Weekly update 11

Hi, welcome to another weekly update! Apologies for the lack of update recently, a combination of back injury, busy work schedule and week long holiday in Maldives have got in the way of updates. Good news is that I’m back, and I have a number of guest posts in the pipeline that I think you’ll really enjoy 

MEAP update for Production-Ready Serverless

We have released 4 new videos on my video course Production-Ready Serverless!

• Use Middy middleware to load SSM parameters at runtime
• Secrets Manager 101
• Use Middy middleware to load Secrets Manager secrets at runtime
• Considerations for advanced use cases

Remember, whilst the course is still in the MEAP, you can get 40% off the face price using the code ytcui.

I have also turned this course into a classroom setting, so if you’re interested in having me run this as a workshop in your company, then drop me a line via the Contact page.

New Posts

Best practices for AWS Lambda timeouts. I wrote a guest post for Epsagon where we looked at ways to protect the user experience during latency spikes, and how to strike a good balance between performance & cost. We discussed why you should use short timeouts for your Lambda functions and we also looked at the timeout setting’s impact on security and cold starts.

The 5 best use cases for the Serverless beginner. Another guest post for Epsagon where we looked at the 5 best use cases for people to start adopting serverless technologies with – ops automation, web apps, analytics pipelines, batch processing and IOT.

Future of Serverless: a toy that will evolve and offer flexibility. I spoke with Corey Quinn recently on his podcast Screaming in the Cloud where we talked about AWS, serverless and chaos engineering. If you haven’t subscribed to his newsletter Last Week in AWS then you’re missing out!

Applying principles of chaos engineering to Serverless. I gave a talk at the recent SRECon in Germany on how we can apply principles of chaos engineering to a serverless architecture and test the resilience of our serverless applications.

How to build observability into a Serverless application. I gave a talk at the recent Monitorama EU in Amsterdam on how you can build observability into your serverless application, including many of the lessons and tools that I have been building and using at DAZN.

How to build observability into a serverless application by ?@theburningmonk? ?@Monitorama? #katjasays #sketchnotes #monitorama #MonitoramaEU pic.twitter.com/QNCElta6cA

— Ekaterina Budnikov (@KatjaBudnikov) September 4, 2018

Upcoming Talks

As we approach the busy conference season, I have quite a number of conference talks coming up in October:

• CoDe-Conf (11th Oct, Copenhagen): a one day conference focused on Continuous Delivery and DevOps
• AWS User Group (17th Oct, London): a 2.5hr workshop on how to build production-ready serverless applications
• DevSecCon London (18-19th Oct, London): all about DevSecOps
• ServerlessDays Milan (19th Oct, Milan): I’m honored to be giving the opening keynote for this year’s ServerlessDays Milan conference 
• VoxxedDays Bristol (25th Oct, Bristol): a one day general purpose conference in Bristol
• get.net (28th Oct, Gdansk): the biggest .Net conference in Northern Poland
• O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference (29-31st Oct, London): O’Reilly’s annual software architecture conference where you learn from some of the best in the field
• O’Reilly Velocity (31st Oct-2nd Nov, London): O’Reilly’s annual conference on distributed systems

The best thing about going to these conferences for me is to meet new people and find out all the cool stuff other people are building. So, if you’re attending any of these conferences then grab me in the corridors and say hi!

AWS Announcements

A new CLI toolchain for AWS Amplify to make it even easier to build AWS-powered web and mobile applications.

Horizontal pod autoscaling now supports EKS.

CloudFormation now supports macros with Lambda!

Not an AWS announcement, but the serverless-step-functions plugin has release v1.7.0 a new version with two changes I’ve wanted for a while:

• JSON pretty print the Step Functions definition
• restrict the Lambda invocation permission of the auto-generated IAM role to only the functions that are part of the state machine definition

Good Reads

Paul Johnston published a nice article on Serverless Best Practices. It summarised many of the lessons that I have learnt over the last couple of years while working with Lambda, it’s well worth a read!

Nitzan Shapira published a nice roundup of the most popular deployment tools out there for serverless.

Peter Pito published a nice article on how to use a Wardley map to build a roadmap.

Tero Parviainen shared his slides for his talk on How generative music work. I haven’t seen the talk myself, but the slides look amazing, and I have long been a fan of generative art so I was excited to see similar ideas applied to music.

And another beauty from Julia Evans, and possibly the most concise explanation for what a manager’s job should be:

what's your manager's job? pic.twitter.com/lpew2KgJxc

— ?Julia Evans? (@b0rk) September 16, 2018

Videos from ServerlessConf SF are now available online, put some time aside and watch as many as you can!

Chris Munns published part 2 of his series on how to protect your API with API Gateway and AWS WAF.

Mikhail Shilkov published an analysis of cold start performance across AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions and Azure Functions.

Dan North published an article on how we have misunderstood Monte Carlo simulations.

Jeremy Daly published another good post on serverless security, using Puresec’s new hotness – FunctionShield!

Danilo Poccia published an article on serverless and evolutionary architectures.

Mike Fortuna published a tutorial on how to visualize GuardDuty findings, which looks pretty sweet!

And I’ll finish off this week’s update with one of the best thing I have seen on Twitter for a while!

https://twitter.com/rachelpage13/status/1034903963944898560