🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Barsha Bhandari, founder and CEO of Happy Panda, AWS Community Builder, and inspirational public speaker. Barsha is an incredible educator and selfless mentor to many students and women all over the world. She helps so many people find their way into the cloud and gives them the confidence and technical know-how to land on their feet and reach their goals. Thank you so much for everything you do, Barsha!

💯 Spotlight

Everyone’s complaining about security with GenAI (myself included… sometimes) but very few people are talking about ways they’ve addressed them. People complain on social media, then switch tabs and upload company docs to ChatGPT to help them work 😬😅 If this is you, watch Kyler Middleton’s talk from AWS re:Inforce. She goes over Veradigm’s security-first approach to GenAI and offers actual, practical advice on doing it yourself and integrating a bot that knows your company’s trade secrets into your work ecosystem. Spoiler - it’s a lot more than just throwing in some guardrails.

🔥 My Favorite Content

If you’re into .NET development in serverless environments, I highly recommend watching James Eastham’s video from last week. He goes over how to test async Lambda functions locally with .NET Aspire. As he always does, James does a great job explaining the problem, showing you exactly how to solve it, and provides you with the code so you can go at your own pace. I love how James’ videos are coming along - it’s been an absolute treasure to watch him grow.

Software is never done. You should always keep an eye out for ways to optimize under-performing or expensive pieces of code. I love what Marcos Henrique talked about last week in a story of how he replaced cron jobs with EventBridge scheduler. The blog post is full of lighthearted Gen-Z slang (in a fun way) and he goes over how he identified a problem and replaced it with an event-driven approach that saves time, money, and heartache. My biggest takeaway here was how he identified and analyzed the problem moreso than the solution itself. Great thinking!

We’ve seen lots of talk on MCP and the things you can do with it. But Marcin Sodkiewicz’s post last week explained it’s potential probably the best I’ve seen. He talks about MCP mesh for auditing and self-service and simply nails the examples that make you realize how much value connecting an LLM to your APIs is. Love this and I’m excited you’re getting into it, Marcin!

I know I say this a lot, but I’m pretty sure my livestream with Andres Moreno last week was my favorite one we’ve done. We covered the A2A protocol from end-to-end, talking about and actually showing multi-agent collaboration using the A2A protocol. I’ve done a lot of work with A2A at this point and even wrote my own version of it that enables serverless agents in any JS environment. We went through all the fun details of that and saw how simple it really is to build agents that talk to each other in the stream.

💡 Tip of the Week

I saw some speculation from Gartner last week and some validation from Armand Ruiz on agentic AI and our desperate need to get past the IDE and proof of concepts.

🐣 New Releases

Amazon OpenSearch Serverless now supports Point in Time (PIT) search. I had no idea that was a thing.

AWS announced Amazon Bedrock Flows last week in preview, which is a visual builder for long running, multi-step AI workflow builder. This looks an awful like Postman Flows to me - it even has the same name!

Last Words

Happy summer, northern hemisphere! And happy winter, southerners! This is the time of year where new projects begin and ideas go crazy. So tell me - what are you working on that you’re excited about 🤔

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