#13 Time to Travel to re:Invent ✈️

In this week’s issue, we have more great insights from our Serverless Expert of the week Marcin Sodkiewicz, the spotlight falls on Luc van Donkersgoed, latest releases, news and more!

Nov 29, 2024

Welcome

In last week’s article, our Serverless expert of the week was international speaker, author and Principal Serverless Specialist Solutions Architect Luca Mezzalira, the spotlight fell on AWS Heroes Program Manager Taylor Jacobsen, and we had some great contributions from the community!
This week, our Serverless expert of the week is AWS Serverless Hero Marcin Sodkiewicz, our spotlight falls on Luc van Donkersgoed, 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 🎤

This week, I had the fun of presenting my lightning talk at the AWS User Group North East, which was titled ‘Testing Generative AI output using AI on AWS‘.

It was a great evening with six fantastic talks, varying from FinOps to the Well-Architected Framework! I was also voted top talk of the night which meant I got to take home the first prize of some fantastic Lego! You can also read the article that prompted the talk here:

📰 Articles that caught the eye

⭐ The highlight for me this week was seeing my friend Omid announce his book release! Congrats!

Orchestrating a Serverless API Workflow with Kestra by Benjamen Pyle. This was an interesting article for me personally, as I have never used Kestra, but I might dabble with this over the weekend to get my own thoughts. (well, I do have a lot of time to kill in airport lounges!).
Christian Nuss covers how to Deploy Hugging Face Models to AWS Lambda in 3 steps. This is a super cool example of using Lambda and function URLs with models, although the first load time is rough with functions.
Vadym Kazulkin discusses Amazon DevOps Guru for the Serverless applications - Part 13 Anomaly detection on Aurora Serverless v2 with Data API. Another detailed article from Vadym with graphs showing exactly what is happening under the hood.
Private API Gateway with DNS by Ricardo Cino. It is really interesting to see PostNLs use of private APIs, which has influenced our poll of the week below. A quick caveat, days after this article was published AWS released the ability to add custom domains on Private API Gateways.
Why Serverless Is A Scam by Andrew Zuo. This is very much one-sided, misinformed, and ‘click-baity’, but an interesting read nonetheless.
Omid Eidivandi has gone one further and written a whole book! “Mastering Serverless Computing with AWS Lambda” Check it out here!

🎓 Ask the Expert

Each week, I ask a different Serverless expert the same three questions to get their personal insights - this week, we have new AWS Serverless Hero Marcin Sodkiewicz:

1. What is one common mistake you see teams making when implementing serverless solutions, and how can they avoid it?
The most common mistake in implementing serverless solutions IMHO is that engineers often naively assume that since something is serverless, it won't fail. We are building extremely distributed systems with serverless architectures and have to deal with failures like all other mere mortals.

We still have to understand what and how it can fail. Failure is part of our system's reality. This is the reason why engineers have to understand how those amazing abstractions like event source mappings work and how they can affect our processing. In optimal event processing, properly configuring event source mappings and handling failure the right way is precisely what makes a difference.

Furthermore, we can contribute to that failure elsewhere by running our ultra-scalable serverless components without considering downstream systems that might not scale at the same pace.

Remember that after coming up with your bulletproof solution, you should always test it; chaos engineering is your friend here.

2. Which serverless tool or service are you most excited about right now, and why?
Since the question has that "right now" component, I am the most excited about Event Bridge Schedulers. That service is perfect for the solution I am building now. Schedulers allows me to effortlessly trigger some action at a specific point in time in the future. That's it—I can move on and provide business value instead of building custom scheduler mechanism. There is nothing to manage. This is the type of serverless product I love and need more of.

3. What is your favourite trick or tip when working with serverless that the readers may find interesting?
My tip is to divide responsibilities and optimize read and write architecture layers in the systems you build with CQRS.

That is a perfect approach in cases where you have to optimize for different architectural characteristics on the read and write layers, and there is a significant difference in volume between them, which is typical in the systems we build. However, I tend to think these days that this is the right way to build systems in general.

Serverless and event-driven architectures are a perfect match here. You can do the heavy lifting on the write layer, which could be built fully using serverless solutions with all the goodies available on AWS, and prepare optimized data that will be accessed on the read layer.

Does your system have a much higher volume on the read layer? Perfect.
Maybe Fargate will be a better fit for your system rather than Lambda. Maybe it will be better to access data through ALB instead of one of Gateways? Maybe your read layer won't be serverless, but that's fine. We can mix and match and have the best of both worlds.

Remember to use a service that will optimize the desired characteristics of your architecture. In the end, it's all about profit & customer satisfaction.

🚀 New Releases

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

⭐ The highlight for me is cross-region connectivity for AWS PrivateLink, as this opens up so many new architecture patterns!

💡 Quick Hints & Tips

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

⭐ [Tip 1] - When building event-driven architectures, don’t make the presumption that only your own AWS services can publish and consume events - your integrated 3rd party products can too regardless of technologies! There are many different patterns, with mine being called ‘domain adapters’ with my heavy focus on domain-driven design. In this pattern, if your 3rd party services can’t publish to, or consume from Amazon EventBridge or SNS/SQS directly, for example, we can create an adapter which can utilise its favoured technology (web-hooks, sFTP, REST, GraphQL etc) and then forward on the events. Check it out!

⭐ [Tip 2] - Linked to above, one of my favourite patterns in an enterprise is the Event Gateway pattern, allowing 3rd party solutions to publish events through an API that sits in front of your EDA architecture - but what other patterns would I suggest people learn in Serverless? Well - I have you covered! Check out the following:

✖️ Social of the Week

This weeks social is from AWS DevTools Hero Johannes Koch, with his quick tip for people travelling to re:Invent next week who want to connect with others on socials!

This is a fantastic idea, and I am going to try and squeeze this in before flying out on Saturday morning! ✈️

🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts

🗳️ Poll of the Week

In last weeks poll we asked the question:

“In your event-driven architectures, do your events follow: event-carried state transfer (fat events), notification pattern (slim events), or other“.

44% of people voted that they use Event-Carried State Transfer (Fat Events), 11% use the Notification pattern (Slim Events), and another 44% saying they use a combination of the two. Personally I am in the ‘combination of the two’ camp, and it just depends on the use cases.

This week we ask the question, “Do you use Private Amazon API Gateways on AWS?“.

The reason for asking the question is that previously we couldn’t have custom domain names on private API Gateways without jumping through some pretty complicated infrastructure hoops, but now we can do this natively! Some people also don’t like the added complexities of SigV4, VPC Endpoints and resource policies.

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

🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts

This week’s quote comes from Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon.

”The cost of experimentation is now near zero. Cloud has democratized innovation.”
- Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon.

I love this quote, especially when linked to Serverless technologies in the cloud. The speed in which we can experiment and innovate now is insane compared to years gone by, whilst pivoting quickly during development when needed, swapping between similar serverless services as we learn more, whilst also creating MVPs with little to know upfront or running costs. Its a beautiful thing!

⭐ Spotlight

This week’s spotlight falls on AWS Serverless Hero Luc van Donkersgoed, who is an International speaker, writer, content producer, and previous winner of Werner Vogels AWS “Go Build Award”.

Luc has also built the fantastic AWS News website, which many of us use for staying up to date with the latest service releases! He has also shared many great insights into the work done at PostNL from an EDA perspective that have supported many others in their serverless journeys. Thank you for all you do for our amazing community!