Serverless Superhero
Our serverless superhero this week is James Eastham, cloud architect at AWS. James is a .NET and Java dev heavy into proper serverless architectural design. He’s schooled me a few times on best practices at scale. James is also an avid runner and is sharing his exciting training journey on social media. Follow him for some daily motivation! Thank you for everything, James!
Tutorials
A common strategy when implementing long-running processes in a serverless environment is using Fargate instead of Lambda. This approach works great for many use cases, but doesn’t always fit the bill when setting a max execution time. Ryan Cormack shared an article last week showing us how to use Step Functions to orchestrate Fargate tasks and tells us how he implements a max timeout to gracefully fail. There are several ways you could implement something like this but I like the simplicity of Ryan’s approach.
Speaking of Fargate, Darryl Ruggles wrote a blog post last week where he used it as a serverless batch data processor that sends updates to Slack. His post dives into the details of the solution as he explains the responsibility of each moving part. It’s a great read and super cool idea from Darryl!
When I hear the term “fitness function,” I automatically think of some workout app that helps you reach your health goals. Turns out, that’s not right. Lee Gilmore breaks down serverless fitness functions and explains what they are, why they are important, how to build them in the CDK, and walks you through a practical example to tie the theory together. To drastically oversimplify, they are health checks in your serverless apps that verify the integrity of objects throughout your workflows. But don’t let me do it injustice - read Lee’s post, it’s great!
Check out our awesome new Level Up videos available for you which cover both new and existing features! These tiny bitesize tutorials are perfect for learning more about the various features on the Postman platform. View the full series Sponsored
Matt Martz and Matt Morgan recently teamed up and created a free course on event-driven architectures on AWS. The course is very thorough, practical, and available on YouTube. It’s about an hour and a half, so long enough to get into some great detail yet short enough to approach and not be overwhelmed. Great job, guys!
Software is always in a state of constant improvement. Build something, see how it works, tinker a bit, see if it works better. I love how Jeroen Reijn tells his story on the matter of how he built the Dev.to Twitter bot for AWS Community Builders. He started by solving the business problem, then after it was live, made some meaningful updates for better robustness and future-proofing. Very cool!
Spotlight
Have you ever needed to do link tracking or provide shortened urls that fit in a post a little easier? Me too, which is why I found the post from Elias Brange last week so interesting. He shows us how to build a url shortener using CloudFront KeyValueStore and CloudFront functions to deliver lightning-fast redirection. He even shows us how to extend his solution to count the number of times each link was clicked. So simple and so effective!
Tip of the Week
I’ve been waiting for this one! Sheen Brisals announced the published ebook format of his book with Luke Hedger, Serverless Development on AWS last week! Head over to his post and get your copy!
📢#TheServerlessBook - EBook is published🚀
— Sheen Brisals (@sheenbrisals) January 25, 2024
The Kindle Edition of #Serverless Development on #AWS (@OReillyMedia) is now available!
You can buy Kindle Edition: https://t.co/YzlTPYkl5H
Pre-order Print Edition: https://t.co/G6t7cZCde8@level_out #microservices #book #cloud
New Releases
Step Functions added integrations with 33 new services, including Amazon Q, CloudFront KeyValueStore, B2B Data Interchange, and many more.
Ampt released what I consider to be next-gen logging and observability views on their dashboard. They use the CloudWatch API to deliver metrics immediately and aggregate all relevant data per invocation. Some of the data automatically provided is HTTP method and response, triggering event name, storage listener event type, and log level!
Last Words
I’m out and about at THAT conference this week talking about moving your synchronous workloads over to async and event-driven architectures. I’m excited conference season has begun! Are you giving any talks soon? Let me know and I can share it.
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
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