Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Wenqi Glantz, software architect at ArisGlobal. Wenqi is an outstanding writer, frequently blogging about AI, serverless, and DevOps on Medium. Her passion and desire to help others is inspiring and the insights in her content are top-notch. Thank you Wenqi for everything you do!

Tutorials

If Lee Gilmore and I weren’t already friends, we’d be friends now. His post on serverless OpenAPI and Amazon Gateway development is amazing. He shows some detailed examples of what you can do with OpenAPI and the CDK, gives advantages and disadvantages of going “API-first”, and provides a meaningful code sample to help show his points. I learned a lot from this one!

Jeremy Daly gave us a cool walkthrough of caching MongoDB with Momento last week. It’s a helpful post that describes different database caching use cases and offers code samples of how to do it.

Interesting Reads

I think we talk about cold starts too much. But whenever I find a particularly interesting article around them, I have to share. AJ Stuyvenberg wrote about Lambda lazy loading to help with cold start times. The gist is that you move your import/require statements into the code instead of outside the main handler to help speed up the init phase. There are reasons you should and shouldn’t do this - it varies on your use case. It’s a cool insight we now have thanks to the cold start flame graph provided by DataDog.

Davide de Paolis reminded us about how you use DynamoDB makes a big difference in your application. He tells us a story about how solving a problem isn’t right or wrong, but could be inefficient. He mentions how this can be the case with your DynamoDB usage. While you solved the business problem, there might be some optimizations that could make your app run faster and more cost-effectively.

Podcasts

Episode 11 of the Ready, Set, Cloud podcast released Friday with Dax Raad. We talk about serverless project structure, building long-term maintainable apps, and discuss why TypeScript is the best programming language.

A particularly insightful episode of the Real-World Serverless podcast debuted last week with Ben Kehoe. He discusses with Yan Cui the meaninglessness of the term “serverless”. It’s a good listen where they talk about a range of topics from developer experience to poor marketing terms.

Matt Martz brings another hilarious episode of The Serverless Cult podcast to us, where he talks about Kubernetes (uh oh) and the new Merged API feature on AppSync. I love this style of podcast, the satire makes it such an engaging listen.

New Releases

SNS now supports X-Ray tracing for FIFO topics. This will allow us to see if processing bottlenecks are a direct result of the ordered nature of these types of messages.

Baselime now natively supports App Runner. Nothing new for you to instrument, the logs will now get piped directly into the observability tool.

Spotlight

There is so much content around AI. But for every positive thing I see, there are three detractors saying it’s unsafe, incorrect, and not ready to be used. I disagree with that sentiment. So I wrote about how ChatGPT changed how I build software. I describe some of the use cases now solved with generative AI, and give some sneak peaks into what’s in the pipeline for Ready, Set, Cloud.

Tip of the Week

If you haven’t used the distributed map functionality of Step Functions, Ben Smith gave us a great reason to try it. He posted a thread about how he used it to get around Step Function service limits for a faster, more reliable execution.

How often do you run up against #AWS #serverless service limits? What do you do when you hit them? I hit a Service limit for #StepFunctions today, I paused to think about the tools Step Functions has to get around this. The solution was pretty awesome (Even if i say so myself)🧵

— Ben (@benjamin_l_s) June 2, 2023

Last Words

I’m off on vacation for the next two weeks! If you see intermittent or missing posts from me, I’ll be sailing across the Atlantic! I’ve set up some scheduled activity in my absence, but I’ll be using this time for some summertime R&R.

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