrating argument I’m often hit with when discussing serverless is that it gets expensive “at scale”. But rarely do I hear what “at scale” actually equates to. So I (Allen Helton) did some apples and oranges math to compare EC2, App Runner, and Lambda costs. My goal was to figure out how to calculate when serverless is more expensive than containers. There is a lot of specific detail left out of the article when calculating costs, but the premise goes to show “scale” likely refers to hundreds of millions of monthly Lambda calls being more expensive than containers.
Upcoming Events
The Serverless Summit is the worlds largest serverless conference and is coming up! It spans November 16-17 and registration is free! Some of the industry’s best serverless engineers like Matt Coulter, Alex Debrie, Yan Cui, and Sarah Hamilton (and more!) will be talking about a vast range of topics. Yours truly will be on a serverless panel as well. You cannot miss this one!
AWS re:Invent is later this month as well. The biggest software conference of the year is only a few weeks away. If you plan on attending and want to meet up, let me know!
Tip of the Week
David Boyne, the true EventBridge MVP, shared with us some incredible content he wrote last week. He is helping establish best practices and common patterns with Event Driven Architectures, which is something we all can’t thank him enough for.
Busy week writing EventBridge content 😍👇
— David Boyne 🚀 (@boyney123) November 4, 2022
✍🏻 Publish with DynamoDBhttps://t.co/I524K6X2Ss
✍🏻 Claim check patternhttps://t.co/geplAR2fY7
✍🏻Enrich Eventshttps://t.co/YK7ojBuNK2
🧑💻 New CDK construct for schemashttps://t.co/svfcz4TBHd
Want more? 👇https://t.co/3TQgA0kZcJ
Last Words
Are you doing something cool and would like it featured in this newsletter? Maybe you need some help getting an idea to fruition? Let me know and I will help any way I can!
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
