Serverless Superhero
Our serverless superhero is Boris Tane. Boris is the founder at Baselime and is working on changing the observability game. He is instrumenting Observability as Code, allowing users to quickly deploy, view, run, and address any issues across their distributed ecosystem. He also shares his thoughts on Twitter when he’s diving deep into a topic and offers highly valuable and thought provoking discussions. Thank you Boris for everything you do!
Tutorials
Marcia Villalba walks us through the new EventBridge Scheduler functionality and shows us how to create a schedule through the console and via a SAM template. She shows us how to setup the right IAM permissions to get things flowing and demonstrates how simple and fast this new functionality really is.
Speaking of scheduled events, Step Functions have been able to run “scheduled tasks” for a while now. Dennis Traub shows us how to get a Lambda function to execute at (almost) the top of a minute via the Wait state in a state machine. It’s a creative concept that works if you need detailed precision, but might be a little expensive if the precision is unnecessary.
AWS Hero Alex DeBrie dives into how to accelerate Amazon DynamoDB in this blog! DynamoDB is a rock-solid database for high-volume applications, but caching can make it even better. Alex outlines how to accelerate performance, increase scalability, and reduce cost for DynamoDB by adding a simple serverless cache like Momento. Read more here! Sponsored
Interesting Reads
A topic that comes up regularly when discussing serverless is sustainability. The Serverless Edge offered us 5 ways to start delivering sustainable technology through serverless last week that helps visualize the concept in its entirety. It gives a checklist offering a quick yes/no to decide if you’re running sustainably, but it also gives a detailed guideline on sustainable practices. It’s an easy read that could make a huge impact on how you build.
One of the sustainable guidelines from above is to minimize your infrastructure. Last week I (Allen Helton) published a blog discussing API Gateway direct integrations and addressing some of the concerns people often have with them. While I don’t talk about sustainability directly, I do cover how to remove unnecessary Lambda functions from your code.
New Releases
AWS X-Ray now supports trace linking between SQS and Lambda. Now your traces can continue further down their distributed flow to visualize your system better.
SNS adds support for payload-based message filtering. This is similar to the capability in EventBridge that allows you to subscribe to messages when the content has a specific value. Great update!
AWS SAM users just got a big productivity update. You can now use VSCode or JetBrains to sync your apps to the cloud. The AWS toolkit released a plugin that integrates SAM directly into the IDE, allowing you to use SAM Sync. Just be sure not to use this for production!
Spotlight
Sheen Brisals continues his series on thinking granular to go faster in serverless with his post on the granular mindset. Sheen explains that the secret to building truly great serverless software is being able to dive deep when necessary to fine tune your infrastructure. He talks about how taking advantage of nuance and tiny technical detail in the services you use help you balance cost, performance, and sustainability.
Upcoming Events
AWS re:Invent starts today! Lots of great releases, talks, discussions, and many more things to be had the rest of this week. I’ll do my best to cover all the detail in our next issue; I anticipate there will be a lot!
Tip of the Week
There has been a lot of talk lately on what serverless is, what it has become, and where it is going. There’s plenty of confusion and strong opinions out there. Ben Kehoe gives us his thought las week.
I feel like we're headed in a direction where serverless means "removing things developers have to deal with" when it should be "removing things the business as a whole has to deal with", and we're losing the recognition those are often not well-aligned.
— Ben Kehoe (@ben11kehoe) November 22, 2022
Last Words
This is a big week for the serverless space. Stay tuned for big announcements coming from AWS and their partners! I’ll try to cover as much as I can in the upcoming issues.
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
