Title: Issue #107: A big week for app builders! Publication: Ready, Set, Cloud! Series: Ready, Set, Cloud Picks of the Week Author: Allen Helton Published: April 15, 2024 URL: https://www.readysetcloud.io/newsletter/107/ We had some great content and big service releases that should make all you app builders giddy with excitement! ### Serverless Superhero Our serverless superhero this week is [Rakesh Sanghvi](https://rdyset.click/AdlFcg), director of enterprise architecture at [Curantis Solutions](https://rdyset.click/nlErxm). Rakesh is an active member of the [Believe in Serverless community](https://rdyset.click/bY8JnR) and an all-around wizard at serverless cost optimization. Don't miss his session tomorrow at 2pm CDT / 19:00 UTC on saving money with serverless, check out the Believe in Serverless site for more details! Thank you for everything you do, Rakesh! ### Tutorials I published an article last week that took me *way longer* than it should have. It's about [creating 30-second timers in AWS](https://rdyset.click/MQJL9m). Cron jobs and the EventBridge scheduler only go down to 1-minute intervals, but if you need something more frequent than that, you're on your own to find a solution. I cover what I considered in my approach and what I ended up going with for a cost-effective solution. You know what developers hate to build as much as unit tests? Reports. Even though we don't like them, they're still a very important part of any production-ready software. [Ben Pyle](https://rdyset.click/5Ta8Y1) wrote a great article on this topic, specifically about [reporting with serverless](https://rdyset.click/CuISoI). He describes three fundamental patterns with pros and cons of each. These are incredibly useful if you're looking for a pattern you can plug into your existing application. ### Interesting Reads The LLRT runtime made waves for a few weeks then the hype died down a little bit. To bring some of the excitement back, [Efi Merdler Kravitz](https://rdyset.click/0NeCGH) wrote a post describing how he [built a Lambda extension on LLRT](https://rdyset.click/bHDKGf) to register analytics without slowing down performance. This is a fascinating article, covering everything from how extensions work to comparing latency with Rust. A couple of weeks ago, I saw a new feature making it easier to connect API Gateway and Amazon Verified Permissions (AVP). Honestly, I didn't know what AVP was, so I chose to skip over learning too much about it. [Jimmy Dahlqvist](https://rdyset.click/j8v9Cg) has changed my mind though. He wrote a walkthrough of [how to set up AVP with API Gateway and Cognito](https://rdyset.click/qI1hBh) and showed me that there's a managed way to do something I've been doing by hand for years. This is a great visual tool to see what you can do with it and how easy AWS has made building safe permissions in your APIs. As much as I like to pretend I don't like the CDK, it's actually pretty cool. [Lee Gilmore](https://rdyset.click/cIPNik) wrote an article last week teaching us about [CDK Aspects and why they are powerful](https://rdyset.click/UY6GK9), and I must say that I'm impressed. Lee tells us what an Aspect is and shows us exactly how to build one with a meaningful example. This has some huge benefits in enterprise development, we should all be using these! Episode #6 of the Ready, Set, Cloud podcast was released last week. In this episode, I chat with [Raphael Manke](https://rdyset.click/o1LiYC) about the [value of in-person meetups](https://rdyset.click/L3guhw). The world has gone virtual and that's not always a good thing. We talk about the differences between in-person and virtual meetups, some of the many successes we've had from it, share a few of our favorite stories, and much more. ### Spotlight [Marcia Villalba](https://rdyset.click/5iqndD) makes incredible content. Last week, she published a video describing the automation she built to [dub video with AWS Step Functions and AI](https://rdyset.click/0sD3DQ). The video itself doesn't go into the code, those videos are separate in an attached playlist. But rather this video describes in detail the architecture and trade-offs made behind something so complex. It's an incredibly interesting video and I learned so much from it. Not only is this a very cool project, but it also demonstrates several core patterns in serverless architectures. Amazing work, Marcia! ### Tip of the Week I posted a brain teaser on Twitter last week to test your knowledge of Amazon EventBridge. I got some varying results and lots of interesting discussion. If you're curious about the answer, check the retweets - I shared it a couple of days later. ### New Releases Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock now [support Claude 3 Haiku](https://rdyset.click/UGQOtI). This means you can connect Claude 3 easily to your company data sources for RAG pipelines. I've been liking Claude more and more, it seems to reason better than many of the other available LLMs. AppSync now [forwards application request headers to custom authorizer functions](https://rdyset.click/Mid73N). Honestly, I'm surprised it didn't do this before - but better late than never! A big announcement for Lambda function urls - [CloudFront now supports Origin Access Control (OAC) for them](https://rdyset.click/UDJ34c)! OAC can be used to authenticate access to function urls to make sure access comes through designated CloudFront distributions. Big win! Step Functions announced an [optimized integration for MediaConvert](https://rdyset.click/XUvPuB). This allows you to do video transcoding jobs directly in your workflows. As someone who has used MediaConvert in production before, anything to simplify this task is a huge boost to productivity! ### Last Words I've started live streaming! If you're interested in seeing me learn some new things and throw down some code, tune in on Fridays at 1pm CDT / 18:00 UTC [on Twitch](https://rdyset.click/qu7xtV). I'm definitely still learning about the streaming process, but there's nothing like learning in public! If you'd like to make a recommendation for the serverless superhero or for an article you found especially useful, send me a message on [Twitter](https://rdyset.click/juWVJw), [LinkedIn](https://rdyset.click/hnUO8b), or [email](mailto:allenheltondev@gmail.com). Happy Coding! Allen