Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero for the week is Sheen Brisals, engineering manager at The LEGO Group and AWS Serverless Hero. Sheen has been leading the way on evangelizing serverless sustainability in the community. He is an active participant in major AWS conferences like re:invent and various serverless days meetups. If you have questions on anything serverless, Sheen is your guy. Thank you, Sheen, for all of your contributions to the community!

Tutorials

The serverless in the park conference took place last week and had a stellar line-up of presenters. Best of all, it was streamed for free, so you can join in on the fun and learn about an incredibly wide range of topics.

A unique article was posted by Pramila Kamat where she walks us through how to use SAM Pipelines to deploy serverless applications. She talks about common errors and how to get around them. This is one of only a few posts I’ve seen on SAM pipelines, so it is a welcome addition!

AJ Gadgil tells us in great detail about how he created a recommendation system for a global website that had significant availability requirements. He walks through each phase of the project and has some insightful points on topics we don’t normally cover in the serverless community.

New Releases

If you’ve never used AWS Trusted Advisor, you should start. It recommends changes in your AWS resources for optimal workloads, which reduce your costs and improve performance. Both of which also help drive sustainability. Anyway, you have even more reason to use it now because it includes recommendations for over and under-provisioned Lambdas for memory size.

We know that observability makes the serverless world go round. An update to SAM CLI this week enables you to easily add X-Ray tracing via the sam init command. Now it’s even easier to get a look deep into your event driven architectures.

Sustainability

Our serverless superhero, Sheen Brisals, has posted part four of his series on serverless sustainability where he turns the tables and talks about the cloud vendor’s responsibility. This is a cool window into shared responsibility when it comes to building sustainable applications.

David Krohn gives us some specific examples on how to optimize workloads for sustainability. Software is never done, and David points out that as new features come out from your cloud vendor, that adopting them often lead to more efficient hardware and software loads.

Spotlight

Around a year ago, I posted the 5 types of architecture diagrams on my blog. It has some parallels with the C4 model, but definitely has characteristics of its own. This week, I’ve published an article on a new type of architecture diagram: the critical path. This diagram is used for documenting ecosystem data flows, identifying bottlenecks and blast radii, and detailing high level architecture. All this is rolled into a single diagram to provide a high-value, cross-cutting architecture diagram.

Last Words

If you aren’t thinking about building sustainable software, it’s about time. There are many tips and tricks out there on how to start, and AWS even has their customer carbon footprint tool to help you. Thinking about the earth hasn’t traditionally been on the forefront of developer minds, but better late than never.

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