Serverless Superhero
Our serverless superhero this week is Benoît Bouré, senior developer at Serverless Guru and AWS Community Builder. Benoît writes about serverless patterns on his blog and is the creator of GraphBolt - a desktop app that helps devs build, test, debug, and manage AppSync APIs. Congratulations on getting GraphBolt to v1 last week, Benoît, and thank you for all you do for the community!
Tutorials
Late in 2023, I had a call with Luca Mezzalira about how we should be building Lambda functions in JavaScript. He said it should all be ESM these days and I just gave him a blank look. I had no idea how to migrate my functions to ESM. Thankfully, Andres Moreno showed us all last week how to setup and configure ESM Lambda functions in a blog post. He walks through the SAM configuration for esbuild and provides a working example repo for you to try it yourself.
Have you been wanting to try EventBridge pipes but were a little overwhelmed by all the configuration options? In typical Lee Gilmore fashion, he turns over all the stones and shared a fantastic article on all things pipes last week. He walks through the IaC configuration, what the various stages are in a pipe, and gives fully functional code for you to give a whirl.
Even though we’re trending past the hype peak of Generative AI, there’s still lots to learn and build. Jimmy Apj wrote a great article on how to implement a RAG pipeline with a knowledge base for Amazon Bedrock last week and I am intrigued. He explains all the terms in a meaningful way and makes the entire concept approachable and easy.
Interesting Reads
We all know observability is important in serverless. But it’s not always easy figuring out how to approach it or even what to do after you’ve instrumented your app with o11y tools. Ben Pyle gave a talk to the #believeinserverless community last week on this exact topic. He spoke about observability in serverless architectures and also discussed how he approached it pragmatically at his day job. Great talk!
Many of us have CI/CD pipelines for our apps already up and running. Typically once you get that first successful deployment, you don’t revisit it again until something goes wrong. But is that the right idea? Johannes Koch published a video last week talking about the holy grail of CI/CD and what best practices you should be following in your pipelines. I’m glad I watched this one, turns out my strategy hasn’t been as safe as I would have liked for years.
Spotlight
It’s time to talk about Rust. There’s been so much hype lately, what’s the fuss? For a detailed look, I highly recommend this video from James Eastham. He covers things like DX, programming style, and of course, performance. He also goes to far as to offer a recommendation on whether or not you should take the time to adopt Rust. Check it out, it’s a great video.
Tip of the Week
Infographics are the best. They provide dense amounts of information in an easy-to-consume format. Yan Cui gave us a great reminder of the 8 fallacies of distributed computing to keep in mind as we go deeper and deeper into serverless.
Pretty much all of us are building distributed systems these days, so here's your regular reminder of the 8 Fallacies of Distributed Computing.
— Yan Cui (@theburningmonk) February 9, 2024
They are just as relevant today in the world of AWS and serverless as ever before. pic.twitter.com/JfuW1W4XsH
New Releases
I’m sure we all saw this one a couple of weeks ago, but you can now create CloudFormation templates and CDK apps for existing AWS resources. This is a HUGE capability we’ve all been wanting for years.
SQS launched an extended client library for Python that allows you to send and receive message payloads up to 2GB. Behind the scenes, it’s saving the large payloads to S3 and passing a reference to the content in the message. That said, the library handles it all for you so it appears like it just works!
AppSync supports environment variables in resolvers and functions now. This makes it so much easier to get dynamic variables into your code!
Last Words
I love seeing highlights of the projects you’re building. If you’re working on something and want to share it with the community, please tell me! The more practical examples we get out there, the better comprehension we can pass along to our peers. Let me know what you’re working on!
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