Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Neetu Mallan, DevOps manager at EZOPS Inc and AWS Community Builder. She is the organizer of the AWS User Group Madurai and a great blogger. Neetu asks some tough questions around serverless and always pushes the boundaries making you think twice about a solution. She’s a great person to follow and bounce ideas off of. Thank you, Neetu, for all your contributions to the community!

Interesting Reads

Congrats to a brand new batch of AWS Security Heroes! Security is a brand new category of AWS Hero and we now have 6 of them! Super exciting!

I am really excited to see an update from Marcin Sodkiewicz about how he improved his AWS compute pricing calculator. Marcin built an app that directly compares equivalent forms of compute in AWS. His post covers all the improvements he recently made and gives you a direct link to the app itself. Fun fact, this project was how I was initially introduced to Marcin years ago.

Arpad Toth wrote an analysis on the components of an S3 object Lambda. He walks readers through a use case where he converts a JSON object on fetch based on the caller’s location. Arpad talks about each resource in the process and shows how to build it yourself.

We got a great look at how to build a serverless file manager from Jimmy Dahlqvist last week. He demonstrates how to build a cool multi-tenant system that maintains files and tracks metadata around them. I’ve built a system like this before and wish I had this as a reference point before I got started.

I stumbled upon a really neat app from David Behroozi last week. The app is called speed run and is a browser extension you can use to convert Markdown-based code blocks into secure, runnable dev tools directly in a GitHub readme or wiki files. It’s a nifty little project that I can see seriously speeding up dev processes and lowering the barrier to entry on open-source projects.

Spotlight

The AWS Amplify and Hashnode hackathon ended last week. There were tons of cool projects highlighting the creativity of the tech community. I highly recommend browsing through the entries to see if inspiration strikes you.

Tip of the Week

Yan Cui reminds us of 7 ways to save money when going serverless. He has a nice graphical format that points out easy to make mistakes and how to avoid them.

These 7 mistakes are wasting money in your serverless architecture.

For more details, check out the full article here: https://t.co/GX3YNm1xDV pic.twitter.com/jijZhP9sp1

— Yan Cui (@theburningmonk) August 7, 2023

New Releases

Momento announced a serverless vector index at MoCon last week. The service is aimed at abstracting away schema and dimension management and providing consumers with 2 simple APIs - add to index and search. The service is in closed beta and you can join the waitlist here.

Ampt announced long-running tasks last week. These are powerful jobs that let you run tasks longer than 15 minutes and enable you to run them now, later, just once, or on a schedule.

CloudFormation released a new retention policy for resources - RetainExceptOnCreate. If you’ve ever struggled through failed initial deployments and deleted your retained resources over and over again so you can redeploy… rejoice! That is now a thing of the past.

App Composer got some cool new updates last week. You can now undo and redo operations, export the entire canvas, and locally sync in real-time as you make changes.

SQS received an increased throughput quota for FIFO queues. It now will process up to 9,000 transactions per second in some regions and 4,500 tps in select others.

A great update for EventBridge Scheduler came out last week, allowing one-time schedules to delete automatically after running. This is a big convenience update so you no longer have to clean them up yourself.

Last Words

WOW! What a week for serverless! It seems like we’re having breakthrough after breakthrough, enabling faster and better apps than ever before. I’m curious - are you building something new? Is there a new piece of tech you’re trying our for the first time? What is it? Let me know what you learn!

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