Serverless Superhero
Our serverless superhero this week is Anna Geller, lead DevEx engineer at Prefect. Anna is sharp as a tack and regularly posts serverless quips on Twitter. She’s been featured in this newsletter for the best definition I’ve seen of what serverless really is. She is a phenomenal writer to boot, posting regularly about Prefect, the cloud, and data. Thank you Anna, for everything you contribute to the community!
Tutorials
We all love the idea of greenfield development and building new EDA applications from scratch. But that’s not always an option. We often have legacy software to communicate with and support long after we transition into the cloud. Lee Gilmore shows us how we can use the serverless event gateway pattern to bridge the gap. He gives us a detailed explanation and code sample of how you can build a communication mechanism with legacy software that does not support AWS services like EventBridge. It’s a great read for those of us that want to move to the cloud but still have to integrate with our existing applications.
In addition to publishing this newsletter, I also regularly post content on my blog. Part of blog writing is republishing/cross-posting on multiple platforms to reach more readers. Last week I (Allen Helton) published an article on a serverless app I built to automatically transform and cross-post my blog posts. I walk through the problems I was trying to solve and describe the way I put everything together to save myself hours of time.
Building robust, fault-tolerant applications is something we all strive for - not just with serverless. A good way to test the effectiveness of the self-healing capabilities of your app is to inject faults, like what Netflix does with their chaos monkey. Last week, Arunsignh Jacob and Sindhura Palakodety released a post on how do conduct chaos experiments using AWS Step Functions and AWS Fault Injection Simulator. The examples provided are for EC2 and ECS, but you can easily draw lines on how you would modify it for serverless apps.
Read how CBS Sports uses facades to enable them to quickly evaluate and deploy a new caching service with simple configuration changes and no code changes! This blog goes over their existing solution, the evaluation criteria, and their results. Ultimately, they were able to meaningfully enhance their ElastiCache-backed caching setup with Momento Serverless Cache. Sponsored
Interesting Reads
The more serverless is adopted, the more we need established best practices and patterns. Ran Isenberg walked through his AWS Lambda Handler Cookbook on the Build on Open Source show where he goes through exactly that. It’s a fun video where he not only talks about the theory but gives us a practical example and dives into code.
When it’s time to refactor your code, a big benefit of serverless is that you don’t have to do it all at once. You can go function by function and refactor to whatever new standards you’re putting in place. In a post not directly about serverless, Ala Shiban talks about how to refactor for startups and discusses reasons and tradeoffs. He goes deep in his analysis, but presents it in a clear, easy to understand way.
New Releases
It’s been hard to keep up with David Boyne and all his new patterns using EventBridge Pipes. In case you missed any of them, they all live on Serverless Land along with many other patterns and best practices.
Spotlight
We all know serverless development and NoSQL go hand in hand. That’s why when I saw Pete Naylor publish his article on what really matters in DynamoDB data modeling I almost passed out from excitement. Pete gives us some invaluable information on designing your data model and even weighs in on the “single table design” concept.
Tip of the Week
As 2022 winds down, we start looking back at our year and celebrating our achievements. Luca Mezzalira sets a high bar and is a real inspiration. What are you most proud of this year?
Thinking about my achievements this year:
— Luca Mezzalira (@lucamezzalira) December 13, 2022
🎯 moved to a #serverless specialist role
📣 36 talks (including 4 talks at #reInvent2022)
🎙 6 podcasts
✍️ 24 blog posts
🏛 1 ref #architecture
🗞 50 #newsletter written
📚 new book signed with @OReillyMedia
What about your 2022? pic.twitter.com/9KcVh3J5zA
Last Words
Do you have any plans upcoming for 2023 and would like to share? There are some exciting things coming for Ready, Set, Cloud that I will be revealing in the upcoming weeks.
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
