Serverless Superhero
Our serverless superhero this week is Daniele Frasca, head of syndication at Seven.One and AWS Community Builder. Daniele writes highly detailed articles about serverless on his blog. His most recent series on serverless latency dove deep into the nuance of serverless operations. It’s a great read to deepen your understanding of the intricacies of the tech. Thank you Daniele, for all you do for the community!
Tutorials
A common pattern in CI/CD is to deploy your code into a non-production environment for testing purposes. An issue I had early on with serverless development was developers stomping over each other when they opened up multiple pull requests at the same time. But thanks to Matt Martz, that might be a solved problem. He built a self-destructing stack construct in the CDK that is perfect for developer environments. These stacks utilize Step Functions to act as a timer that will delete your stack. He uses CloudFormation custom resources to kick off the workflow, which is a clever way to trigger something on stack deployment.
The EventBridge scheduler is an incredible feature, but it hasn’t had Step Function support until last week. Pubudu Jayawardana built a POC showing how you can use Step Functions to both create and clean up one-time scheduled events. It’s a simple demonstration that unlocks a lot of opportunities.
Interesting Reads
Did you notice EventBridge seemed a little snappier last week? So did Luc van Donkersgoed. He shared with us some drastic improvements on both p50 and p99 latency of the service and has updated his serverless messaging latency blog post to reflect the changes. This is one of the things I love about serverless - the services keep getting better without consumers needing to do anything!
Alex Debrie is well-known for being a smart dude. Last week he wrote an article explaining the difference between event-driven architectures and event-based compute in serverless applications. It dives deep into the definitions of the two concepts and aims to set the record straight on what they mean and imply. There’s so much content in this article, make sure you set some time aside to really take it all in.
Momento Serverless Cache is now available in AWS region ap-south-1 (Mumbai)! This expansion enables faster data access and significant cost efficiencies for India-based businesses and developers—and this is just the beginning. Momento is dedicated to rapid expansion of access for their serverless offerings. Find more details on the Momento blog. Sponsored
Lately I’ve been building projects with the goal of making my life a little easier (who doesn’t want that). I’ve automated my blog posting, newsletter sending, and workout creation. It’s been great, I’m getting hours of time back every week! So I (Allen Helton) wrote a blog post explaining why you should do it too. Besides the obvious “it makes your life easier,” there are some other benefits to your career hidden in there too.
Podcast
Episode 4 of the Ready, Set, Cloud podcast came out on Friday where I spoke with Andres Moreno about being both serverless-first and API-first, something that you wouldn’t think is possible. We dive into what each of these “firsts” mean, the tooling that makes the magic happen, and how his overall development process has been turned on its head.
Yan Cui released episode 72 of Real World Serverless last week where he talks with Rowan Udell about his book The Practical AWS IAM Guide and gets his thoughts on IAM best practices.
New Releases
Step Functions added 35 new service integrations last week! Integrations include EMR Serverless, AWS Clean Rooms, AWS IoT Fleetwise, and AWS IoT Roborunner, and EventBridge scheduler!
Spotlight
Do guys remember that article I wrote on how I cross-post my blogs? I open-sourced the app with the hope someone would make incremental improvements on it. Well, Matt Martz took it and ran with it. He made it better than I ever could have hoped. It now boasts full CDK support, optional cross-posting to different websites, and new GitHub integrations. There’s so much in there and he covers it in his post extremely well. Thank you Matt!
Tip of the Week
There are a few people that always make me drop everything and read their content as soon as they post something new. Lee Gilmore is one of those people. He has a masterful way of making advanced serverless architecture easy to understand with relatable content. He reminds us of the incredible depth of content he has available online… for free!
If your interested in #Serverless on #aws go checkout 👇🏽https://t.co/I4CV9Xf43O
— Serverless Advocate 🥑 (@LeeJamesGilmore) February 21, 2023
where I cover most use cases, patterns and services, along with supporting free code repos written in #TypeScript and the AWS CDK / Serverless Framework 👨🏽💻 (feel free to retweet for others) pic.twitter.com/inkAKXxhWD
Last Words
There was a ton of amazing content last week in serverless. Thank you all for spending your time building, creating, and sharing!
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
