Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Stephen Sennett, cloud consultant, content creator, and AWS Community Builder. Stephen has such a positive energy around serverless and the cloud. He’s always willing to engage with people to offer opinions and feedback (he’s helped me several times). Stephen is a great blogger and builder, actively working with both serverless and AI. Thank you, Stephen, for all your contributions to the community!

Interesting Reads

I’ve been loving the content from Arpad Toth lately. Last week he wrote about how to build a Slack notification when CloudTrail logging is turned off. This is a project we all should have in our arsenal so we can monitor who does what, when in our AWS accounts. He talks about how you can send a message to Slack using only EventBridge features (no Lambda function at all!) and shows how you can turn logging back on automatically.

Ran Isenberg continued his series on SQS best practices with an article on mastering retries. In his post, he covers when you should and shouldn’t retry, offers some tips on using SQS partial failures vs handling the retry logic yourself, and gives you the fully functional code to go along with it. I’m really looking forward to the last article in the series on managing failures and utilizing dead-letter queues.

I build proof of concepts for a living. They’re quick and dirty and usually can go from idea to done in half a day. I’d never use any of them in production. Why? Because they aren’t “production-grade”. What do I mean by “production-grade”? Glad you asked, because I explain what production-grade software is in an article last week. I talk about the difference between it and production ready and use an analogy to talk about the major technical components of software ready for prime time.

Podcasts

On the Ready, Set, Cloud podcast, I was joined by Omkar Kadam to talk about DevOps and the impact of serverless and generative AI. We talk about the durability of the practice and why it might be something people are practicing for the long haul.

In episode 93 of AWS Bites, Eoin Shanaghy and Luciano Mammino talk about CDK patterns. The talk is incredibly thorough, covering everything from “what is the CDK” to “why do we need L3 constructs”. Great listen for both newbies and veterans of the CDK.

Spotlight

One of the hard parts of event-driven architectures is knowing how and where your data flows. But thanks to David Boyne it’s a little easier. He just published a new version of the EventCatalog. This open-source markdown-powered app is designed to show you your messages, data flows, services, and domains. It’s super cool and fully featured, absolutely worth trying if you’re into EDA.

Tip of the Week

If you haven’t been following along with Lars Jacobsson’s journey with the samp-cli, you should be. He’s building out an incredibly powerful CLI that allows you to do local debugging of the cloud right from your IDE! Last week alone he added support for .NET and Python and it makes me wonder if he ever sleeps.

📢 Update to `samp local` giving more #awssam users the joy of running their functions locally, triggered by any event source:

* #Python🐍 support 🎉
* Extended IDE support - JetBrains IDEs
* Even simpler usage (https://t.co/PACxxIePsx)

💾https://t.co/CIRjOt9RI8 pic.twitter.com/i9PPT1RD8F

— Lars (@lajacobsson) August 10, 2023

Last Words

I put out a poll last week and got some interesting results. I asked about your favorite type of learning session. Here are the results:

1. Workshops - 58 votes
2. Bootcamps - 12 votes
3. Presentations - 11 votes
4. Something else - 11 votes (mostly just documentation)

Not at all what I expected. Do you agree with these results? Let me know!

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