Serverless Superhero
This week’s serverless superhero is Sam Williams, serverless consultant and AWS Community Builder. Sam is the mastermind behind Complete Coding, a high quality serverless enablement and consultation company. He regularly publishes high quality content aimed at teaching developers to build faster and build apps that last. Thank you Sam for everything you do!
Tutorials
We all should be comfortable with using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for our serverless deployments. But what do you do if a resource you need to deploy isn’t supported? Marcin Sodkiewicz has you covered in his post on how he created a custom resource to build Identity Center users. Marcin shares his code and a new npm package he built for easier custom resource development. This is a great way to extend our IaC practices!
Many of us have had one of those “oops” moments where we accidentally built a recursive pattern that generates a sky high AWS bill. Dheeraj Inampudi goes into detail about a time when he accidentally spent $40,000 this way. He explains how it happened and what can be done to prevent it from happening to you.
Interesting Reads
What if there was a way we didn’t have to write infrastructure as code? What if we could write our business logic and the infrastructure could be determined from that? There are a few solutions out there that tackle the infrastructure from code problem, and I decided to test them. I (Allen Helton) did a benchmark of three IfC vendors comparing the different approaches and capabilities of what is available today. If you haven’t been exposed to infrastructure from code yet, now is the time to try!
AJ Stuyvenberg warns us that serverless tools cut both ways in his post from last week. He reminds us that the tools we may take for granted like Serverless Framework, CDK, or SAM are powerful abstractions that aren’t perfect. He describes a recent experience he had troubleshooting an issue with these tools and offers us a gentle reminder to be careful how we build our applications.
Congratulations to the new AWS Heroes! In this last batch of heroes of 2022, we have three new Serverless Heroes including Jones Zachariah Noel, Luciano Mammino, and Paweł Zubkiewicz. Welcome and thank you for everything you do!
Serverless caching can reduce your MongoDB (and other database) operations! AWS Data Hero, Rob Koch, shares how he added Momento’s serverless cache to MongoDB with 5 lines of code to see a 40% reduction in processing time. Dive into his blog to learn how you can easily reduce cost and latencies so you can refocus precious time on other work! Sponsored
New Releases
Buckle up.
Serverless Cloud is breaking off from Serverless, Inc and becoming Ampt. This is a big movement that opens up tons of potential with Infrastructure from Code. Congrats to the team!
SQS introduced attribute-based access controls. This enables you to add tags to your queues that can be used with IAM to restrict access.
If you’re an AppSync user, life just got a lot simpler. JavaScript resolvers are now supported in your queries! These can sit side by side with VTL in your pipeline resolvers.
Amazon EventBridge has new filtering capabilities, including suffix filtering, case insensitive matching, and OR pattern matching. This opens up a ton of opportunities, including reacting to events from S3 with specific file extensions!
The AWS SAM CLI now has Terraform support for local testing. This enables you to test your functions from a Terraform template directly from the SAM CLI.
Node.js 18 runtime is now supported in Lambda! I think that might be record speed for supporting a runtime after it reaches LTS. This runtime automatically includes the AWS SDK v3, but no longer includes v2. So if you aren’t using v3 yet, this will be a breaking change for you and not an automatic upgrade!
Spotlight
We’ve seen the word “serverless” stamped on some things lately that make you wonder if that word has any meaning anymore. To many of us, serverless comes with specific implications that if you don’t satisfy, you aren’t serverless. Khawaja Shams and Kirk Kirkconnell spell it out succinctly in their post last week on fighting off fake-serverless bandits with the true definition of serverless. They talk about what is and isn’t serverless and offer a quick litmus test to make the determination yourself.
Upcoming Events
AWS re:Invent is next week! Big announcements have already been made, I can’t imagine what is to come at the actual event.
Tip of the Week
Not so much serverless (yet), but always a generally polarizing concept is low/no code. With the way infrastructure from code is trending, this might be something we see in the not too distant future with serverless. (Or if you know of something now, please tell me!)
The answers in the comments share some interesting thoughts and cool recommendations of some tools to try.
I’m curious to see the developers’ thoughts on low code and no code.
— Catalin (@catalinmpit) November 18, 2022
Do you use low/no code tools? Feel free to mention the tools and how you use them.
Last Words
The serverless summit was last week and it hosted some of the best serverless minds in the industry today. As the videos come online, I’ll be sure to link to them in the newsletter. Thank you to globaldatanet for putting on a great conference and thank you to all the speakers for your amazing content!
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
