🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Piotr Pabis, Senior Platform Engineer at ABOUT YOU and AWS Community Builder. Piotr is a great blogger and regularly contributes to the community with his insights and thought-provoking polls. Thank you for everything you do, Piotr!

💯 Spotlight

The world of data was rocked last week. In a surprising and exciting announcement, Databricks is acquiring Neon. According to the post, Neon isn’t going anywhere. In fact, they’re doubling down efforts and are going to continue to rock it. I am super happy to see this acquisition, I’ve been a fan of Neon since I first tried them out. It’s wonderful to see this growth and upcoming trajectory for that whole team.

🔥 My Favorite Content

We see every day the automations and tools developers are building to make their lives easier. They’re great for not only productivity, but for getting the idea wheel turning in other developers’ minds. Roman Tsypuk share a blog post about a CLI tool he made that generates images from blog posts and uses them as the hero graphic for his content. While I don’t necessarily agree with using AI-generated images for your blog posts (they don’t help you stand out as a content creator), I like the tool he built very much! He emphasized developer experience and built it to be low-friction and intuitive. Great story and cool implementation!

You may or may not have seen the AI web show I do with Andres Moreno every two weeks. The show demonstrates how to build real software using the latest protocols and technology. So it’s always interesting for me to see other peoples’ take on things we’ve covered - especially when those people are friends 😁 Ran Isenberg published an article last week describing his experience building an MCP server on Lambda using Python, and let me tell you - we had very different experiences. I don’t know if it’s a runtime thing or what, but it’s very interesting to see how Ran approached it compared to my experience. I love his raw, honest truth about the DX, though. Great work, Ran!

I love a good technical article. Ones that reach deep into the underpinnings of how things actually work and explain them in a way I can understand. This is exactly what Khawaja Shams did with his article comparing Valkey performance with Redis. Turns out there’s a ton of knobs, bells, and whistles, you can turn to fine-tune the performance of Valkey, which can get you up to 1M requests per second on a single machine. I had no idea that was possible and am incredibly grateful that there’s people out there who love this kind of thing and are willing to share their expertise.

Videos from SREday London were released last week, and I particularly liked Yan Cui’s talk titled Money-saving tips for the frugal serverless developer. This talk is full of wonderful insights on how to optimize everything from CloudWatch costs, to Lambda functino costs, to tricks on how to build on Lambda with frugality in mind. As always with Yan, this content is very high quality and worth a watch.

💡 Tip of the Week

There’s one person I specifically trust when it comes to doing serverless testing the right way - Elias Brange. Lots of his content is centered around testing in innovative ways that strengthen the quality of your apps. I really liked a post from him last week around using a local DynamoDB instance in a test container. The comments are gold as well!

🐣 New Releases

AWS Transform has gotten some updates. It’s now generally available for VMWare, GA for mainframe, and available for .NET. But buyers beware - there’s some scary verbiage in the fine print.

Postman continues to make waves in the AI space, launching getmcp.dev, a curated catalog of MCP servers on their network. You can even jump straight into testing them!

OpenAI introduced Codex, their “software engineering agent” that is capable of working on many tasks in parallel. This is a coding agent that seems to have a lot of promise.

Another cool AI-related release, AWS released Strands Agents, an open source SDK for building AI Agents. This is supposed to drastically simplify creating agents and equipping them with tools. I’m excited to try this one out!

Last Words

It was a big week for AI! From completely transforming code bases to official coding agents, it seems like we’re entering a new phase of mostly autonomous coding bots. I’m extremely interested how this is going to shape up over the next few months.

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