Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Thomas Ankcorn, software engineer at Baselime and organizer of the London Node User Group. Thomas has been critical in the next-gen features Baselime has been pushing out giving us incredible insights into our serverless apps. If you want to talk to someone who understands serverless, give Thomas a follow - he’s a great person. Thank you for everything, Thomas!

Tutorials

I’m really excited about the productivity we’re about to gain as a result of Amazon Bedrock. The clever ideas have started to surface online, including one from Jimmy where he uses the AWS CLI to generate images via Stable Diffusion. He walks through setting up Bedrock in your AWS account and also shows how to use the Stable Diffusion model to create assets. This is a really clever way to get exactly what you need in a manner of seconds.

Keeping the Bedrock train rolling, Marcia Villalba posted a video on how to build applications with Bedrock and Lambda. No stone is left unturned here, she covers everything from enabling access, to IaC, to even viewing the API request you get manually in the console. This is one of the best resources I’ve seen to get you from “what is Bedrock” to AI developer.

I really enjoyed reading Yan Cui’s post last week on how he built an affiliate tracking system in a weekend. He clearly describes the problem he was trying to solve and also goes into detail in all the serverless components involved. It’s a neat peak behind the curtain of the empire he’s built over the years. I find it really motivating to follow along with people who solve their problems with serverless because it’s fast to build with and cost effective to boot.

Interesting Reads

If you haven’t been building real-time notifications in your apps, it’s time to do so. One tried and true method to do so is to use AWS API Gateway WebSockets. Michael Walmsley gave us a crash course last week explaining all the technical details and showing us the shape of the events that come in when you connect and disconnect. If you’re interested in real-time updates, definitely give this a read.

If I was a CDK guy, one of my favorite features would be the ability to create high level constructs. I’m not a CDK guy, so I’m a bit out of my element there. That said, Marko is no stranger to the CDK and wrote about tips for developing CDK constructs with Projen. He talks about all the nuances and how you can tune your CDK construct creation to exactly your liking.

New Releases

Not too many new and exciting releases this past week in the serverless world. This is what I’d call the “calm before the re:Invent storm”.

Spotlight

When many of us talk about serverless nowadays, we’re often met with eye rolls and the same four “counter arguments”. Luc van Donkersgoed wrote a post/manifesto last week that addresses each of these counter arguments in a level-headed and reasonable manner. It’s a fantastic read that you can tell comes from years of successful practice. This is my favorite read on serverless in quite a while.

Tip of the Week

Since we’re going all in on AI and Amazon Bedrock this week, it just makes sense to highlight Michael Liendo’s post on fullstack AI on AWS. Apparently you can go end-to-end with LLM back and forth without writing a single Lambda function!

It's here and ready to launch!

How to setup the following ALL ON AWS:

🔐 Authentication/Authorization
🔄 An API
🏬 A database
🤖 TALKING TO AN LLM

✨No Python code, no Lambda functions✨

All using the AWS CDK, completely in TypeScript, with NextJS!https://t.co/u7SxRwtcRN pic.twitter.com/rbZcR6Jihx

— Focus Otter (@focusotter) October 11, 2023

Last Words

EDA Day is coming up! Will you be attending? This event has some of the best speakers in the industry on event-driven architectures. This is your opportunity to get deep insights on building performant, robust event based software.

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