# 12 Growth Explosion 🏆

In this week’s issue, we have more great insights from our Serverless Expert of the week Luca Mezzalira, the spotlight falls on Taylor Jacobsen, more hints and tips, our weekly poll results, and more!

Nov 22, 2024

Welcome

In last week’s article, our Serverless expert of the week was Darryl Ruggles, the spotlight fell on AWS DevTools Hero Matthew Bonig, and we had some great contributions from the community!
This week, our Serverless expert of the week is international speaker, author and Principal Serverless Specialist Solutions Architect Luca Mezzalira, our spotlight falls on AWS Heroes Program Manager Taylor Jacobsen, we look at the latest exciting serverless news, service updates, and more!
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Leighton.

A Glimpse into My Week 🎤

Last night, I had the fun and prestige of attending the Dynamites Awards, where I was up for the Tech Champion Award. I was pipped to the post, unfortunately, but it was amazing to be a nominee up against some amazing tech leaders in the North East! What was amazing, however, is my company, Leighton, won the Growth Explosion award! Well done team! 🎉

The rest of the week was focused on working with our engineering teams to build out new products and solutions.

📰 Articles that caught the eye

⭐ The highlight for me this week was Ran Isenberg covering AppSync Events.

🎓 Ask the Expert

Each week, I ask a different Serverless expert the same three questions to get their personal insights - this week, we have international speaker, author and Principal Serverless Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS, Luca Mezzalira:

1. What is one common mistake you see teams making when implementing serverless solutions, and how can they avoid it?
When it comes to implementing serverless solutions, teams at different levels of experience often face distinct challenges. For newcomers to serverless architecture, a common pitfall is the tendency to approach it with a traditional mindset. These teams often struggle to think "serverlessly," focusing solely on code-level modularity while overlooking the importance of applying the same principle to infrastructure.
To overcome this, new teams should embrace the concept of infrastructure as code and design their systems thinking when to colocate their service and when to decouple it.
A good rule of thumb is looking on rate of change in a service, in this way they will be able to apply the right level of granularity in their systems without over engineering it. On the other hand, more seasoned teams working with serverless technologies face a different hurdle. Their main challenge lies in optimizing for asynchronous workloads and embracing eventual consistency.
These experienced teams should push themselves to challenge conventional wisdom, collaborating closely with product teams to identify which parts of the system truly require synchronous operations and where asynchronous programming can be leveraged to enhance scalability. By adopting this mindset, mature teams can unlock the full potential of serverless architectures, creating more resilient and scalable platforms that can handle the demands of modern applications.
2. Which serverless tool or service are you most excited about right now, and why?
As a developer, I've worked extensively on optimizing code for embedded systems, low-end platforms, and mobile devices. The performance aspect has always fascinated me. Despite this year is the 10-year anniversary, I'm still in love with Lambda like I was at the beginning.
Lambda enables me to leverage the mindset I learned in the trenches having incredible performance in combination with other AWS services. When I think about the scale at which the Lambda service operates, I find it absolutely brilliant. Having teams managing a service with over 10 trillion requests per month is insane.
Sometimes I ask myself how I'd handle such load, which patterns and techniques I should use for managing that traffic. I find it extremely fascinating because it's completely unconventional and not something that you can see in a lifetime for the majority of us.
3. What is your favourite trick or tip when working with serverless that the readers may find interesting?

One of my favourite tips is retrieving CloudWatch logs directly from the IDE. Instead of going to the console every time, I can use the AWS Toolkit plugin, search for CloudWatch, and select the logs group I'm interested in. From that point on, I can search through the logs similarly to how I'd do in the console, but without leaving the IDE.

🚀 New Releases

This week, more really interesting service updates! pre:Invent is in full swing!

⭐ The highlight for me is Serverless Aurora v2 going fully serverless and scaling to 0! In last week’s article, I asked in my poll if AWS should have a “fully’ serverless SQL database offering” - and they have delivered!

💡 Quick Hints & Tips

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

⭐ [Tip 1] - Proofreading. This first tip is for the content creators out there, specifically people writing articles or blogs. Quite often, when proofreading our own content, we miss duplicated words, poor grammar choices, or use of the wrong word in place of another. One easy way to pick up on this is using a screen reader, or your blog services built-in reader, to listen to your content out loud. This is a fail-proof way of finding issues, as issues really stand out when hearing somebody talk it out loud!

⭐ [Tip 2] - Generate Config. I recently needed to generate some config on the fly within my code repo any time I did a CDK deployment. To do this, I simply created a Typescript file called ‘generate-config.ts’ which took the current stage I was building for as an environment variable, and I ran this as an NPM script on CDK pre-deploy. You can use this quick example below to build out your own if the need ever arises:

I then ensured we had the correct NPM script in place to run this on a pre-hook, like so:

✖️ Social of the Week

⭐ You may notice ‘Tweet’ of the Week is now ‘Social’ of the Week for obvious reasons. I’m still on the bird app and cross-posting, but there has definitely been a shift in recent weeks.

This week’s post is by Yan Cui, who has created his own Serverless Starter Pack on BlueSky:

This is such a cool feature, especially when starting on a new platform and wanting to engage with some of the tech leaders in the serverless community! Go check it out!

🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts

🗳️ Poll of the Week

In last week’s poll, we asked the question, “Does AWS need a fully serverless SQL-based database offering?“. The answers were really interesting, with 73% saying yes, 18% saying no, and another 9% saying ‘it depends’.

Serverless Aurora v2, as of yesterday, now has the feature of scaling fully to 0, meaning it hits the mark now being fully serverless! Previously, it would only scale down to 0.5 ACUs, which meant it was always costing you (even when not being used).

In this week’s poll, we ask the question, “In your event-driven architectures, do your events follow: event-carried state transfer (fat events), notification pattern (slim events), or other“.

I would love to hear your thoughts using the comments button below!

🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts

This week’s quote comes from Kevin Wanke, and I have used this quote many times over the years with teams I am mentoring:

“Never present a problem without presenting at least one possible solution.”
- Kevin Wanke

Why is this so important? Over the years, I have seen so many engineering team members highlight problem after problem without even trying to suggest a possible solution.

From a team impact perspective, it can bring morale down and have a negative effect on team health. An alternative is to really think about a possible solution before highlighting the problem, a way of triaging the issue, or at least booking a meeting proactively for the team to storm on. This is a common trait of a good senior engineer.

What are your thoughts on this quote, and what does this mean to you?

⭐ Spotlight

This week’s spotlight falls on AWS Heroes Program Manager, Taylor Jacobsen.

Meet the final cohort of AWS Heroes this year – November 2023 | AWS News Blog

What many people do not see day to day is the sheer amount of hard work and effort that Taylor puts in to keep our Heroes community running, and for us to stay motivated, interested and connected; whether that be organising events with the AWS Heroes, answering queries on our Slack channel, supporting the wider community and its events, interfacing with the service teams on our behalf - and the sheer mountainous event we call re:Invent and the amount of support she gives us! Thank you for everything you do Taylor!