Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Marco Troisi, CTO at Trilo and AWS Community Builder. Marco is the author behind The Serverless Mindset, which is a blog, newsletter, and podcast all about AWS serverless. He has great content and approaches writing with a clever standpoint that makes you think about things a little differently. Thank you Marco, for everything you do!

Tutorials

When building on EventBridge, have you ever wondered if you should use a rule with a cron timer or a schedule? I know I have. Ran Isenberg looks to demystify one over the other in his post on how to build AWS serverless scheduled tasks. He explains the differences between the two, makes some interesting observations about the DX around them, and of course, provides working CDK to get you started.

Marcia Villalba published a video on how to connect a DynamoDB stream to an EventBridge pipe to send an email. This is a super cool example of using event-driven architectures to react to events in your system. This is a practical use case that many of us have, and she makes it look so easy! Her example walks through CDK code to connect the infrastructure together with little to no actual “code”. This is mostly a configuration exercise!

Interesting Reads

This newsletter highlights outstanding members of the tech community every week. But not everyone is clear on what “the tech community” even is or how to find it. So last week I wrote an article diving into it and explaining how to find your community and why it’s the best source of growth for your tech career.

I love all the use cases I see popping up with ChatGPT. A particularly fun one was from Anna Geller last week about how she uses it to send messages to her mom. No, she’s not offloading the entire conversation, but she’s using it to kick off a dialog just in case she forgets to do so every Sunday. I haven’t seen another use case treating it as an accountability partner, this one is cool!

I made a fun little video last week about IoT data. The video itself is not much more than a silly teaser for a blog post on managing IoT device statuses with a serverless API. This was my first foray into IoT and it was much simpler than I originally thought. I see a lot of potential from this launch point.

New Releases

AppSync released a cool feature last week. We now have access to Merged APIs, which consolidate multiple source GraphQL APIs into one. This provides a seamless, unified experience for large teams pushing out multiple APIs for the same product.

Momento released a new Web SDK last week, enabling users to have direct access to their cache and pub/sub messaging straight from a browser. This is a huge feature, opening up single-line WebSocket configuration and shared client/server caches. I’m really excited about this one!

Baselime added S3 archival of data to their growing list of features. This means your telemetry data will be automatically pushed into an S3 bucket you own so you don’t lose out on that invaluable data. It also makes it extremely easy for compliance regulations around logged data.

We all love when things get better without us having to do anything. It’s what we love about serverless. Ampt released an update last week doing just this. They added support for App Runner behind the scenes, which is a great serverless container service providing super-low latencies. Since Ampt is about infrastructure FROM code, the only difference you’ll notice is faster run times.

Spotlight

Matt Martz published the first episode of his Serverless Cult Podcast, where he talks through the post by Ran Isenberg mentioned earlier. I only wish I had the intricate way with words Matt does in this breath of fresh air. It’s a funny mix of fancy words and great content which makes this podcast a much-needed cathartic break.

Tip of the Week

In case you missed it, EventBridge just got WAY faster. Gotta love the continuous improvements of serverless services. Who doesn’t love customer obsession?!

I'm excited to announce the Amazon EventBridge Event Bus latency improvements are now live in all AWS Regions 🚀! We're observing p50 of 90ms and p90 of 140ms - an 80% improvement in latency. 🧵https://t.co/f7lx1fks1O

— Nickste (@nickste) May 19, 2023

Last Words

Are you speaking at an upcoming conference? Which one? As the summer begins to roll in, people are getting excited to learn and teach others. It’s my favorite part of the year!

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