Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Darryl Ruggles, cloud solutions architect at Ciena. Darryl has a nose for quality serverless content - always finding and sharing great announcements and blog posts on interesting builds. He is a positive light in the community, regularly engaging with content and offering his two cents on a variety of topics in and around the cloud. Thank you, Darryl, for your engagement and insights!

Tutorials

Ran Isenberg is back with his third and final post on SQS best practices - Dead Letter Queues and Handling Failures. In this post, Ran walks us through how to configure a dead letter queue and add a redrive function to automatically restart processing of failed messages. He’s succinctly wrapped up all his code from the series in a nice repo, giving readers a complete reference with his best practices.

I didn’t know I wanted to build an app that included maps until I read a post from Tobias Müller last week. He built a serverless map app using OpenStreetMap data and AWS serverless services. I learned a ton about map tiles and why they are difficult to tackle. Tobias even offers the source code so you can build something with it yourself!

We don’t talk about security enough. So thank you to Benjamen Pyle who posted an article on the security side of building serverless apps with AWS. He recommends using a Lambda authorizer when you use API Gateway (which coincidentally is my recommendation as well) and gives a breakdown of what you can do with them. He also dives into important topics like building an IAM policy and using encryption keys to protect data. This is a good refresher for some and great new content for others.

Interesting Reads

Every time I see an article advocating for Rust in Lambda, I’m intrigued. I don’t know how to write Rust code but the thought is promising. Luciano Mammino published an article last week talking about why you should take the leap and start building your functions in Rust. He covers the basics of Lambda before transitioning to how building in Rust can improve cost savings and result in fewer bugs. It’s a cool read if you’ve been trying to decide if it’s time to become a Rustacean.

I’m a big fan of direct comparisons between frameworks/languages/apps. It lets you get down to brass tacks and remove some noise when doing evaluations. Valentin Beggi did a framework comparison last week between CDK, SST, and Serverless Framework, showing how the three stack up against each other. He does a great job staying objective in his comparison and hits all the highlights I’d look for in an evaluation.

I’ve been seeing a lot of questions around SAM lately. People are trying to get started with it but having issues cutting through the clutter and making sense of example repositories. So I aimed to fix that with my article on a beginner’s guide to SAM. I cover the SAM transform, which resources you’re likely to use more than others, and point out the commands from the CLI that you absolutely need to know.

New Releases

AWS AppSync now supports JavaScript for all resolvers. Goodbye, VTL!

Postman Flows officially launched last week. The visual API workflow builder has been around for a while but was made official last week. I’m really excited about this and the doors it opens up for integrations.

Spotlight

You probably have seen that HashiCorp is changing its license to a Business Source License (BSL) for all their products, including Terraform. This moves away from the open source license it has always had, which places some restrictions around commercial usage. I spoke with Pawel Piwosz last week on the subject and he left me with this message:

I strongly believe that adoption of IaC wouldn’t be possible without Terraform itself and hundreds if not thousands of contributors. With this license change, especially for this specific tool, I see a potential risk for this adoption. I believe that Terraform should be available to everyone. In the same way, like GCC is.

If you or your company are affected by the change, consider using OpenTF, starring the repo in GitHub, or pledging to help back the valiant effort.

Tip of the Week

With serverless, logs == life. So this post from Eric Johnson last week is invaluable.

Terraform + AWS SAM Tip: If you are using Terraform and are looking for an easy way to view logs. use the sam logs command. This works on ANY CloudWatch logs (not just #Serverless). I build an outputs list that looks like this: pic.twitter.com/xMeJhRSIzM

— Eric Johnson (@edjgeek) August 16, 2023

Last Words

Congratulations to all the AWS Community Builders, both new, renewed, and returning from a leave of absence! So happy to have you all as part of the community and I am so excited to see what you build!

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