Serverless Picks of the Week
Issue #4: Orchestration, anyone?

Serverless Superhero

This week our serverless superhero is Matt Morgan, senior director of software engineering at PowerSchool. Matt is an AWS Community Builder and extremely active contributor on the aws-community-projects GitHub project. He provides a wealth of knowledge to the community not only around serverless, but business growth in the cloud. Thank you for all that you do, Matt!

Tutorials

Serverless Framework just introduced their Compose functionality, which allows users to deploy multiple services with a single command. Orchestrating deployments of microservice architectures can be complex and frustrating, but Matthiew Napoli walks us through how to use the command with a lightweight example. He also describes some of the primary benefits of using this new functionality.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about how serverless governance is everything. This week, Mohammed Izzy has written a post on how you can get started enforcing some of your governance rules. He writes about using AWS Config to run both managed and custom rules to validate your infrastructure. Pretty cool!

With everyone talking about Event-Driven Architectures (EDAs) lately, there are some words being thrown around that some people might not recognize or know the difference between them. Pablo Iorio breaks down the differences between choreography and orchestration with pros, cons, and when to use each one. This is incredibly helpful if you’re trying to break into the event-driven space!

New Releases

An interesting and exciting new release from AWS this week introduces the Amazon DevOps Guru for Serverless which hones in on your serverless applications to provide some invaluable insights. It uses ML to identify anomalies and gives you the tools to quickly do some root cause analysis. What’s more, pricing of this service seems fairly reasonable, charging you for monitoring on a per-resource-per-hour basis.

The much anticipated Aurora Serverless v2 went GA last Thursday, providing the capability to scale to your wildest dreams in fractions of a second. Because of the speed and scaling improvements it inadvertently has become up to 90% cheaper to run. This release supports MySQL8.0- and PostgreSQL 13-compatible editions of Amazon Aurora.

Database

With the release of Aurora Serverless v2, Marcia Villalba has written a post breaking it down in an incredible amount of detail. She gives us a peek under the covers of this service to help devs figure out how any why they need to get started with this new release.

While we all impatiently await serverless OpenSearch, Jake Scott is taking matters into his own hands. He has come up with a proof of concept for a full-text search using DynamoDB, EFS, and Lambda. His post walks us through his design in great detail and even includes a link to the public GitHub repo. Thanks, Jake!

Spotlight

In December of 2021, AWS announced the sustainability pillar as part of the Well-Architected Framework. Since then, Sheen Brisals has been writing a series of sustainability articles with serverless. In his new post, he describes the steps you can take to build more environmentally friendly and sustainable applications. If you will be attending Serverless Days Paris, he will be giving a talk about Sustainability in Serverless that you don’t want to miss!

Last Words

Thank you all for your contributions to the community! It always warms my heart to see all the content you create and the willingness you have to help teach our peers what you’re learning. This really is the best tech community out there.

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

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