Weekly update 40

Hi, welcome to another weekly update.

Learn you some Lambda best practice for great good!

I have been working hard since the last update and have published 27 lessons so far (total of ~2 hours of content). The lessons cover all areas of performance & cost optimization, scalability, security and observability. The last batch of lessons will be made available when the course officially launch on the 13th Feb. Until then, you can still enjoy the special preorder price of just £9.99 (~$13).

Enroll here.

New posts

Amazon Builders’ Library in Focus #5: static stability using availability zones. I summarised this article by AWS senior principal engineer Becky Weiss and principal engineer Mike Furr on what they mean by static stability and why each AZ should be completely independent and how it affected the design of their systems. They also discussed the importance of isolating the data-plane operations from control-plane operations.

Amazon Builders’ Library in Focus #6: implementing health checks. I summarised this article by AWS principal engineer David Yanacek on the delicate tradeoffs one have to consider when implementing a system’s health checks. It also ties into some of the concepts in #5 wrt isolating data-plane operations from control-plane operations.

Podcasts

I met up with Jeremy Daly at ServerlessDays Belfast and we sat down and recorded another episode for his ServerlessChats podcast series. It’s about an hour long, and you can listen to it here.

Talks

I delivered a new talk at the AWS Community Day Nordics in Stockholm this week. I talked about the essential open source tools that you should use as a serverless developer.

Workshops

It’s been just over 3 weeks since I announced my European workshop tour (yup, that’s what I’m calling it now…). The group tickets for the Amsterdam workshop (March 19th-20th) has sold out, but there are still a couple of early bird tickets left.

I’m also running the workshop in Helsinki and Stockholm in May. If you need help convincing your manager to let you go, I’ve also created an email template for you to use ;-) (thanks to Jeremy Daly for the idea!)

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Dear [your manager’s name],

I’d like your permission to attend this 2-day serverless workshop by Yan Cui, who is an AWS Serverless Hero and has several years of experience of actually running serverless applications in production with AWS Lambda at scale.

[insert URL of the workshop you want to attend]

The workshop is happening on [insert workshop date] in [insert workshop city]. Attending this workshop will be beneficial to both my personal growth and our company’s cloud knowledge in the following areas:

• Boost proficiency in AWS’s serverless offerings, like AWS Lambda, API Gateway, Cognito and EventBridge.
• Learn about the latest features of AWS Lambda such as Provisioned Concurrency and Lambda Destinations and when to use them.
• Get educated on architectural and operational best practices on topics such as CI/CD, security, testing, logging and monitoring.
• Gain valuable hands-on experience which I can bring back to my team and apply right away.

Here’s an estimated breakdown of costs:

Domestic flight:  [insert estimated flight cost]

Hotel (2 nights):  [insert estimated hotel cost]

Admission:  [insert ticket price for the workshop you want to attend]

Total:  [insert total]

Hope to hear from you soon and many thanks in advance.

Kind regards,

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To help the community grow, I’ve also reserved a couple of diversity tickets for attendees from minority groups and students. And there’s a referral fee of €100 for every student that you refer to the workshop! Details are available on the relevant event page.

Find the nearest workshop to you here.

Thank you to my patrons

Finally, I want to give a shout out to my patrons:

Alexis, Andre Silva, Boseok In, Dome Jantaphat, Ebru Cucen, Hrafnkell Palsson, Joe Kearney, Jon Barber, Jonathan Kosgei, Kevin Woods, Luis Gutierrez, Marko @ Serverless Life, Michael Wills, Sal DiStefano, Shawn MacIntyre, Tendies123, Will Saunders, Yinan Xue

Thank you guys so much for your continued support!