Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Justin Callison, General Manager of workflow services at AWS. One of the services under his purview is Step Functions, which had a MASSIVE week last week (links below). If you’ve never met him, seek him out - he loves connecting with customers and getting feedback, plus he’s an all-around friendly guy. Thanks for everything, Justin!

Interesting Reads

Technically an announcement, Amazon released Amazon Q, a GenAI-powered assistant throughout their entire ecosystem. This powerful tool is going to be popping up throughout our CLIs, favorite console windows, and anywhere else you can imagine. I want to highlight this one specifically as probably the biggest release with the most content and actionable use cases starting today.

Speaking of which, Benjamen Pyle released a fun little blog post demonstrating how easy Q is to use by making a Taylor Swift assistant. This is a fun premise that shows some of the real capabilities of the service.

AWS Hero Matt Lewis is also excited about Amazon Q and talks theoretically about how it can deliver customer value. I agree with his viewpoint and pragmatism on this service. Seems like it’s going to be an accelerator.

Podcast

I had Rohan Desai on the season finale of the Ready, Set, Cloud podcast to talk about how IoT is perfectly serverless. Rohan shares some stories from when he was at SmartThings and looks toward the future with serverless capabilities and IoT. The podcast will be taking a break until around February of 2024.

Yan Cui had Patrick deBois on the Real-World Serverless podcast to talk about the future of AI and DevOps.

Spotlight

It takes a lot of effort to make it through AWS re:Invent coherently. It takes even more effort to write a daily summary of everything that happened as it’s going on. I was hanging out with Ben Pyle most nights last week and knowing that he was able to get a comprehensive view of the day after a night of mischief is beyond me. I highly recommend his take on the conference. This link is to his day 4 recap where he references days 1-3. Great job, Ben!

Tip of the Week

Last week was jam-packed with information, posts, and general fun. But my absolute favorite one featured Jeremy Daly busting it out on the dance floor at the Momento #believeinserverless party.

James Brown needs to watch out! pic.twitter.com/A0DT91ma2u

— Chris Williams (@mistwire) December 3, 2023

New Releases

I normally put my impressions on the releases but there are too many this week. Instead, we’ll go service by service.

Step Functions

• Optimized integration for Amazon Bedrock directly in your state machines
• Direct HTTPS endpoint support and TestState API. This is one we’ve been waiting for!
• Workflow Studio is integrated with App Composer. This includes variable substitution with resources in your stacks!
• Use App Composer and Workflow Studio directly in VS Code! This is a big, big update for DX around building state machines!

Bedrock

• Customize models with your data via fine-tuning and continued pre-training.
• Build your own agent with improved orchestration control and reasoning visibility
• New guardrails add safeguards to GenAI responses
• Knowledge bases are available, allowing you to easily build RAG pipelines from a multitude of data sources.
• Claude v2.1 is now available for use along with Llama 2 70B.
• New Titan models for image generation, multimodal embeddings, and text are now available
• You can now process prompts in batch

CloudWatch

• Use natural language to query logs
• Infrequent access log type available at a lower price
• New logs anomaly detection and pattern analysis
• New Application Signals automatically instruments your apps, allowing you to identify related services and APIs.

Lambda

• Functions now scale 12 times faster in high-volume scenarios
• Assisted code remediation via Amazon Inspector for injection flaws, data leaks, weak cryptography, etc…

EventBridge

• New partner integrations with Adobe and Stripe

SQS

• Throughput increase and DLQ redrive support for FIFO queues. Max throughput is now 70,000 TPS per API action!

Elasticache

• A serverless offering is now available. A little more serverless than OpenSearch but not quite as serverless as Lambda, DynamoDB, or Momento. Honestly though, a great release despite my obvious bias.

S3

• New Express One Zone high-performance storage class was announced. It aims to deliver 10x better performance than S3 standard storage.
• Mountpoint can be used with Express One Zone storage

Last Words

WOW. Last week was a lot. I’m sure I missed things but I’m still recovering 😄. I’m so excited to build with these new feature releases and even more excited to see what you build. Please share what you’re excited to make and post when it’s done! If you need help getting started in blogging or with any of these new services, feel free to reach out and I’ll help you the best I can.

A special shoutout goes to Momento for the best re:Invent party I have ever been to. It felt like the entire serverless community was there dancing, talking, and having a great time. This was truly for the community and I will never forget it.

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