Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Aaron Hunter, principal developer advocate at AWS and all-around smart guy. Aaron has one of the coolest career backgrounds of anyone I know, working on insanely difficult projects with AWS customers to make sure they are successful. He is community-focused and is (probably) responsible for the education of thousands of developers making their way into the cloud. Thank you for everything, Aaron!

Tutorials

I love the content AJ Stuyvenberg has been creating lately. His videos are detailed, friendly, and actually educational. Last week he talked about using SQS and Lambda the right way and clarifies some assumptions many of us make when connecting the two together. I also feel personally attacked when he calls out that these mistakes are made because you didn’t read the docs (ok not attacked, but definitely guilty).

Another cool video from last week is from Marcia Villalba about streaming responses from Bedrock through Lambda. This gives you that “ChatGPT feel” of the GenAI typing back and responding to your question. It’s also a necessity for user-facing apps that wait for GenAI responses. Instead of waiting for the LLM to finish completely, you get the bits and pieces as they are received.

Interesting Reads

Congratulations to the new AWS heroes! Three new heroes were announced last week including Emin Alemdar (container hero), Richard Fan (security hero), and Takuya Tachibana (community hero). Welcome and thank you for all you do!

I published an article on a recent project that takes a JSON object and creates a full, workable mock-API from it using Amazon Bedrock. It generates endpoints, identifies child resources, and builds summary schemas into an API spec then uses Postman to create a mock server. This is great for ideation or front-end enablement because it only takes a few seconds to run and you end up with a functional API you can call.

Ran Isenberg published a super helpful article on exporting CloudWatch logs to 3rd party tools last week. He goes over three different implementations and the pros and cons of each. As we all know, the best implementation depends on your use case! If you’ve been waiting to export your logs because it seemed like a big, scary effort - Ran has your back.

Podcasts

I had Sam Lock on the Ready, Set, Cloud podcast to talk about how Serverless Guru approaches serverless. We talk about serverless trends, what’s new for Serverless Guru, and of course - generative AI.

Eoin Shanaghy and Luciano Mammino had a fascinating episode of the AWS Bites podcast talking about Lambda Runtimes. As usual, they go through all the details, thoroughly explaining runtimes and offering their recommendations. Great timing with the Nodejs20.x release!

Yan Cui had Sandro Volpicella on the Real-World Serverless podcast to talk about Hashnode’s serverless architecture. It’s a great episode talking about the super popular blogging platform and the challenges they face at their scale.

New Releases

The pre:invent announcements have begun streaming in! Let’s take a look at some exciting serverless updates.

EventBridge supports 22 new CloudWatch metrics including API latency, event payload size, and number of successful/failed/throttled events. Great observability update!

EventBridge also added logging for Pipes! I can’t tell you the frustrations I’ve had trying to link some services together via a pipe and having no idea how to troubleshoot when something goes wrong.

Bedrock has access to Llama 2 Chat 13B in an exciting release. It also now has access to Cohere Command Light and Cohere Embed English models.

Observability just got better with Lambda now that there’s a single-pane view of metrics, logs, and traces. No more bouncing around CloudWatch and the Lambda console!

Speaking of Lambda, you can now view and export a function template to App Composer. So if you happen to start building your functions in the console (break that habit!) you can get your IaC quick and easy.

Any JavaScript fans? Lambda supports Nodejs.20x as an official runtime. Not only do we get the Node 20 language features, but we also get configurable cert loading for faster cold starts and native response streaming! Famous last words, but everything should be backward compatible for a fast upgrade.

Even more on Lambda, we now have new controls to search, filter, and aggregate function logs. This release also includes the ability to capture logs in JSON format without using external logging libraries. Nice!

Not serverless, but exciting for me - AWS launched a local zone in Dallas, TX, USA, which is not only my hometown but my backyard to this day ❤️

Step Functions can now redrive executions from a failed state! Now you can fix that data or config issue and restart your workflow. WOW!

Want to build GenAI apps but have no idea where to start? AWS released PartyRock a GenAI app-building playground last week. It uses Bedrock to power the apps in a fun, intuitive, code-free way.

Message filtering just got easier with SNS with the introduction of suffix matching, case-insensitive matching, and OR matching. Big flexibility improvement here!

A whole slew of observability metrics were released for AppSync including (but not limited to) InboundMessageSuccess, InboundMessageError, and InboundMessageFailure. It’s worth checking out the announcement for all the new metrics.

Spotlight

We all know I’m a big fan of practical, open-source builds. That’s why I love this article from Mihaly Balassy talking about how he made a free DIY digital business card on serverless services. The article itself doesn’t talk about the details, but he does offer an architecture diagram and source code. This is such a useful and cool build - especially with re:Invent coming up next week.

Tip of the Week

In case you missed it, Momento is throwing a big serverless party at re:Invent next week on Wednesday night. It’s a celebration of the community and the developer productivity unlocked by serverless services. It’s going to be AMAZING! Link to RSVP is in the tweet.

Let’s celebrate community members who advocate for a serverless future! Join me, @AllenHeltonDev & @FarrahC32 at Omnia Wed night at reinvent for an epic party!

Who’s coming?

Sponsored by @momentohq @awscloud @MongoDB @CloudZeroInc & @serverlessguru https://t.co/UgmF0fIpWM

— Khawaja Shams (@ksshams) November 16, 2023

Last Words

It’s an exciting time of year! For my fellow Americans, happy Thanksgiving week! I hope you all enjoy some well-deserved time off and enjoy it with friends and family. For all my tech friends, see you next week!

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