Serverless Picks of the Week
Issue #149: Going full stack this week!
This week's newsletter is authored by Andres Moreno.

🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Rossana Suarez, Tech Lead DevOps at NaranjaX, AWS Container Hero, winner of the Go Build Award in 2024 and regularly publishes blogs and videos. Thank you for all that you do Rossana!

💯 Spotlight

I love the videos James Eastham has been releasing. They are highly entertaining, bite sized and contain handy information. His latest video discusses using events to start breaking down a monolith. Most of us know that breaking down the monolith is a complicated task requiring much planning and coordination. What makes it even more complex is that most of the time, you are “changing the tires on a moving bus,” meaning it’s a running system that has to continue functioning while executing all the tasks. I like the pattern he talks about, as it allows you to keep developing and making progress while keeping the old and the new systems running. Please take a look at the video to see what I’m talking about.

🔥 My Favorite Content

Managing authentication and authorization can be a pain if it is not done right. As with anything in tech, there are many ways to approach this. Jimmy Dahlqvist wrote a very detailed post called PEP and PDP for Secure Authorization with Cognito, explaining several auth concepts and an implementation for authenticating serverless applications.

When working on an application team that is continuously growing, you’ll learn that reviewing pull requests will eventually take up most of your time. This is a critical part of the process, regardless of your seniority or title. Taking a bit of the load off from pull requests is very lovely. We are starting to see AI makes its way into this part of the process and Yan Cui helped build a tool that will review your pull requests and explains how it was built on his post How we built an AI code reviewer with serverless and Bedrock.

I want to highlight two posts in Spanish this week. First, we have a post by Oscar Cortes that talks about AWS Serverless Application Repository, and shows you how you can deploy your own applications here. Hazel Saenz released a post to talk about the journey for how Kiu was created. Kiu is a virtual assistant that helps connect AWS communities all built with a serverless architecture.

Heeki Park talks about building frontends with Streamlit as a backend developer. Heeki goes over the process of building a working prototype and the challenges faced when doing this using Streamlit. I haven’t tried this yet and seems like something interesting to play around with for my projects.

💡 Tip of the Week

This post by David Nix reminded me of the time when my team started building serverless applications and were moving from .NET to TypeScript. This seemed to have the same experience and made us feel more comfortable. But at the end we realized we were creating all the types but ended up using ‘any’ when creating variables. By doing this we were losing all of the benefits TypeScript brought. If you are going to be using TypeScript you will have to keep strong governance and prevent the usage of ‘any’.

🐣 New Releases

It just got easier to find and discover AWS service events with the enhancement of Amazon EventBridge’s event source discovery in the console.

Amazon Q Developer agent can now produce higher quality code by running builds and tests to validate the code before developers receive the results. This will help reduce the amount of iterations by getting better results on the first try.

You can now define a schema when creating Amazon S3 Tables, to be able to create tables with predefined columns. And you can now get up to 10,000 tables per S3 Bucket.

Amazon S3 Metadata is generally available. This service was announced in preview two months ago at AWS re:Invent and is finally GA.

AWS Amplify now supports using the TypeScript Data client in server-side AWS Lambda functions allowing you to eliminate the need to write raw GraphQL queries.

Last Words

I am constantly impressed with all the good work all of you are providing for the community. As I read and watch all of these posts I become way smarter every week. This weekend I went to visit my good friend Allen and I was able to help out with Olivia’s Garden. I helped build fences, dig a trench and many more things. Every time I visit the Heltons I realize there is so many things to learn outside of tech that are so much fun. I really recommend people trying something outside of their comfort zone, believe me, you will have a lot of fun.

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 or LinkedIn.

Until next time!

Andres

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