#17 Building in Public ♠️

This week, our serverless expert is AWS Serverless Hero Vadym Kazulkin, our spotlight falls on AWS Community Builder Raphael Manke, we look at the latest AWS service releases, blog posts, news & more!

Dec 27, 2024

Welcome

In last week’s article, our serverless expert was AWS Community Hero Rehan van der Merwe, and our spotlight fell on AWS Serverless Hero Jones Zachariah Noel N.
This week, our serverless expert is AWS Serverless Hero Vadym Kazulkin, our spotlight falls on AWS Community Builder Raphael Manke, we look at the latest AWS service releases, blog posts, hints and tips, news and more!
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Leighton.

A Glimpse into My Week 🎤

This week, other than spending some much needed family time, I have been focusing on a side-project mainly, which I hope will go live as an MVP over the next couple of days.

Building in public - going live with a side project in the next few days

I have also been working on a blog post about the new custom domain feature of Amazon API Gateway Private APIs; and obviously working on this weeks newsletter issue!

📰 Articles that caught the eye

⭐ The highlight for me this week was the article by Matt Martz - very cool indeed!

🎓 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 Vadym Kazulkin:

1. What is one common mistake you see teams making when implementing serverless solutions, and how can they avoid it?
One of the common mistakes is to think that by using fully-managed AWS (Serverless) services you only focus on the business logic and don’t need to think about operations of the AWS Serverless services and that they will scale indefinitely.
The reality is, you need to understand the concepts and challenges of the distributed systems and all individual AWS (Serverless) service quotas/limits, know which of them are adjustable and not and architect your solution around it.
It’s important to find the right balance to design and implement the architecture that fits your current and near future needs, but find the right timing to rearchitect the solution if it’s about not going to meet you scalability needs anymore (which also means, your business is successful).
2. Which serverless tool or service are you most excited about right now, and why?
I’m currently excited about Amazon Aurora DSQL service (currently in preview) and concretely what place it will find among other Amazon (Serverless) database offerings for the development of the new services/features and migrating the existing ones to it.
3. What is your favourite trick or tip when working with serverless that the readers may find interesting?
As Serverless solutions typically involves using event-driven architectures and asynchronous invocations, the observability of such systems (which are heavily distributed) becomes challenging.
In many cases your solution involves not only completely Serverless solutions, but also other types like different types of Docker containers (ECS or EKS with or without using Fargate), or even self-managed (EC2) servers. So you need to incorporate the overall observability right from the beginning, select the right tool or vendor for your specific solution, understand its pricing and what influences it (which is generally the largest item in the invoice), set up the alerts and integrate them into your incident management tool.

🚀 New Releases

Here are the latest releases this week in the AWS World - fairly quiet as you would imagine over the festive period! My fave? Probably the EventBridge proactive token refresh!

🔥 Tip: Check out https://aws-news.com/ for the very latest up-to-date serverless releases as they happen, created by the talented AWS Serverless Hero Luc van Donkersgoed.

👷🏻 Tools & Frameworks

Checkout the latest open-source frameworks and tool updates from the past week - my fave, EventCatalog federation:

💡 Hints & Tips

Each week I share quick hints or tips based on things I notice in day-to-day engineering life. This week we are doing something a little different, as these are the tips I would give if I had to start out again in the industry:

📑 Focus on the items that will produce the biggest and best results, forget the things that don’t. The Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, is the observation that 80% of outcomes come from 20% of effort. It’s too easy to fill your days looking busy on replying to emails and attending meetings - focus on the items that give the biggest return.

🙅🏽‍♂️ Learn to say no. If you don’t have time, or don’t want to do something, just say “no”. Preserve your energy for the important things.

🎙️ Build your personal brand (now). The sooner you start this and realise its power the better. It’s never too late to get started, and I wish I had started years earlier. Even introverts can blog, post, or do OSS work.

🙇🏽‍♂️ Your gut is rarely wrong, listen to it. A former ex-secret service colleague taught me this. If something fundamentally feels wrong, it probably is.

🚀 Opportunities multiply as you take them. Over the years I’ve realised there is a cascading affect when you take up opportunities, however scary they might be.

📚 Be consistent with personal growth. The rule of a 100 states just 18 mins of learning per day (100 hours p/year approx) can make you better than 95% of people globally in your field. I usually spend 2 hours per day on self improvement and have done for ten years now.

⏰ Make more time. I get up at 4am each day for 2 hours of focus time while my family are asleep, as time with them is precious. Even getting up an hour earlier gives you 7 hours of dedicated focus time per week.

💪🏽 Growth happens when it’s scary. You grow when you do things your not qualified to do. Start that podcast, take that course, go all in. I had never blogged or done a newsletter before, for example, and both now get thousands upon thousands of views per month. You won’t grow doing nothing.

🍼 Become comfortable not knowing. If you can be comfortable always starting at the bottom of the ladder knowing nothing in a given area or service, having faith in the learning process and enjoying the journey, whilst taking into consideration the points above, you will always be in the growth zone.

🦸‍♂️ Let things go. If you make a mistake, a colleague undermines you, or you made a wrong decision; if it won’t matter in 5 years time then don’t spend more than 5 minutes thinking about it. Move on. Many call this the 5 by 5 rule.

What are your thoughts on this list? Do you agree or disagree? What is missing?

✖️ Social of the Week

This week’s social is on X/Twitter and comes from AWS Serverless Hero Ran Isenberg:

The post links to the following AWS article which covers how CyberArk delivers business value faster using serverless technologies on AWS, going from 18 weeks to 3 hours when standing up new services. Go check it out!

🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts

Here are some of my favourite videos and podcasts this week, with the favourite being the Marc Brooker interview:

Interview with AWS VP and Distinguished Engineer Marc Brooker

Weekly Case Study 🔍

This weeks case study comes from Capital One, where you can learn how they saved developer time and reduced cost by going serverless using AWS Lambda and Amazon ECS.

What I find great about this case study is that it is a prime example of serverless being used at huge scale, as Capital One is one of the top ten largest banks in the US, and by the end of 2022, more than a third of Capital One’s apps used serverless technology.

🗳️ Poll of the Week

In last week’s poll, we asked the question, “Can AWS SAM be used in Enterprises, rather than looking at AWS CDK and Terraform as default?“.

Interestingly, 100% of respondents said no, which actually doesn’t surprise me at all since most enterprise workloads include non-serverless services. Whats even more surprising is the Capital One study showed they did indeed use SAM at scale.

This week, we ask the question, “Which observability provider do you use?“

Please feel free to add comments below as to why you chose that option.

🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts

This week’s quote comes from Neil Ford:

“Often, the architect is also the technical leader on projects and therefore determines the engineering practices the team uses. Just as architects must carefully consider the problem domain before choosing an architecture, they must also ensure that the architectural style and engineering practices form a symbiotic mesh. For example, a microservices architecture assumes automated machine provisioning, automated testing and deployment, and a raft of other assumptions. Trying to build one of these architectures with an antiquated operations group, manual processes, and little testing creates tremendous friction and challenges to success.“
- Fundamentals of Software Architecture (2020) - Neil Ford

This quote is really interesting for me having worked on a spectrum from Global Head of Architecture where my architects were separate from the engineering teams by design (enabling teams), to being a Technical Architect working embedded in the team and cutting code at Sage as the lead engineer.

So where do I sit personally with the optimum way of working? For me, an architect working in a serverless team is more like a ‘Staff Engineer’, and the naming I think is important. The name ‘architect’ usually has historical connotations of being ivory tower, and over the years I have seen so many architects being out of touch with the frameworks, services, WoW, and code, and therefore can’t make rationale decisions in that space (yet do!). A Staff Engineer by name and nature is close to the code and team, a mentor, spots the ‘weak spots’, can design the architecture with the team, and has eyes on cross team dependencies and initiatives.

I would say regardless of my current title of Principal Cloud Architect, I actually work as a Staff Engineer ironically.

What are your thoughts on where architects sit in organisations?

⭐ Spotlight

This week’s spotlight falls on AWS Community Builder Raphael Manke:

Raphael is an AWS User group Leader, public speaker, and also built the Unofficial AWS re:Invent planner! Whats more, he is a really nice guy and great to be around! Thank you for all your community contributions Raphael, and I look forward to seeing what you achieve this year!

👋🏼 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

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