Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Dax Raad, a man who likely needs no introduction in the serverless community. Dax is one of the builders of SST and co-host of How About Tomorrow. Dax is well-known for his slightly shocking, highly-intellectual tweets. He’s fun to watch because of his bold statements that end up being right 99% of the time. Thank you Dax, for keeping it fresh and for the genuine contributions you’re making to the tech community!

Tutorials

Jimmy has been doing great work in the serverless/GenAI space lately. Last week he published an article on how to stream an Amazon Bedrock response with Lambda. It’s surprisingly simple and the first time I read through the article I missed it entirely. Jimmy even shows you how to connect the stream in a browser for that true ChatGPT experience. It’s great to see how easy this is, thanks Jimmy!

Interesting Reads

I’m usually skeptical of services that claim to do things in “a new and better way” than we’ve done them before, but Manoj Fernando did an excellent job in his article last week convincing me otherwise. He wrote about how to effectively share code between Lambda functions using the service Bit.dev. It’s a remote, decentralized code module hosting service that lets you run, update, and test reusable code from anywhere. I might give this one a shot, I’m intrigued.

I read a strongly opinionated piece by Phạm Văn Trung last week urging readers to stop using API Gateway and use function urls instead. He makes a case for his claim and offers a matrix of feature comparisons between API Gateway and function urls. It’s a detailed article but in my opinion, the price tag on API Gateway is well worth the functionality compared to all the workarounds with function urls.

Yan Cui published a video about caching in serverless applications. He talks about the different kinds of caching and where in your stack they live. Caching always sounds like a good idea, but it can be difficult to implement in practice if you don’t know what you’re doing. I like how Yan explains the differences and what your options are. Great video.

Spotlight

If you’re attending re:Invent, I have a surprise for you. We all know how people go crazy over swag - it’s a huge part of what makes the conference so great. So I built a website that allows you to find and share the swag you find at the conference with everyone. Take a look at SwagHunt, a fully serverless, AI-powered app that (hopefully) we’ll see everyone using this week.

All you need to do is take a picture of the swag you found, type in who gave it to you and where you found it and hit submit! From there the back-end service will analyze your image, determine what kind of swag it is, and store it in the serverless Momento vector index for searching. I’ll be talking about this app on various live streams this week but I’m happy to discuss it in person if you’re interested!

Tip of the Week

The last article I’ll share is from one of my favorite people in serverless - Sheen Brisals. He posed the question “is serverless hard to adopt” and answers it in a thought-provoking way. I love the way Sheen writes and the way he makes you think about things a little bit differently.

🆕Blog: ✨Is Serverless Hard To Adopt?✨https://t.co/KyXO6gvF50

Many things in life are complex and challenging, but we have always found ways to get better at them. If so, is serverless adoption any different?#Serverless #AWS #AWSreInvent #TheServerlessBook #awscommunity

— Sheen Brisals (@sheenbrisals) November 21, 2023

New Releases

A new testing utility called the AWS Integrated Application Test Kit was released last week. This is an open-source tool that helps you write tests to validate EDA. Great to see AWS focusing on this area!

Amazon CodeWhisperer made it to the command line. You can get CLI completions with typeahead for your favorite CLIs but get this - you have access to a natural language-to-bash translation!

AWS Amplify hosting now allows developers to build plugins for server-side rendering applications. We were previously limited to only Next.js, but now have support for any framework built on Nitro.js.

Amplify also released Gen2 - its code-first developer experience. This beta launch has so many features I can’t list them all here. It’s a genuine productivity boost for any developer looking for rapid app development.

Amazon released CloudFront KeyValueStore - a global, low-latency, key-value data store. You can use this in your CF functions as long as you build them in the new CloudFront runtime cloudfront-js-2.0.

Last Words

This is going to be a busy week! If you’re not attending the conference, hang in there! If you are attending the conference, brace yourself!

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