🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Bryan Chasko, CTO for Cloudcroft Cloud Company, AWS Community Hero and AWS User Group Leader for the AWSelfTaught UG Rio Grande Corridor Cloud Community. Thank you for all that you do for the community, Bryan!

💯 Spotlight

The interface provided by Amazon Cognito wasn’t nice, which meant you had to create your own. With the introduction of managed login pages, there is now the flexibility to make them much prettier and better aligned with your brand. Matt Martz shows us how to set this up in his post Secure Your Serverless App with Cognito’s Managed Login Pages. Matt goes into setting this up and getting fined-grained authentication by combining server-side rendering and using a custom Lambda authorizer.

🔥 My Favorite Content

Everybody tends to have their own practices and structure. I love seeing how different teams set up their repositories and how there is a story behind all of the decisions made. In the post Supercharge Your AWS Lambda Development Workflow, Matteo Depascale shows us the repository structure they’ve come up with over the years. The post also discusses code quality tools, development workflows, middleware and utilities. Lots of great information that can be applied to any of your projects.

Jorge Tovar shows us How to deploy a serverless application using Terragrunt. Terragrunt is a terraform wrapper that simplifies your infrastructure management by avoiding code duplication across environments.

James Eastham is back this week to talk about The Two Types of Applications Every Developer Should Know. He goes into user-facing workloads versus backend workloads and different deployment strategies for these.

Did you know you could add inline comments in AWS Step Functions when using JSONata? I did not!! Dave Hall shows us an example of how to do this in his latest post Step Functions, JSONata and Comments.

In my new job, I work with different clients, helping them modernize their applications and migrate them to the cloud. I’m quickly realizing that the main issue in the migration is not technical but more around the difficulty of changing people’s mindsets to work differently. Eyal Estrin goes into more detail about these issues in his post Stop bringing old practices to the cloud.

Charles Allison talks about the lessons learned from developing serverless applications, going over all the things he recommends based on his 5-year journey on serverless technology.

In the post How to get started with AWS (for absolute beginners), Suzana Melo gives excellent recommendations on how to start your journey on AWS at your open pace!

💡 Tip of the Week

Lately, I’ve been working more with Terraform, and deciding when to write a separate module to make them reusable is not a simple decision. Thankfully, Chris Williams shared this great flowchart to simplify this decision for all of us!

🐣 New Releases

Serverless Inc introduces the Serverless Container Framework allowing you to switch between AWS Lambda and ECS with Fargate with a simple configuration change.

Richard Davison announced the release of LLRT (Low Latency Runtime) v.0.5.0-beta with lots of improvements, enhanced performance and many other things.

Bruce the goose is a girl, laying its first egg today!.

AWS Step Functions Distributed Map state now supports more input formats coming from S3 and added new output transformations to get more control over the results.

I’ve had to split stacks several times, whether that is to separate responsibilities, or splitting the stack because you’ve hit a resource limit. You can now reshape your stacks in CloudFormation by moving resources from one stack to another, split stack and rename the logical names of the resources. Having this flexibility reduces the stress of trying to have the “perfect” structure initially.

Amazon GuardDuty reduces the price for Malware protection for S3 buckets. I’m pretty sure everybody appreciates a price reduction anytime.

Creating WebSockets using AppSync Events just got easier if you are using CDK. The AppSync team released L2 constructs that greatly simplify setting these up.

AWS Step Functions increases the amount of State Machines and Activities for an account from 10,000 to 100,000.

Last Words

I’m wrapping up the week watching the Philadelphia Eagles destroy the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl. I was pretty sure the Chiefs were going to win the Super Bowl and I think I’m not alone on that. Sorry to all the Swifties out there.

Now that I’ve settled in at my new job I plan to get back on my community activities by first restarting my live streams, be on the lookout for the first one this week.

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