Serverless Superhero
Our serverless superhero this week is Farrah Campbell, head of Modern Compute Community at AWS and OG serverless hero. Farrah has been pivotal in the serverless community for years and I genuinely feel like it wouldn’t be what it is today without her. She has given talks, advocated for, and enabled teams to use serverless and is constantly working to better the community as a whole. I can’t think of a more deserving person to close the year out as the serverless superhero. Thank you Farrah, for all that you do for us!
Tutorials
Every now and then I read an article unrelated to serverless but think it’s too important not to share. That is exactly how I felt when I read Dmitrii Abramov’s post on architecture decision records. His post talks about “the four horsemen of software complexity” and why our applications get harder and harder to maintain over time. There’s a lot of truth to this article and it will hit close to home for many of us.
Whenever I go on any form of social media, I see posts about ChatGPT. It’s trending right now and everyone is integrating with it - for good reason (it’s awesome). I found a double interesting post last week from Lolo code that builds a slackbot that communicates with ChatGPT. This is cool because it shows how to build a slack app that communicates with OpenAI, but also it shows how to build a serverless app with Lolo. Lolo is a platform with a visual designer that builds serverless apps completely in a browser. Might be a fun little experiment to finish out the year.
Give yourself the gift of new perspective by reframing your cache hite rate (CHR) as cache miss rate (CMR). Imagine a CHR drop from 99% to 98%. No big deal, right? But the CMR doubled from 1% to 2%—an alarming 100% increase in the requests now hitting your database. Momento Serverless Cache manages this for you, with a focus on minimizing CMR spikes so you get maximum elasticity and availability. Sponsored
Interesting Reads
We often talk about building serverless apps from scratch but don’t focus enough on production readiness. Getting an application ready for prime time is an art. Ran Isenberg helps us out with his serverless production readiness checklist. He talks about 5 separate categories you need to consider before a go-live and gives some invaluable tips that make long term maintenance a breeze. This is a great addition to the operational readiness review (ORR) provided by AWS.
I recently hit my goal of writing 50 blog posts this calendar year! I wrote mostly about serverless but I covered some other topics as well. Last week I wrote about the lessons learned from writing 50 posts in a year. The article is not about serverless, but rather life lessons and career boosting behavior I discovered from grinding through so many posts. It’s a good starting point if you’re looking to get into writing in 2023.
New Releases
Not much in the way of serverless releases last week. However, PartiQL made it to GovCloud. PartiQL is a SQL-compatible query language for DynamoDB. It helps bridge the gap for developers working their way into a NoSQL mentality.
Spotlight
The AWS Community Builders will always have a special place in my heart. I was a CB for 2.5 years before I became a Serverless Hero. A special activity many of the community builders did this past week was talk about themselves and the program with their AWS Community Builder Christmas blogs. The Community Builders are an incredible group of people and I learn so much from them week after week. This is an amazing chance to get to know some of them a little better.
Tip of the Week
Lars Jacobsson continues to impress us with his uncanny ability to build what we all want. I think he might have outdone himself this time.
Here's a teaser of something I've been working on tonight.#StepFunctions Workflow Studio to the left, #vscode to the right.
— Lars (@lajacobsson) December 22, 2022
With a bit of luck I'll release it before Christmas🎄#aws #serverless pic.twitter.com/XOg6mpj5Jw
Last Words
This is the last issue for 2022! Thank you to everyone for an amazing year. I appreciate each and every one of you, whether you’ve been with me the whole time or just joining. Thank you and I looking forward to growing together.
2023 is going to be a great year of growth. Ready, Set, Cloud will be expanding and I hope to bring as high quality of content as ever.
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
