#05 The Power of Connections!

In this week’s issue, we have more great insights from our serverless expert of the week Omid Eidivandi, more hints and tips, our weekly poll results, and even more!

Oct 04, 2024

Welcome

In last week’s newsletter, we had great insights from Serverless Hero Danielle Heberling, tips and tricks, the latest articles and serverless news, and much more!
In this week’s issue, we have more great insights from our serverless expert of the week Omid Eidivandi, we see just how much is going on in the EDA space, more hints and tips, our weekly poll results, and even more!

Last week, I was lucky enough to attend the AWS Manchester Community Summit, and I walked away with a similar feeling that I do after attending AWS Re:Invent: amazed by the power of our community and the strong connections that we have built across international boundaries.

From the moment I walked in, I was greeted by friends from all over the World, friends who support and share each other’s content, discuss difficult technical questions and approaches, offer constructive feedback, and are always there for each other even outside of the ‘tech’.

Luca Mezzalira shares similar thoughts in a must-watch video below (it is excellent). How do you get more involved in this community? Go check out https://www.believeinserverless.com/ to get started.

📰 Articles that caught the eye

This week I released my own article on progressive Lambda function deployments with rollbacks:

Other articles from the community:

🚀 New Releases

🎓 Ask the Expert

Each week I ask a different Serverless expert the same three questions to get their personal insights - this week we have AWS Community Builder Omid Eidivandi.

1. What is one common mistake you see teams making when implementing serverless solutions, and how can they avoid it?

Applying serverless before having the mindset shift, serveless decomposition brings some new challenges, and I think teams must take time to understand those challenges.

If I try to mention some, the first will be trusting managed services without clear visibility on scaling, availability, and resiliency mechanisms. You asked for one, but I put another one on the table. I see a lack of clear visibility on the consequences of inverting the communication direction by applying EDA, observing, testing, and developing only for a sub-system/system process, and forgetting to track consumer health; maybe well-defined KPIs can help, but there are many options.

2. Which serverless tool or service are you most excited about right now, and why?

Honestly, there are many, but Amazon SQS is my first love for its real reliability and scaling, from 1 to 1000 RPS. I never saw a single lost message or scaling problem, and I never heard a customer complaining about SQS, did you? Amazon EventBridge is my favourite one for high-scale enterprise architecture, it brings the option of collaboration but keeps the ownership boundaries clear while dealing with multi-account design.

3. What is your favourite trick or tip when working with serverless that the readers may find interesting?

When I design serverless on paper, I put the boxes without knowing the service that I will use, but the lines are my secret recipe. I think about ‘What’, ‘When’, and ‘How’ the communication will be established on any single line. This helps to put the best eligible tradeoffs in the discussion and make the best decision for the boxes later. Sometimes this leads to crossing the company governance and conventions boundaries but for a good reason.

💡 Quick Hints & Tips

Each week I share quick hints or tips based on things I notice in day-to-day engineering life:

⭐ [Tip 1] We all know that you can set Amazon CloudWatch alarms for more than ‘N’ number of errors happening in a given time period, but did you know that you can alarm on the ‘minimum number of success’ requests per time period? This is useful when an upstream system has a failure where your own alarm indicates an issue, as limited throughput has the knock-on effect of fewer successful calls in your service.

A great example is Netflix, who expect a certain amount of video plays to be started per second, and if this drops significantly, it indicates there is a major issue elsewhere!

⭐ [Tip 2] Many people use Lambda Powertools for logging, tracing and metrics, but many forget that it also has built-in support for idempotency! This article covers it in detail and shows you how to set this up with your NodeJS or Typescript-based functions!

🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts

✖️ Tweet of the Week

OK, for the second week running, it is actually AJ for tweet of the week, however, this tweet discussed something I knew was bound to be coming from AWS for Re:Invent, but something I am not looking forward to due to ‘AI fatigue’!

I was hoping for more sessions on general-purpose services and, obviously, more specifically, serverless! I’m lucky enough to be going to Re:Invent this year and will purposefully be giving a lot of the AI talks a wide berth unless they are brand-new services where I need to learn them to support my company.

🗳️ Poll of the Week

Firstly, last week’s poll results were in, and 60% of people shy away from using particular databases on AWS due to the overheads of VPCs and networking. I get it, using DynamoDB is a blessing when it comes to building, but sometimes you need to utilise a different database technology which does introduce a lot more in the way of networking setup. Why there isn’t a fully serverless version of Amazon Document DB is beyond me.

In this week’s poll, we ask the question “In your organisation are you currently embedding AI into your products?“.

🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts

This week’s inspirational quote comes from the great Martin Fowler:

“If you can't deploy your software automatically and painlessly, you're not realising your potential as a software developer.”
- Martin Fowler

I love this quote as it shows that automated deployments are not just a luxury or later ‘add-on’, but a necessity for high-performing software teams, and should be created up-front, in my opinion, at the start of any project. What constitutes a great CICD pipeline to you?

⭐ Spotlight

This week’s spotlight falls on David Boyne, who is the creator of Event Catalog, EDA Visuals, ‘Awesome EventBridge’ resource list; as well as a well-known international speaker, blogger, and much more besides!

David has pretty much owned the EDA space for a while now whilst educating thousands of people on everything from best practices to DDD, to building lots of very useful and cool products around event-based architectures.

Kudos, and thank you for everything that you do for our community!

👋🏼 Wrapping Up

Thank you for reading the latest 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