🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Jason Butz, senior architect at Republic Airways and AWS Community Builder. Jason is a great writer, sharing high-quality content through his blog posts. He’s also active in the tech community - helping others figure out their problems and sharing his experience. Thank you for enabling others and for teaching us your hard-earned lessons, Jason!

💯 Spotlight

I’ve read quite a few existential serverless blog posts over the past few years, but I think Seth Orell’s Serverless is not a primary post from last week might be my favorite. Existential might be a bit strong of a word here, but it’s a wonderful article describing that simply “going serverless” is not the answer to all your problems. Quite the opposite, in fact. It reminds me of a series that Sheen Brisals did a while back tamping the magic bullet mentality buzz would have you believe. Great stuff, please read this one!

🔥 My Favorite Content

For whatever reason, I really like seeing engineers post their GitHub activity grid at the end of the year. Heatmaps are fun and they give you a quick view at data you’d otherwise spend minutes reading and likely not comprehending. Last week, Gabriel Koo shared a blog post of a project he made with Kiro that shows dev.to blog engagement in GitHub grid style. While I don’t particularly like the heavy AI influence in the authoring of the article, I thought the project was pretty cool. Looking at this end-to-end, it’s interesting to see how fast we can move with AI. From analyzing the problem, to coding the solution, to even writing the recap. This is a type of enablement like we’ve never seen before, and I view this article as a perfect case study into the types of things we can do these days.

AWs recently released S3 Vector Store, but I didn’t see much hype around it besides a few “this is cool” remarks. But Brian Tarbox picked up on its importance and published an article last week discussing at length the lessons from the vector store and nuance of using it at scale. This is an incredibly thoughtful article, covering S3 Vector Store from every angle you need as a software architect. He compares it to other stores like OpenSearch and Pinecone, and tells you what it’s good for and more importantly - what it’s not good for. Fantastic write-up!

Good ol’ James Eastham decided last week would be a good time to stir the serverless vs containers pot. But as polarizing as “Serverless vs Containers… You Decide” sounds, he does a pretty good job at staying objective and explaining the situation we find ourselves in at this point in time. He makes a couple of pretty bold claims toward the end of the video, which I love, but I won’t spoil them because this is worth the watch.

💡 Tip of the Week

I had several “a ha!” moments last week reading this post on AI agent building shared by Carlota Soto. Following the points she shared is the difference between hacking away on a POC and building robust, production-ready systems.

🐣 New Releases

AWS released DocumentDB Serverless, a new configuration for DocumentDB. I won’t go into the same arguments we’ve had for Aurora and other “serverless” flavors of services. I’ll just be happy with the dynamically scalable option that now exists 🙃

Amazon SES just introduced tenant isolation allowing you to segment email sends to virtual tenants. This means you could build multi-tenant systems on SES and not have one bad actor ruin your entire reputation.

S3 Access Points now support tags for ABAC. Now you can use tags for access control to simplify how you grow your application.

Last Words

Last week I attended Momento’s (Buffer-Free Video)^AI Conference in Seattle. It was a truly engaging experience and eye-opening to see all the real production scenarios massive video companies are solving with AI. From audio-track isolation to repainting a scene in an uploaded video, there’s so much that goes into making whimsical experiences for users I just had no idea about. Videos will be up in a couple of weeks for the talks, I’ll be sure to share them!

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