#10 Welcome to the new AWS Heroes! 🏆
In this week’s issue, we have more great insights from our Serverless Expert of the week Sheen Brisals, the spotlight falls on Pubudu Jayawarda, more hints and tips, our weekly poll results, and more!
Welcome
In last week’s article, our Serverless expert of the week was Serverless Hero Jimmy Dahlqvist, the spotlight fell on Sarah Hamilton, and we had some great contributions from the community!
This week, our Serverless expert of the week is AWS Hero Sheen Brisals, our spotlight falls on AWS Community Builder Pubudu Jayawardana, we look at the latest exciting serverless news, service updates, and welcome our latest AWS Heroes!
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Leighton.
A Glimpse into My Week 🎤
Yesterday I attended the on:tech event in Newcastle, where I got the chance to speak to tech leaders in the community to learn and share ideas and experiences. The key focus was questions around “Beyond one-size-fits-all: “How personalisation transforms software products“. With all of the hyper-personalisation work we have been doing with AI on AWS recently, this was a great event!
New AWS Heroes!
Also, welcome to the latest AWS Heroes: Ayyanar Jeyakrishnan (AJ) | Dzenana Dzevlan | Vadym Kazulkin | Marcin Sodkiewicz | Stephen Sennett | Kenneth Attard
It’s fantastic to see people like Vadym being recognised after all he has done for our community over many years! Congrats all!
📰 Articles that caught the eye
This week, I wrote an article on “How to e2e Test AI Responses using AI“:
Other great contributions from the community this week:
Marko covers how to export DynamoDB to S3 and query with Athena using SQL. This was a great article and I learned about Amazon Ion for the first time. Looking forward to part 2.
Omid Eidivandi discusses “Conventional Use of AWS CDK”. There are lots of great nuggets in this one!
Simplicity Is An Achievement by Seth Orell. I really enjoyed this article, and as you will see below in the inspirational quotes section, I have been having similar thoughts recently.
Testing AI-Powered Apps: Introducing LLM Test Mate, by Danilo Poccia. This fantastic article and open source project was shared by Danilo whilst I was writing my own article, and it’s interesting to compare the different approaches with different languages.
5 Prompt Engineering Tips for Developers by Slobodan Stojanović. I loved the quotes “prompts are not magic. They are just instructions“ and “The better you explain what you want, the higher chance you’ll get a useful reply“. Great article, go check it out.
🎓 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 Serverless Hero, Sheen Brisals:
1. What is one common mistake you see teams making when implementing serverless solutions, and how can they avoid it?
New engineers and teams assume serverless is so easy, and they can smash everything within a day. After a while, the same engineers and teams complain that serverless is complicated!
Why?
When teams newly adopt serverless, they only see Lambda functions, S3 buckets, SQS queues, etc., and the ease with which they can develop and deploy their PoCs or MVPs. They ignore the serverless ecosystem, where several other services, tools, patterns, practices, and people coexist. Due to their skewed view, they don’t see the need for guardrails and principles to guide them on the right track.
Can this be avoided? Yes!
How?
Alongside experimenting with serverless, invest time to understand its technology landscape. Think simplicity by drawing smaller ownership boundaries between teams and employing contractual communication measures such as APIs and events.
Learn to separate concerns and responsibilities, sync and async needs, and build smaller microservices.
Instill cost and suitability thinking in those who propose architectures.
Be part of the serverless community and learn from those who’ve already overcome the hurdles.
2. Which serverless tool or service are you most excited about right now, and why?
Since its release, I’ve been a great fan of Amazon EventBridge; however, as the AWS re:Invent season is fast approaching, I look forward to hearing some exciting cool stuff.
Beyond AWS, it is wonderful to see how the fully managed services ecosystem is evolving. Many of us know how the team at Momento is promoting serverless, Cloudflare is making waves in the industry, and a startup, DBOS, is in the serverless space with new ideas!
3. What is your favourite trick or tip when working with serverless that the readers may find interesting?
Given the spooky season, there are enough tips, tricks, and treats around. Let me offer some advice instead to engineers and teams:
Think beyond what is being proposed or discussed at your technical sessions. Ask uncomfortable questions about architectural choices. Don’t hold back a question and regret it later—forever. As an engineer, develop Systems Thinking.
🚀 New Releases
This week was a little more quiet than last, but I expect this to change in the next few weeks!
⭐ The highlight for me is Claude 3.5 fine-tuning in Haiku now available to play with!
Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Haiku model now available in Amazon Bedrock.
Fine-tuning for Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku model in Amazon Bedrock is now generally available.
AWS introduces service versioning and deployment history for Amazon ECS services.
AWS Lambda announces JSON logging support for .NET managed runtime.
💡 Quick Hints & Tips
Each week I share quick hints or tips based on things I notice in day-to-day engineering life:
⭐ [Tip 1] - Do you work a lot with DynamoDB but are not a fan of using the console to perform data searching, filtering, and data modelling? It’s a bit restrictive isn’t it? This is where NoSQL Workbench may really help!
NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB is a cross-platform, client-side GUI application that you can use for modern database development and operations. It's available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. NoSQL Workbench is a visual development tool that provides data modelling, data visualisation, and query development features to help you design, create, query, and manage DynamoDB tables.
⭐ [Tip 2] - This is non-serverless specific, but just one that I have practised for many years. When creating a sizeable pull request that is going to go for review to your team, create a draft one first, and take yourself off for a walk/cup of coffee/away from your desk for 5-10 mins, then come back to it with fresh eyes, and talk through the code in your head as if you were explaining every line to the person that will review it.
The number of times I see issues, potential bugs, typos, etc, with a fresh pair of eyes and having walked through the changes line by line is frightening, and it actually saves time compared to fixing up the code and the back and forth with further reviews and comments.
✖️ Tweet of the Week
This week’s tweet comes from David Boyne who is building out his wonderful EDA tool Event Catalog.
The amount of effort to build this out with what feels like new features every few days is simply amazing! This latest feature around visual animations on message flows is great. Massive kudos!
🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts
Developing Highly Scalable Image Storage Solution with AWS Serverless with Vadym Kazulkin.
Money-saving tips for the frugal serverless developer with Yan Cui.
Scaling for Global Growth with Modern Cloud by David Anderson.
“He built a hotel booking system that costs $0.82/month to run with” Yan Cui.
🗳️ Poll of the Week
In last week’s poll, we asked the question, “Are you double-guessing yourself with using AWS services now in case they are deprecated?“. It was interesting to see 36% of people being concerned with AWS deprecating services, 45% saying they can adapt and are not too worried, 9% saying that they only use core services, so they are unaffected, and 9% said other.
This week, we ask the question, “Do you ever choose Kubernetes for new greenfield work?“.
I would love to hear your thoughts using the comments button below!
🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts
This week, we are going with three separate quotes that span around 400 years but ultimately say the same thing with regard to simplicity, which we can think about when architecting and building solutions:
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”
- Leonardo da Vinci.
“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand."
– Martin Fowler
"Complexity is your enemy. Any fool can make something complicated. It is hard to make something simple."
– Richard Branson
I have thought about simplicity recently and have also reflected on when, in the past, teams have potentially overcomplicated solutions when trying to do too much or being too clever.
What spurned this was discussing a CLI tool we built at a previous company where we tried to add too many features, for too many people, and for it to do too much, where it became less useable than the initial simple MVP. What was needed here was simplicity.
As you go into next week, when designing and building your serverless solutions, keep it simple! Simplicity is your friend!
⭐ Spotlight
This week’s spotlight falls on AWS Community Builder Pubudu Jayawardana who is a fantastic speaker and blogger who works for the great Serverless story, PostNL.
Pubudu has written amazing articles that always caught my eye on many of the hard parts of serverless architecture, especially in the EDA space (SQS, SNS, EventBridge, etc). Thank you for all you do in our amazing serverless community. I have personally benefited from your fantastic content on more than one occasion!
👋🏼 Wrapping Up
Thank you for reading the latest Serverless Advocate Newsletter!
For anybody attending Re:Invent this year, please reach out if you would like to grab a coffee and chat about all things serverless!
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
