Weekly update 42

Hi, welcome to another weekly update.

Real-World Serverless podcast

Inspired by what Jeremy Daly has been doing on ServerlessChats, I decided to take the plunge and start my own podcast too. I want to play to my strength as an independent consultant, and focus on the success and struggles of individual companies and share their serverless stories from the trenches.

So I’m excited to launch the Real-World Serverless podcast. The first episode is already out and has been played over 500 times in the first 3 days, so huge thanks to everyone who have shown an interest in the podcast. In this first episode, I spoke with Ricardo Espirito Santo to talk about Zoopla and how they’re using serverless, their experience with it so far and the challenges they have experienced with serverless technologies.

If this sounds like something you’re interested in, then go to realworldserverless.com and listen to the full episode, and follow us on Twitter @RealWorldSls for updates. We have some cracking episodes coming your way in the next few weeks including discussions with Joe Emison around monorepoes and a conversation about vendor lock-in with Moneyou, a Dutch bank based here in Amsterdam.

New posts

I wrote a two-part article for AWS Open Source blog on “24 open source tools for the serverless developer”:

• part 1 covers deployment frameworks, Serverless plugins and CLI tools
• part 2 covers libraries and SAR apps

Over on the Lumigo blog, I also published a new post on the 5 reasons you should use EventBridge instead of SNS in your project. TL;DR – lots more targets, support for third-party partner events, content-based filtering, automated schema discovery and input transformation.

Talks

I gave a talk at the Frontend Developer Love conference in Amsterdam and talked about why Serverless gives frontend developers superpowers!

I gave the opening keynote at the first ever ServerlessDays Rome conference and talked about how we can use Serverless technologies to empower modern businesses and allow them to focus on their differentiating factors.

I ran a free webinar with CodeMotion on the common mistakes companies made when they first adopt serverless.

The session was recorded and available here:

Workshops

It’s the last chance to sign up to my Production-Ready Serverless workshops next week in London and Amsterdam. If you’re interested in joining us, here are the sign-up links:

• London, March 16th-17th
• Amsterdam, March 19th-20th

If you can’t make these dates, then don’t worry, you can still catch me later in the year:

• Helsinki, May 4-5th
• Stockholm, May 14-15th
• Dublin, June 16-17th
• London, September 24-25th
• Berlin, October 8-9th

I have also reserved a number of diversity tickets for each of these events. Anyone from an underrepresented group in tech is invited to apply for this, including:

• Women and other gender minorities of all expressions and identities
• People of colour
• Sexuality minorities, including asexual people
• People with disabilities, both visible and invisible neurodiverse people
• People with chronic illnesses or diseases
• Religious and ethnic minorities
• Age minorities (under 21, over 50)
• People experiencing poverty
• Caregivers of children or other dependents
• People who have experienced trauma and its aftermath
• People living with or recovering from substance abuse

To apply, visit the Eventbrite page for the event you want to attend and look for the application information in the FAQs.

AWS announcement

I don’t share these anymore as many others (such as the @awswhatsnew Twitter account) do a much better job of aggregating them than me. But I want to share an update that many of you would be very excited about. CloudFront has massively improved the deployment time for CloudFront distributions (including Lambda@Edge)!

@TwippedTech We recently made changes that reduced the time to ~5 min consistently. We're not done yet as this continues to be a priority for us this year. When we say a config is deployed we reference p100 metrics; however, most edge locations are updated in seconds.

— Amazon CloudFront (@cloudfront) March 5, 2020

Thank you to my patrons

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

Alexis, Andre Silva, Boseok In, Dome Jantaphat, Dragan Cabarkapa, Ebru Cucen, Efi Merdler-Kravitz, Hrafnkell Palsson, Jon Barber, Jonathan Kosgei, Ken Ng, Kevin Woods, Luis Gutierrez, Mark David McCreary, Marko @ Serverless Life, Michael Wills, Shawn MacIntyre, Tendies123, Will Saunders, Yinan Xue

Thank you guys so much for your continued support!