🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Vlad Onețiu, automation engineer and AWS Community Builder. Vlad is an engaging speaker and thoughtful serverless developer known for tackling serverless systems with massive real-world impact, like detecting earthquakes and practical high-performance Confluent Kafka integrations. He has a knack for real-time architectures, which showcase serverless at its best. Thanks for inspiring the community and pushing the boundaries, Vlad!

💯 Spotlight

I’m all about automations. Especially the ones that enable others to do things easier. A couple of weeks ago, Jimmy Dahlqvist shared a blog post about how he automated proofreading of his content. Apparently he’s kept the ball rolling because last week he published another article about how he automatically translates his blog content to other languages. I love this idea - translation on websites is a notoriously long process, but Jimmy found a way to do it in seconds and hands-free. His article covers his motivation for the change, goes through a technical deep dive with a good look at JSONata and Step Functions, and describes the trickiness of getting the translated content back into his static site. Great work, Jimmy!

🔥 My Favorite Content

Most of you reading this know I’m not much of a CDK guy. I do actually think it’s very powerful, but when it comes to infrastructure as code, I’m much more of a declarative guy. That said, I really appreciated Matheus das Mercês’s post last week titled “You don’t need a construct for that.” It’s a post about CDK Blueprints, Aspects, and Constructs and when the appropriate time to use each one of them is. I learned a lot from this article - it’s well written, it has helpful examples and images, and is short enough to keep your attention while giving you plenty of information.

In a very opinionated post, Ran Isenberg gave us his thoughts on serverless MCP on AWS last week. He goes over a couple different ways to implement an MCP server on Lambda and talks about the tradeoffs of building on ECS Fargate. It’s great to see the options available in the AWS ecosystem, but I would have loved some code showing how these approaches differ in practice (hint, hint, Ran). Personally, I’ve found Cloudflare to be ahead of the curve on serverless AI workloads, handling much of the undifferentiated heavy lifting AWS still leaves to developers. To Ran’s point, AWS may be behind right now, but better support is likely coming.

AJ Stuyvenberg wins my 🌶️spicy pepper award🌶️ for this week (not actually a real thing). In his matter-of-fact clapback, Does Lambda Have a Silent Crash?, AJ gives it to us straight on exactly how the NodeJS runtime works in AWS Lambda. This post is in response to an article from a couple of weeks ago where someone claimed Lambda was silently failing and dropping messages. Turns out, Lambda is behaving as expected, and AJ tells us exactly why that’s expected behavior and how to do what the original author is trying to do. I absolutely love, love, love this.

💡 Tip of the Week

I loved the point made by Sandro Volpicella last week about CloudWatch costs. He poses the thought that people often try to optimize the wrong thing when it comes to cutting costs.

🐣 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!

It was a big week for AWS releases! Let’s talk about some of the most exciting ones.

Amazon S3 Vectors was announced in preview, which does exactly what you think. This is a huge announcement that can greatly cut costs for many of us doing RAG or similarity searches.

EventBridge gained some long-awaited logging features that track event lifecycles easily. You can now see when events are matched against rules, delivered to subscribers, encounters failures, and more.

The AWS Free Tier was updated, providing credits and a guaranteed “no charge option” for the first 6 months or until you run out of starter credits. This is a huge enabler for people who want to explore AWS but are afraid of racking up unknown charges. Great idea!

Amazon introduced Bedrock AgentCore in preview last week, which promises to deliver a comprehensive set of enterprise-grade services to build agents that operate any any scale on any framework and model. This is a huge statement and if it holds true, a massive leap forward for building AI agents. I will be kicking the tires on this one real soon.

You can now do remote debugging of Lambda functions directly in VS Code. We’ve seen many workarounds to make this happen over the years, it’s amazing to see if fully supported for real life.

AWS released Kiro, the agentic AI IDE last week. It claims to be different by giving you an option to not only vibe code, but to plan and build off a spec as well. I tried it out last week and am loving it so far. I think either the Anthropic outage or a hug of death might have been crippling it a bit though. We’ll see how it continues to improve.

Last Words

Wow, big week! Huge announcements from AWS, cool content from the community, and a smoking keyboard from me as I quickly refactor my newsletter from SendGrid to Amazon SES. If you see any hiccups in the email version of the newsletter, please let me know. I’ve had to rebuild an entire newsletter framework in a few days to keep everything uninterrupted.

Also, I’m on vacation this week! I’m taking the week off for a little summer break with my family so I can come back fully recharged. I hope y’all remember to do the same this summer.

That’s my take on the week, but what’s yours?

What did I miss? What made you nod along (or 🙄)? Hit reply if you’re reading the email. Prefer socials? Ping me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or email.

Happy coding!

Allen