🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Felipe Malaquias, senior software engineer at idealo internet GmbH and AWS Community Builder. Felipe recently released an app called “Teach Tech 2 Me” and is actively looking for people to try it out. Why don’t you give it a shot and help him out? He gets bonus points for building it completely on serverless services. Thanks for everything you’re doing, Felipe!

💯 Spotlight

We’re starting off this week with an inspiring success story from Evandro Pires. His blog post last week walks us through is team’s journey to a serverless-first approach that ultimately led to tripling their innovation capacity and cutting costs by 75%! We all love being technologists, but to be genuinely successful like Evandro, we have to lean on the people side of software and be willing to help each other out and be enablers of learning and innovation. Thank you for sharing, Evandro!

🔥 My Favorite Content

We saw a fascinating solution to a low-level problem in Lambda last week in an article from Omid Eidivandi. Omid talks about how the fetch command is used in the Node runtime and how it can cause issues when coupled with proactive initialization in Lambda. You may or may not know - you can’t control proactive initialization. But Omid seems to have found a solution to a potential race condition. He does a great job explaining the problem and offering a simple solution.

Not a serverless post, but interesting nonetheless, Marcos Henrique shared with us that AI chain of thought is probably a lie. He walks through a study done by Anthropic that followed the reasoning (or chain of thought) of LLMs where they found out that, simply put, the AI is lying to you for your benefit. It’s crazy to hear and makes me a little nervous for the years to come. Marcos does a fantastic job explaining the concepts in this post, by the way. Follow him if you don’t already.

Andres Moreno and I did a livestream last week where we built an MCP server and discussed MCP at length. There’s a lot that’s good about the protocol, but also a lot of scary, open attack vectors as well. If you’re looking to build your own MCP server, we cover it here. But watch until the end - because we also have some real talk on whether or not you should be making one. BONUS - I published my first ever short form video on MCP being one step forward, but two steps back.

💡 Tip of the Week

I’ve started seeing ads (I guess?) on my Amazon Echo for Alexa+. While I initially rolled my eyes at another paid service, this post from Werner Vogels with the story of how expectations are evolving makes me a little more excited about it.

🐣 New Releases

There’s so many things this week that are important, I’ll list them without my usual comments.

Amazon EventBridge archive and replay now support customer-managed KMS keys.

Amazon Nova Reel 1.1 was released and can generate up to 2 minute multi-shot videos!

Amazon Bedrock announced general availability of prompt caching. Hooray for cost savings!

Amazon Nova Sonic was introduced, which is a voice-to-voice foundational model. Meaning voice in to the LLM and voice back out from it.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone slashed storage and request prices making it significantly more affordable.

Cloudflare announced their secrets store service in Beta.

Postman released a built-in MCP tester directly in the application under early access. Seriously cool stuff here.

Last Words

Spring is in the air! I love this time of year because the warmth brings energy, enthusiasm, and creativity to many of us. Have you started building anything new? I’d love to hear about it. I have some crazy ideas that could use a developer if you’re looking for something fun to do 😀

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, LinkedIn, or email.

Happy coding!

Allen