🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Denise Ignatova, software engineer and AWS Community Builder. Denise is a amazing advocate for women in tech 💙 and very active in the community. She is a blogger, community voice, and all-around genuine person. Thank you for everything you do, Denise!

💯 Spotlight

I am a big fan of benchmarks. Pitting services/runtimes/concepts against each other to see “who is the clear winner” is always a fun thing to do and read. Jason Butz published an article last week benchmarking Deno, Bun, and JavaScript as Lambda runtimes. He shows us a comparison of warm starts vs cold starts, and gives us his thoughts on what happened. The results are not what I expected!

🔥 My Favorite Content

Do you ever wonder to yourself, “I wonder if .NET is a good choice for Lambda these days because of SnapStart?” Yeah, me neither - but in the off chance you do, James Eastham posted a really good video about it covering everything you need to know. This is a follow-up video to .NET SnapStart he did where the performance was… underwhelming. But this time he re-evaluated, found some interesting new features, and tells you exactly what you need to do to eek out some top shelf performance from the runtime.

Ok seriously though, if you’re interested in using .NET with Lambda, you really need to watch Matthew Wilson’s talk from Serverless Days Belfast. His talk, titled The joy of serverless .NET? is expertly delivered, and is as funny as it is informative. He covers everything from “why .NET with serverless” to practical implementation strategies. I’ll be honest, it has me tempted to dust off my old C# code and start giving it a whirl.

Not a serverless related article, but certainly a grounding reminder about the joy of programming and community - last week, Ashley Willis published an article describing how she built an npx business card. The post goes over the details of the project, but more importantly, it talks about the how, why, and importance of doing projects like this as a developer. Her digital business card is very cool and makes me want to do one myself!

Warran Parad took us on a rollercoaster ride last week with his article on API Gateway authorizers are vulnerable by design. While I don’t quite agree with the click-baity title, the content of the post is good. He describes a series of issues I ran into years ago when I was implementing a unified API Gateway across microservices that utilized role-based auth. He covers everything you’ll see when you implement this type of auth mechanism and shows you how to fix the alleged security issue with some configuration.

💡 Tip of the Week

I remember at re:Invent of 2023, AWS announced both serverless ElastiCache and S3 one-zone express. Funnily enough, it felt like the S3 release was closer to the serverless cache rather than ElastiCache. Looks like people are starting to realize that:

🐣 New Releases

Reminder - AWS News is the best source for AWS-related service announcements. For all releases and summaries of what happened, head over there!

DynamoDB Local can now be accessed via AWS CloudShell. All you need to do is use the dynamodb-local alias and you’re good to go.

Bedrock Agent metrics are here! You can now see invocation counts, latency, token usage, and error rates on a per-agent basis.

Tired of missing AWS service deprecations? Now you can keep up to date with the AWS Product Lifecycle page, which shares which services are stopping support.

Anthropic Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet were released last week and already have support in Amazon Bedrock.

Last Words

It’s summertime (at least for my kid)! Do you have any fun summer plans? Conferences? Side projects? Live streams? Let me know, I’d love to feature what you’re working on.

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