Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Benjamen Pyle, CTO at Curantis Solutions and AWS Community Builder. Benjamen is a prolific and insightful blogger, writing about all things serverless and offering rare perspectives on tech from a CTO’s position. He also is popping up in more and more talks about building on AWS, so be sure to catch him when you can! Thank you Benjamen for everything you contribute to the community!

Interesting Reads

Lee Gilmore has been on a roll lately. Last week he released a post sharing how he uses plop to improve serverless DevEx. The article covers how he created a CLI to generate templated code in his lightweight clean code approach. I don’t know how he does it - there’s so much incredible content in here I can’t believe it’s only been a week since his last insightful post.

Every now and then I see someone talk about a project they built and think “wow, that is a really cool use case and implementation!” That was exactly how I felt with Casey Johnson’s post on how he built a serverless SMS app for theme park wait times. His post clearly states the problem he was solving, describes his architecture well, and explains how and why his app works so well. This is a great article with an engaging writing style - plus the code is open source!

Automations keep stacking up in Ready, Set, Cloud. Last week I published an article describing how I automated writer analytics and text-to-speech. I walk through my open-source project that uses Chat-GPT and Amazon Polly together in a Step Function workflow to analyze new blog posts and boost the accessibility of my blog.

Matt Martz shared a cool article dissecting CDK aspects. He explains what they are, how they work, and gives some best practices around when and how to use them. This is something I can’t find a SAM equivalent for, it’s a really cool piece of functionality unique to the CDK.

This is going to be the last time I mention the whole “Prime Video moved from serverless to monolith” fiasco. Paul Johnston wrote, in my opinion, the final words that needed to be said on the whole ordeal.

Podcasts

Episode #10 of the Ready, Set, Cloud podcast came out last week. I talk with Taylor Jacobsen about the AWS Hero program. We discuss the nomination process, what AWS looks for in their heroes, and recall some of our favorite memories about the program.

Yan Cui spoke with Eduard Bargues on the Real-World Serverless podcast about a bunch of serverless topics including a serverless-first mindset, Lambda vs Fargate, and why DX teams are important. They also talk about the fascinating EventBridge implementation at Ohpen which allows for FIFO support with events.

New Releases

Baselime introduced their Markers API, which allows you to indicate when you have a significant architectural event. You can flag when you have a major deployment or data migration in your system, allowing you to relate potential issues with developer activities.

Momento released a data migrator utility - enabling easy migration into Momento Cache from Redis, csv, json, and more.

Spotlight

Last week AWS hosted Serverless Innovation Day, which was a full 7-hour livestream with the latest and greatest in serverless. Content ranged from fireside chats to building at scale to success stories with EDA. I recommend watching the whole thing - but in pieces. The content is amazing and you really need time to soak all of it in.

Tip of the Week

A new service made its way into the market last week. CloudGTO went public beta. They aim to simplify cloud app design and implementation through an easy-to-use webpage that generates IaC for you. It’s a neat idea that’s worth trying out.

Hi, we’re CloudGTO & we just launched our Public Beta 🎉

Join for free and let us know how you like it: https://t.co/fOnBhG5GuD 🚀

Our mission is simple: Help cloud developers build cloud applications faster. How do we do that exactly? Check out the thread below 👇🏼 pic.twitter.com/DNiXXV80wZ

— CloudGTO (cloudgto.com) (@CloudGTO) May 19, 2023

Last Words

Summer approaches! Any fun projects planned? Let me know about it and I can share on the next issue of the newsletter.

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