🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Suzana Melo Moraes, full-stack dev, AWS Community Builder, and AWS User Group leader. Suzana is a fantastic developer advocate and wonderful speaker, covering a range of topical and important development areas. She’s also an amazing community advocate, regularly highlighting individuals and underrepresented groups. Thank you for everything you do, Suzana!

💯 Spotlight

I loved the story from Marcos Henrique last week for a few reasons: it explains an issue with a common architecture only present at massive scale, it’s written lightheartedly with lots of personality, and it gets its resolution from help via the serverless community. His article is about an EMFILE issue causing Lambda failures and includes details that you didn’t know you didn’t know. Excellent piece of writing!

🔥 My Favorite Content

I ran into throttling issues with something I was building last week. It made me wonder what happens on a throttle - does my request get dropped or does it go into a bucket and wait for a cooldown period? By happenstance, Yan Cui published an article on exactly that topic as it relates to Lambda invocations. He makes some great distinctions about async invocations vs async event sources and also talks about synchronous invocations of Lambda as well. I love how simple he makes this fairly complex topic.

Spoiler alert - AWS released Lambda SnapStart for Python and .NET functions last week. With a super quick turnaround, James Eastham made a video on everything you need to know about using it. He covers configuration, important info for testing, performance comparisons, and much more. Great work on this, James!

Any time someone talks about WebSockets you’re sure to find me leaping from the shadows with an “um, actually” 🤣. Ran Isenberg published an article on his experience with AppSync Events and talks a bit about WebSockets, too. I found the post to be a great first impression for someone who hasn’t used AppSync Events or WebSockets before. I’m going to bite tongue on the um, actually’s because Ran does a really good job explaining the difference between this and API Gateway WebSockets and describing some of the cool new features of the service.

Before you jump on the WebSocket train, let’s take a look at a post from Renato Losio last week going into a case study about how Recall.ai saved $1m on AWS by eliminating WebSockets. It’s a short recap, but it goes over the surprising resource allocation of the WebSocket protocol and how it can slip away from you if you aren’t managing it correctly. And yes, Renato got bonus points for citing me in the article 😀

💡 Tip of the Week

Since we’re on the topic of WebSockets and real-time communication, Michael Walmsley introduced us to his framework agnostic EventHub for Front Ends (Effe) last week. This abstracts away WebSockets and provides you with connectors that send your events anywhere. Extremely cool and promising framework, Michael!

Introducing EventHub for Front Ends (Effe). It's time to build in public and get feedback.

What is Effe?

🌟A pure event bus without confusing WebSockets
🌟Connectors to transmit your events anywhere!

I like to think of it as EventBridge for FrontEnd!https://t.co/2C0pK2cWaS

— Michael Walmsley (@walmsles) November 21, 2024

🐣 New Releases

Normally I weigh in on the serverless releases from the prior week, but there’s just too many to form opinions on, so I’m just going to list them out and leave you with a link to the pre:Invent releases on AWS News.

AppSync can now integrate directly with Amazon Bedrock.

You can append data direcly to an object in S3 Express One Zone.

Lambda now supports APM via CloudWatch Application Signals.

SQS FIFO queues increased the in-flight limit from 20K to 120K.

CloudFormation Hooks let you run custom logic to enforce security, compliance, and governance during CloudFormation operations.

Lambda supports S3 as a failed-event destination.

CloudFront supports gRPC delivery.

Lambda now has SnapStart for Python and .NET functions.

Step Functions lets you generate IaC templates from your existing resources.

Lambda now supports Node.js 22 in all regions, including GovCloud!

There’s lots more that came out last week, but these stood out to me as really exciting features!

Last Words

I am back from a fantastic week at Disney World! I am so grateful for the Make-a-Wish foundation for providing an unforgettable experience for my family and me. We felt appreciated, special, and thankful everywhere we went. There are some truly amazing people in this world, and we got the privilege of meeting a bunch of them last week 💙

AWS re:Invent is next week! And good news - I am definitely going to be there! I hope to catch up with many of you while we’re there. But until then, enjoy this week of Thanksgiving. Americans - enjoy the food and the time off. Everyone else - take some time to consider what you’re thankful for and share it with us. A little bit of gratitude goes a long way.

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 Bluesky, Twitter, LinkedIn, or email.

Happy coding!

Allen