Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Peter Hanssens, founder of Cloud Shuttle and AWS Serverless Hero. Peter is the co-founder and one of the organizers of Serverless Days Sydney and is a phenomenal contributor to the serverless community. Thank you Peter, for the contributions, feedback, support, and platforms you’ve helped create for some many builders!

Interesting Reads

Recently Cognito released a feature that allows you to customize access tokens. This is a really big deal with a huge boost of pragmatic security patterns now available at our fingertips. If you want to see what it’s like to build on top of this feature set, Ben Pyle released a blog post on how he added custom fields to his access tokens with Rust. He explains the concepts really well and gives you some code to try it yourself.

It feels like Yan Cui and I might be on the same page leading into the new year. Last week he published an article explaining how and why you can get direct access to AWS resources via the frontend. This echoes the same sentiment I predicted in my article in early December where I talked about full-stack serverless becoming a focus in 2024. There are a bunch of benefits to doing this but there are some hefty drawbacks as well. Read Yan’s article to learn more on what to look out for as we begin to shift focus.

Sheen Brisals posted an inspiring article a couple of weeks ago that I missed in my last newsletter. It’s an important one, so I’m surfacing it this week. He wrote about becoming an invisible community influencer and how that has influenced his career decisions. I loved this article, Sheen is such a humble person with some serious words of wisdom. Thank you for this, Sheen!

Spotlight

We’re all familiar with adding alarms for failure scenarios in our system. But what about alarms on successful scenarios? Lee Gilmore published a fascinating article last week breaking down Netflix’s video play strategy with success metric alarms. He explains the use case really well and as always, shares the code he wrote so you can try it yourself and start implementing it in your projects. I really like this concept a lot and it has me thinking about things a little bit differently leading into this new year.

Tip of the Week

We’ll be seeing 2024 predictions for the next month or so and I think I already found my favorite one. Jeremy Daly weighs in on his thoughts about GenAI and what we’re going to be seeing in the year to come.

Prediction for 2024.

More SaaS products will rush to add #GenAI to their products using expensive LLMs instead of more cost effective and use case specific old AI like #ML, bayesian classifiers, etc.

Some will pass this on to the user via overall price increases (and likely… pic.twitter.com/7L4o3q8xku

— Jeremy Daly (@jeremy_daly) December 30, 2023

New Releases

The last week of the year is always slow, so not many new feature releases debuted since the last newsletter. I’m glad the teams are taking some time off to enjoy the holidays.

AWS CodePipeline now supports self-managed GitLab instances. This is a nice feature release to close out the year.

Last Words

It’s going to be a big year! My New Year’s resolution is to be out of my comfort zone as much as possible. Look forward to seeing me at front-end oriented conferences and trying to horizontally scale my skillsets. You may even see me at a keynote or two this year 🤔. What are your resolutions? Let’s hear them!

As a reminder, I’m opening up Ready, Set, Cloud for guest authors in 2024. If you’re interested, please send me a message!

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