🦸 Serverless Superhero
Our serverless superhero this week is Marcos Henrique, Cloud Architect at Welbe Care and AWS Community Builder. Marcos is a great blogger and active community member - regularly sharing his thoughts and findings on AI and serverless. Thank you for everything you do, Marcos!
💯 Spotlight
There’s no argument that data is important. Not only what you store, but how you store it can make or break the success of an application. Seth Orell has been writing a series on data and databases describing ways you can unintentionally break your app through different data (mal)practices. In part four of his series, Seth talks about data consistency and why you might reconsider making everything you write strongly-consistent.
🔥 My Favorite Content
There are lots of new protocols and SDKs coming out these days making it easier to build AI agents. A popular one from AWS is Strands Agents, which is a Python SDK for defining agents simply. Davide De Sio published an article last week showing us how to use it to make a simple, fast AI Agent. It’s impressive how easy it looks - but I’m still waiting for something that makes it this easy in JavaScript.
Armand Rego posted an article last week about how he sped up transcription of audio files by 15x using Lambda to chunk up and parallelize processing. The idea he had is great, but I think the magic in his post is his working configuration for ffmpeg in Lambda. I’ve tried a few times to get it working but with minimal success. However, Armand got it working and shows you exactly how to use it. Nice!
Need a quick performance win? Momento Accelerator (MAX) is a smart gateway you simply slide in front of DynamoDB or S3. It quietly handles caching, connection pooling, and traffic smoothing, so p99 drops and your error budget finally gets a break. No code changes, no migrations. If your app could use a little breathing room, grab early access here → https://www.gomomento.com/max Sponsored
I use AI to generate images in a relatively shallow way. I typically aim for one-shot prompting and if it’s not right, I try again. But there’s so much more to image generation than that. In his article from last week, Lee Gilmore showed us all the ways you can use Amazon Bedrock to manipulate images. This includes inpainting, outpainting, background removal, color-guided generation, and text-to-image. I honestly had no idea there were so many things you could do and am very excited to try these myself!
I stumbled across a particularly fascinating article by Marcin Sodkiewicz last week talking about if adopting system correctness practices was worth it. Marcin goes into a lot of detail and shares his thoughts from his extensive research into the topic. I learned a lot - not just about advanced formal methods, but about the concept in its entirety. This is a wonderful advanced software engineering topic that is broken down in a relatively easy to understand mental model.
We all know MCP has its vulnerabilities. But I read an article last week showing a vulnerability called toxic agent flows that poisons agents using MCP tools. The post talks about accessing private GitHub repos using MCP, but there’s nothing wrong with the MCP server or the agent itself. This is an attack from a seemingly open and plain vector, which makes things even scarier. I highly recommend reading this article, it has some great suggestions to keep your data safe.
💡 Tip of the Week
API versioning with serverless is a tricky topic. I’ve spent way too much time researching and building POCs to only result in an “it depends” answer. Yan Cui did some hard work last week to boil down the most common strategies for API versioning and I wish I had this info years ago.
🐣 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!
Aurora DSQL is now generally available! This is a huge leap forward in distributed SQL. Congrats team!
S3 One Zone now supports Access Points - allowing for granular access control of your objects.
AWS announced MCP servers for Lambda, ECS, EKS, and Finch last week, which actually build your IaC for you in addition to giving you best practices. Very nice!
Last Words
I am at POST/CON this week! This annual conference, hosted by Postman, is all about APIs and AI. If you’re in LA this week, let me know and we can meet up!
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
