Title: Issue #140: Welcome to re:Invent!
Publication: Ready, Set, Cloud!
Series: Ready, Set, Cloud Picks of the Week
Author: Allen Helton
Published: December 02, 2024
URL: https://www.readysetcloud.io/newsletter/140/

AWS re:Invent has official begun! Let's cover the last of the fun pre:Invent announcements and look at some fantastic content from the community.


### 🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is [Dave Hall](https://rdyset.click/k80q04), AWS training lead at Pfizer, consultant, and AWS Community Builder. Dave is a wonderful resource for anything cloud related and a friendly face always willing to help. Catch him [giving a talk](https://rdyset.click/suKIx6) for the community this week at re:Invent! Thank you for everything you do, Dave!

### 💯 Spotlight

I'm a big fan of everything [Sheen Brisals](https://rdyset.click/V5VOE3) does. He has a way of conveying ideas in a way that makes you think about things from a completely different perspective. In a recent talk at QCon, Sheen describes how and why to [think, architect, and sustain your serverless apps as set pieces](https://rdyset.click/nC8gZH). He has both video and long-form formats of his message, where he talks about complexity, microservices, domain-driven design, and more all while relating it do a movie set. Very clever analogy and fantastic insights from this legend.

### 🔥 My Favorite Content

I do a lot of orchestrated workflows and am always fascinated different options for top notch orchestrators. [Ben Pyle](https://rdyset.click/EXxq5G) published an article last week [exploring Kestra in a serverless API workflow](https://rdyset.click/zaUrkT) that I really liked. From Ben's findings, it looks like Kestra has a great way to build and visualize workflows that aren't tightly coupled with AWS - which seems like a necessity as the tech scene keeps growing. I like Ben's honest opinions in the article, and his intuition is spot on as always.



AWS does a pretty good job at keeping Bedrock up to date with high quality models, but there are *hundreds* of models out there that do a plethora of things. [Christian Nuss](https://rdyset.click/G42aH8) shared a quick little article showing us [how to use Hugging Face models in Lambda](https://rdyset.click/2CA60y) in only 3 steps. This has never been something I considered before, I thought the models might be too large for effective Lambda use, but maybe I'm wrong! It's a neat article nonetheless.

[Robert Bulmer](https://rdyset.click/unE1rs) built an entire app and wrote an article explaining every last detail of it. The app tracks customer engagements and [uses AI to automatically build reports](https://rdyset.click/pfFhzk) for them. Robert goes through every detail of the app, from the architecture to the data model to API endpoints and security 🔥. This article gives me Lee Gilmore vibes - you can tell Robert and Lee used to work together 😜.

Fun fact - the reason I use JavaScript for everything is because I abandoned .NET (it had 20 second cold starts in Lambda at the time). I know .NET cold starts have gotten significantly faster since my departure in 2019, and it looks like it's gotten even faster with some work that [Jordan González](https://rdyset.click/IwSX7i) recently did. He wrote a gritty engineering post detailing how he [achieved faster .NET cold starts with ReadyToRun compilation](https://rdyset.click/MbKdnX). This is some great low-level content!

### 💡 Tip of the Week

As we prepare for a week most likely full of big generative AI releases and roadmaps, it's good to remind ourselves that GenAI isn't perfect and is capable of hallucinations that can put you in a tight spot if you aren't careful. I get the feeling Matt might have trusted a git command he probably shouldn't have 😬



### 🐣 New Releases

Last week was full of more exciting releases. I won't attempt to list them all here but I will share the serverless ones I think are particularly cool. If you want to see everything, I highly recommend you check out [AWS News](https://rdyset.click/0iSgn3).

[S3 now allows you to do conditional writes](https://rdyset.click/OoksOW). No more accidental overwrites of your content!

You can now [implement custom orchestration in Bedrock Agents](https://rdyset.click/EeKaN6).

[Amplify supports passwordless auth via Cognito](https://rdyset.click/wKIQt5).

[Amazon Q is now context aware in the console](https://rdyset.click/RgRzo9). This is a big one for usability of Q when poking around the console.

### Last Words

We're in day 1 of AWS re:Invent! The [Believe in Serverless community](https://rdyset.click/gZ2Swp) is doing 10 sessions across Tuesday and Wednesday of this week in Buddy V's ristorante at the AWS Community Lounge. These sessions are for Community Builders, Heroes, and User Group leaders, but they are being recorded and will be online later this month. If you want to attend in person, please [register on re:Meet](https://rdyset.click/nz20Xs).

I hope to see as many of you as I can this week! Send me a message somewhere and we'll set something up!

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/FjhARJ), [LinkedIn](https://rdyset.click/L2cDCC), or [email](mailto:allenheltondev@gmail.com).

Happy coding!

Allen