Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Julian Wood, principal developer advocate for serverless at AWS. Julian gives us amazing peeks behind the curtain at Lambda and explains things in a way that makes even the most complex concepts seem simple. He’s also the host of serverless office hours, the livestream that takes people through a range of serverless adventures. Thank you Julian, for helping shape the serverless community!

Interesting Reads

Now that we have recursive loops in Lambda taken care of, Pubudu Jayawardana turned his sights toward another potential hole in your wallet - EventBridge Bus recursion. Pubudu explains how you can find yourself in this predicament, then offers example code on how to find it and stop it.

In a continuation of his series on building serverless applications with AWS, Benjamen Pyle covers event handling. He describes four event notification services in AWS and covers the gotchas and tips for developing with each one. Benjamen also gives a bit of information on how each of these services are billed. If you’re looking to get into EDA, start here.

Arpad Toth published an article reminding us of the ways we can programmatically retrieve secrets in our apps. He shares several options on how to implement it and gives the pros and cons for each one. It’s a good reminder that there are some efficient and managed ways to get secrets that we may not be utilizing.

SQS is a powerful service but sometimes its vast customizability can be confusing and lead to unoptimized implementations. Ran Isenberg started a new series on SQS best practices where he covers batch processing. He gives some advice on how to implement a batch processor in Lambda using Python, with great call outs on effective error handling. I look forward to the rest of this series!

While not directly related to serverless, an important article was released last week by Luc van Donkersgoed. The article about his “failed attempt” at monetizing tech content. While he might not have had the outcome he was hoping for, he still learned valuable lessons, built amazing life skills, and helped countless individuals in their serverless journeys. Thank you, Luc!

Podcasts

I had Benjamen Pyle on the Ready, Set, Cloud podcast to talk about the business side of serverless. We discuss operational considerations, org culture shifts, and much more.

Momento started up a new podcast called Cache-it recently. CEO Khawaja Shams talks with industry all-stars on how they’ve adapted caching strategies into their businesses. Episode 1 was with Yao Yue and covered building AI feature stores. Episode 2 is with Manju Rajashkhar about building a world class search system. Super cool concept!

Spotlight

If you haven’t already seen it, Lars Jacobsson built an incredible CLI tool for local serverless debugging. He explains how it works and works hard to make sure there is no “magic” for consumers. This tool updates your function code in the cloud, so be sure to not use it in production! Amazing work as always, Lars!

Tip of the Week

I agree with this tweet from Roman last week where he states that Amplify is great because of the high-order abstractions it provides. I wanted to bring this up because I feel like it will spark debate in his other claim and would like people to weigh in on it.

AWS Amplify currently is the most ergonomic framework for development on AWS.

Why?

It abstract all crafty “infra”

Dev and web friendly

Very descent higher level SDKs: datastore, auth, ui forms, ui components

— Roman (@naumenko_roman) July 29, 2023

New Releases

Amazon Bedrock now supports agents, bringing in some fantastic managed capabilities allowing you to move even faster with generative AI.

You can now use ForEach in your CloudFormation/SAM templates. This enables users to repeat code without the risk of making silly mistakes in copy/paste/replace tasks.

Lambda supports Python 3.11 as an official runtime. It’s always great when we get new supported runtimes in Lambda.

Efi Merdler-Kravitz added another great tool to his AWS CLI tools project. He built a chaos Lambda extension that will introduce havoc without requiring code changes. His tool will introduce latency and alter function responses randomly, which is great to test how resilient your app is.

Last Words

Ready, Set, Cloud is growing! If you’re on Twitter, give the dedicated account, @readysetcloud, a follow. As always, if you’re interested in getting involved, either as a guest author or on the podcast, send me a message and we will work something out!

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