#01 - New AWS Heroes Announced!
New AWS Heroes announced, fantastic insights by our expert of the week Ran Isenberg, latest news, and more...
Welcome
This has been a fantastic week as the latest AWS Heroes have been announced, including myself as an AWS Serverless Hero! It’s a title that I am honoured and humbled to have been given, and I have always taken my responsibilities seriously as somebody supporting the wider community for so long. Hopefully working with the existing heroes will allow me to level up further!
Congratulations to the other new Heroes too!
Faye Ellis, Minoru Onda（みのるん）, Ilanchezhian Ganesamurthy, Jimmy Dahlqvist, Jaehyun Shin, and Maciej Walkowiak.
🎓 Ask the Expert
Each week I ask a different expert the same three questions to get their personal insights - this week we have Serverless Hero Ran Isenberg!
What is one common mistake you see teams making when implementing serverless solutions, and how can they avoid it?
”A familiar mistake teams make is not thinking enough about production readiness. Failure handling, resilience, security, and scaling optimizations are critical aspects of any solution, and while serverless means we get a managed service that takes care of some of these aspects, there's still work to be done.
When I ask a serverless design question during an interview, many engineers fail to suggest a dead letter queue with automated re-drives, for example. These are crucial aspects of our services, as everything fails, and engineers need to be more aware of it.”Which serverless tool, concept, or service are you most excited about right now, and why?
”As an architect in a cybersecurity company, I'm most excited about Amazon Verified Permissions. I'm currently designing a centralized authorization service, and having a serverless option with CEDAR support is very exciting for me. I can't wait to see where this service ends up; there's a lot of potential and features that I'd like to see added.”What is your favourite trick or tip when working with serverless that the readers may find interesting?
”My favourite tip is working with proven best practices and automating as much as possible as I can. I love using Powertools for AWS Lambda open-source, which comes in several languages, but Python is my favourite. It's a collection of proven production-ready serverless utilities that everybody should use. And speaking of automation, I've used Powertools as my serverless blueprint, which gets you going with a serverless Python service in seconds with all the best practices.”
📰 Articles that caught the eye
Yan Cui wrote the article “Is it safe to use ID tokens with Cognito authorizers?”.
https://medium.com/theburningmonk-com/is-it-safe-to-use-id-tokens-with-cognito-authorizers-c7d8943b931aOptimizing Costs in the Cloud: Embracing a FinOps Mindset by Ran Isenberg
https://www.ranthebuilder.cloud/post/optimizing-costs-in-cloud-embracing-a-finops-mindsetServerless AWS Account Watcher by Darryl Ruggles
https://darryl-ruggles.cloud/serverless-aws-account-watcherA self-hosted CodeCommit alternative by Johannes Koch
https://dev.to/aws-heroes/a-self-hosted-codecommit-alternative-b79
💡 Quick Hints & Tips
Each week I share two or three quick hints or tips based on things I notice in day-to-day engineering life:
[Tip 1] API Gateway 29-second timeout can be extended for LLM use cases which was enabled as of June, but recently it was the first time I extended it. We can do this in the AWS CDK, for example, by adding a timeout property to the Lambda Integration, and ensuring that the quota increase has been done in the console. In my own use case, the reason I didn’t use streaming through Lambda function URLs was that I needed to convert the full response to voice using Polly to respond as base64 to the client app. Function URLs also had some baseline missing features compared to API Gateway.
[Tip 2] AWS CDK Hotswap is so, so under-utilised from my experience when working with teams and ephemeral environments! Why wait for a git commit and full pipeline run when you just want to check a quick change to a Lambda function, state machine, or ECS container image? The AWS CDK ‘hotswap’ argument allows us to utilise the AWS SDK under the hood to make a near-instant change to a function or workflow without performing a full synth and deploying through CloudFormation.
Do you have a tip or hint to share with the readers? If so, reach out!
🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts
Julian Wood and David Boyne talked about all things EDA and Event Catalog on Serverless Office Hours. The work David is doing is seriously impressive!
Danielle Heberling covered Rethinking Serverless on the Believe In Serverless channel.
Episode 7 of the Believe In Serverless podcast was out this week with Allen Helton running solo! Great episode!
Luc van Donkersgoed was on the AWS Developers podcast discussing the incredible story behind aws-news.com. Loads of great insights on this one!
James Eastham covers building your first CloudFlare worker with rust. It’s not a language I am familiar with but some very cool approaches being showcased here.
✖️ Tweet of the Week
The following tweet by Santiago really caught my eye this week, and it is probably how a lot of us are feeling at the moment. AI currently is a tool to support engineers, not to replace them.
How often do you get AI-generated code with hallucinations about methods that simply don’t exist, or generated output with huge amounts of code that would ideally be pulled into separate files and functions? Even some of the best AI tools are still generating output with the v2 AWS SDK being used. I do worry that a lot of the engineering skills we have cultivated for many years will slowly diminish as generative AI is used more and more by people claiming to be engineers who don’t have the experience.
🚀 New Releases
Announcing Validation API for AWS Step Functions
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/08/validation-api-step-functions/Amazon Redshift Serverless now supports AWS PrivateLink
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/08/amazon-redshift-serverless-aws-privatelink/Amazon DynamoDB announces support for Attribute-Based Access Control
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/09/amazon-dynamodb-attribute-based-access-control/AWS AppSync enhances API monitoring with new DEBUG and INFO logging levels
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/09/aws-appsync-api-monitoring-debug-info-logging-levels/Bedrock Agents on Sonnet 3.5
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/09/bedrock-agents-sonnet-3-5/
📚 Books
Humble Bundle are doing an amazing deal right now on £1,070.52 worth of books for £34.21, covering everything from design thinking, to serverless, to architecture, microservices, and more! Well worth a look!
This also contains the book ‘Serverless Development on AWS’ by Sheen Brisals and Luke Hedger which I can personally recommend as a fantastic read!
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/software-architecture-2024-oreilly-books
🗳️ Poll of the Week
This week’s poll concentrates on AWS Step Functions after some fun banter on Twitter between myself and Allen Helton. My own thoughts are they are great for some specific use cases, but (and it’s a big but), I believe we need to watch our core business logic doesn’t get tied into ASL and intrinsic service calls causing service lock-in and accidental complexity.
Let us know your thoughts and experiences in the comments!
🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts
So many times over the years I wish I had followed this pattern of breaking down a large daunting task into smaller ones when massively overwhelmed, and just getting started on the first task to gather momentum:
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one.”
Mark Twain
👋🏼 Wrapping Up
Thank you for reading the first Serverless Advocate Newsletter! If you want to find out a little more about me, please have a look at:
https://www.serverlessadvocate.com/
See you next time,
Lee
