Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Daniel Aniszkiewicz, senior software engineer at Algoteque and AWS Community Builder. Daniel has a genuine passion for educating others and isn’t afraid to dive deep to do so. He is always releasing new blog series or courses around AWS serverless concepts, bringing in-depth knowledge to the hands of many. Thank you Daniel for everything you do for the community!

Tutorials

Have you ever needed to protect a static website with a login? It’s a lot more common than you’d think. Jimmy Dahlqvist wrote an article explaining how he protects static sites with Cognito and Lambda@Edge. As usual from Jimmy, this is an incredibly creative solution built and explained in a simple way. He even provides the source code so you can do it yourself.

Sometimes when we get really into something we get tunnel vision and forget about other totally viable ways of doing something. This happens to me regularly, as I often default to putting any sort of compute in a Lambda function or Step Function workflow. But Coner Murphy’s post last week is a great reminder that you can use AWS resources outside of Lambda (or any other sort of AWS compute service). He shows us how to create a presigned URL in S3 in a Next.js app. It’s surprisingly simple and is an approachable way to tackle the problem.

Interesting Reads

A few weeks ago on my podcast episode about GenAI with Matt Carey, Matt threw out the idea of test-driven development where humans write the tests and the AI writes the code. I had always done the opposite and was intrigued by the idea. So I built a POC and wrote a blog post about my findings. This iterative approach to code generation just might be a hit. I tested it by having it create a Lambda function that fetched data out of DynamoDB, ran some validations, and returned unmarshalled data.

I’ve been a die-hard fan of Alexa since the first echo came out in 2014. The evolution over the past 9 years has been a marvel to watch. You may or may not know that Echo devices have extension points called skills, which are basically apps. Brian Tarbox wrote a forward-thinking article last week on the future of Alexa skills. He lays out the current landscape, the problems with it, and speculates on what is to come.

The videos have started to trickle in from AWS ComSum a couple of weeks ago. They are available here on YouTube. There’s some great serverless content in there by rockstars in the community. This newsletter would be way too long if I tried to name them all. Scroll through and pick your favorites!

Have you ever used CloudWatch alarms for alerting on Lambda failures? It works, but it’s not great. It’s not great because there’s always missing context on what errors are actually happening. But Marko has a solution for that. He wrote a post about how he improved CloudWatch alarms for Lambda by using a function to provide enriched details in your messages. It’s a clever solution that he’s wrapped in an easy to use CDK construct.

Podcasts

I had Steve Rice on the Ready, Set, Cloud podcast last week talking about feature flags on AWS AppConfig. We talk about what feature flags are, what they definitely are not, and some really cool ways AppConfig is a differentiator in the market.

The Real-World Serverless podcast by Yan Cui released an episode last week with Charity Majors about deploying to production on Fridays. This isn’t a “throw caution to the wind” episode but actually a very interesting talk spanning a bunch of different topics.

Spotlight

I’ve seen many people advocate for Step Functions local when it comes to testing, but I’ve yet to see someone explain how to use it. That is, until last week when Tom Bailey walked us through step-by-step on how he uses Step Functions local to test. It’s way simpler than I thought and can actually be run as unit tests! Now I’m mad at myself for never trying it 🤷

Tip of the Week

Last week I gave a talk on how to build serverless real-time notification capabilities in your app. I showed how you can do it browser-to-browser, service-to-browser, and service-to-service. Best part? I did it with a chicken on my shoulder. If you’re interested in the talk, here’s the recording.

@AllenHeltonDev doing a lunch and learn with a real chicken is maybe most epic thing I’ve ever seen. “This was a bad idea bringing a chicken…” 🤣🐓 pic.twitter.com/AiEd65Ot3m

— Ellery (@elleryaw) October 5, 2023

New Releases

Eventbridge now supports wildcard filters in rules. I’m excited about this one. You can now react to things like *.png or *error* and tie them into generic processes.

As an avid SAM user, I am thrilled to see Lambda test events available in the SAM CLI. The only option to get properly structured test events prior to this was through the Lambda console, so it’s nice to see this pop up via the CLI.

The CDK received a new Amplify GraphQL API construct, bringing full feature parity with the GraphQL transformer capabilities already in the Amplify CLI. This is a great decision by AWS to bring this functionality to the table as IaC.

If you’re a Vercel user and are looking for an observability platform that’s fast and easy, Baselime has a new integration for you. Your logs will be indexed and available in Baselime in a moment’s notice. If you haven’t tried it yet, I highly recommend giving it a shot.

Last Words

It was a big week! Thank you so much to everyone who write content and share with the community. Whether you release something on a weekly basis or it was your first time, every little bit of content from varying points of view are invaluable to others. So thank you from the bottom of my heart!

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