Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Lakindu Hewawasam, senior software engineer at Enlear and AWS Community Builder. Lakindu is an active member of the serverless community, giving talks, releasing open source projects, and writing blog posts. It’s impressive how much content Lakindu produces week after week. Thank you for everything you do, Lakindu!

Tutorials

A fascinating read from Alex Lebeouf was published last week about how to find advanced persistent threats in your security logs. To be honest, I wasn’t even familiar with the concept of security logs prior to reading it, but I feel like an expert now thanks to the clear explanation and tutorial. He shows us how to identify potential threats in CloudTrail logs, detect suspicious AWS API calls, and how to scan GitHub audit logs. Tons to learn from this piece!

Interesting Reads

Johannes Koch released a video with Ran Isenberg on why and how you can use feature flagging in your apps. This is a two-part series with Ran, and they cover all the bases to make feature flags an attainable feature in your application.

I stumbled upon an ambitious project on GitHub last week called AWS CLI Tools. Its guiding principles are targeted, fast, interoperable CLI tools to improve the experience of using the AWS CLI. Right now it contains several projects written in Rust and Ruby. A cool example project is delete-bucket - a tool to quickly and easily empty and delete S3 buckets. This is currently being maintained primarily by AWS serverless hero Efi Merdler-Kravitz.

Regardless of whether you’ve been building event-driven architectures (EDA) for years or if it’s your first day, the content by David Boyne is worth its weight in gold. He published an article on things to consider when building EDA that reminds us of some of the intricacies involved in “building it right”. He covers 6 aspects of event-driven architectures and tells us why each of them are important.

If you’re looking for an in-depth comparison of when and why to use Fargate or Lambda, Benjamen Pyle has you covered. He published an article last week on his experiences with the two AWS services and offers his insights on when to use one over the other. He also talks about how to deploy code, configure parameters, calculate costs, and overall DX of the two services. This is probably the best comparison I’ve seen between the two services. Great write-up!

Spotlight

We saw the recent post from AWS about Lambda detecting recursive loops. But does it really work? Pubudu Jayawardana took the risk and tested it out for us. He built a small repo and did a write-up with his findings about how fast Lambda can identify the loop and kill it. Turns out it’s pretty quick and you even get an email saying you have a loop! He has example code for you to try it yourself. I think I might just trust him on this one.

Tip of the Week

Ben Smith shared a clever tip last week on persisting variables in a Step Function workflow without transitioning them from state to state. This can be a burdensome task in large workflows, and his solution is so simple it makes you think “why didn’t I think of that?!”

🚀AWS Step Functions Pro Tip 🚀
Need to hold a value from start to finish without passing it along each state? 🔄 Use the power of Parallel State! 🧠 Set one branch to hold and return the value while the other performs tasks. Preserving data has never been easier!💡#Serverless pic.twitter.com/RFsJ89gTxA

— Ben (@benjamin_l_s) July 21, 2023

New Releases

A super cool GitHub action was released by Matt Carey called Code Review GPT that does exactly what you think. It uses OpenAI to scan your pull requests and offer suggestions on things like dead code, exposed secrets, unoptimized code, and unreadable code. It’s currently in alpha and the suggestions should be taken with a grain of salt, but super cool project that opens the doors to faster code turnaround.

Momento released an HTTP API allowing you to set, get, and delete cache values without using their SDK. I see great use cases for this, like better caching in edge environments and updating or invalidating your cache via EventBridge API destinations.

The Lambda Annotations Framework for .NET went generally available last week. This programming model provides a more natural feeling experience in Lambda - a great boost to developer experience!

Enhanced filtering was brought to both Lambda and EventBridge pipes last week. You can now add suffix filtering, case-insensitive filters, and OR matching.

The AWS Amplify JavaScript library got a big boost in performance last week. The team reduced the bundle size for Auth, Storage, Notifications, and Analytics, meaning your app will benefit from smaller package sizes - resulting in faster performance.

Last Words

If you’re interested in joining me on my podcast, send me a message! I’m always looking to talk to the community and am anxious to learn from you all about niche topics or exciting projects.

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