Serverless Superhero
Our serverless superhero this week is Michael Walmsley, serverless application architect at Accenture and AWS Community Builder. Michael is highly active in the serverless community and writes great content on his blog. He seems to know everybody in serverless, so if you haven’t had the chance to meet him yet, be sure to reach out! Thank you Michael for everything you do for the community!
Tutorials
Lambda container images have been around for a while, but they still have a shroud of mystery around them. How do you build one? When do you need one? Can you deploy it via IaC? Ran Isenberg posted a great article last week answering all those questions. He explains use cases for a Lambda container image and exactly how to build one in the CDK. It’s the most concise article I’ve read about the topic. Great work!
In part two of his series on EventBridge pipes being the missing piece in your EDA puzzle, Mario Bittencourt covers the power of enrichments and transformations. He walks us through an example converting a DynamoDB stream record to a meaningful SNS message. He covers what happens when your enrichments fail and leaves us with a reminder that it’s not a silver bullet.
Interesting Reads
You’ve probably heard me say it a few times already, but 2023 is the year of observability. To help us in our adventure, I (Allen Helton) released an article giving you good news and bad news about your cloud metrics. Many of us fall into the “just deploy the APM vendor stack to my environment and we’re done” trap, thinking our observability game is on point. But I have some bad news…. that’s not enough.
There’s a lot of talk about what serverless is (and isn’t), but there’s another important question: why? Why serverless? By their very nature, serverless services have a tendency to fade beautifully into the background, but it can make all the benefits a little obscure. Read up on 5 reasons why serverless is worth all the buzz and worth your investment. Plus, get some ideas on answering the next key question: where can you introduce serverless to your stack? Sponsored
In our last issue, it was announced that AWS released a new feature to limit the maximum concurrency of SQS to Lambda. Zac Charles gave it a once over to answer the question “does maximum concurrency solve the Lambda+SQS issue?” Along with his findings, he beautifully describes the SQS overpull problem which seems to still be an issue even with this new feature.
New Releases
Not much in the way of new serverless features came out last week. However, the videos from the Serverless Summit 2022 are now online! The videos are separated into day one and day two playlists to help you easily find what you’re looking for.
Spotlight
Those of you that follow my blog probably know I’m a big infrastructure from code guy. I did an experiment a while back that compared a few IfC vendors against several categories. Ala Shiban published a great article on the current state of infrastructure from code where he dissects the different ways 7 vendors approach the problem. It’s a great way to gauge your options if you’re looking to dip your toes into the space.
Tip of the Week
With serverless adoption rates skyrocketing, a portion of the current workforce has experience only with serverless development. Boris Tane ran across this last week when he was speaking to a new dev. Crazy to think how our paradigms are shifting and what some of the new de facto skills have become.
I met an engineer today who told me he "only knows serverless"
— boris tane (@boristane) January 12, 2023
he's self-taught, and has been working exclusively in serverless-first teams
there's an interesting future ahead with more serverless-first developers joining the industry
Last Words
Ready, Set, Cloud is growing! If you haven’t checked out the podcast, episode 1 released last Friday. New episodes are coming every other week, so look for the next one this coming Friday, the 27th!
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
