Serverless Superhero
Our serverless superhero this week is Andreea Merariu, software engineer at LEGO and AWS Community Builder. Andreea is a great writer and has a real knack for solving difficult problems in serverless applications. She is also a wonderful speaker, talking about her serverless journeys and helping to educate others with tried and true patterns. Thank you for everything you do, Andreea!
Interesting Reads
As a happy surprise last week, AWS announced general availability of Amazon Bedrock. If you’re looking to quickly get your feet wet in this new AI-enabling service, Renaldi Gondosubroto shared a post and starter code showing you how to build with it. He explains some of the crucial steps to getting started, enabling you to build your first AI app even faster.
Sam Williams published a comprehensive article last week where he addresses some concerns around serverless. He covers everything from performance to security to best practices. This article has tons of content and is worth sharing around your organization if you’re trying to get into serverless.
Testing end to end workflows in event-driven architectures (EDA) can be difficult. Tests are typically run synchronously in CI pipelines, but EDA is asynchronous. Marko wrote a blog post reminding us how he’s solved this problem with ServerlessSpy. This free CDK-based library intercepts traffic and reports it back down to your test files, allowing you to test steps in your workflows in real time. Super cool!
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Everyone likes having a little fun. Danielle Heberling wrote an article giving developers a way to lighten their day with emojis on EventBridge. Emojis are utf-8 encoded, which means they can be used in your EventBridge rules to trigger AWS resources. Nothing like triggering a failure recovery workflow by publishing a 💩 event! Danielle gives her source code in case you want to try it yourself.
There’s been lots of talk lately about API specs and general development around APIs. Of course, we can’t talk about API specs without debating code-first or spec-first development. I decided to weigh in on the topic with my thoughts with a highly opinionated post on spec-driven development. Get your popcorn.
New Releases
As mentioned earlier, Amazon Bedrock went GA. It brings you easy access to numerous foundational models and provides a wealth of capabilities around developing with AI.
AWS AppComposer now supports every CloudFormation resource. No excuses not to give it a shot now!
DynamoDB released incremental export to S3 allowing you to get only the data that changed over an interval. This eliminates the need for the countless hand-rolled solutions that do exactly this!
AWS Amplify released a developer preview for their JavaScript library. This brings great integrations with Next.js and overall reduced bundle size, among other things.
If you’re a fan of both AppRunner and monorepos, great news! AppRunner now natively supports monorepos, making it even easier to get your container applications to the cloud.
Spotlight
If you like getting into the nitty gritty of Lambda, AJ Stuyvenberg has been doing some really cool stuff on his Twitch channel recently. Last week he streamed several times while running some benchmarks on Lambda and making educated deductions. I haven’t seen anyone testing the stuff AJ is doing, it’s a pretty novel concept with incredibly interesting results. Great work, AJ!
Tip of the Week
Yan Cui has been on fire lately with his engaging, high-quality serverless content. Last week he released a video with some tips and recommendations for load testing serverless applications.
Want to know how to load test serverless apps like a pro?
— Yan Cui (@theburningmonk) September 29, 2023
Here are a few handy tips and tool recommendations to help you out.https://t.co/WkYZKYwP17
Last Words
It was a big conference week! AWS ComSum in Manchester, GopherCon in San Diego, and a virtual CDK day all happened in the last 7 days. As the content makes its way online I’ll be sure to include it in upcoming issues of the newsletter.
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
