Weekly update 43

Hi, welcome to another weekly update.

I teamed up with Furnace

First, some personal news. I have joined the advisory board for furnace.io and am working closely with Danny Waite and John Blamire. We’re building a platform for data-intensive applications that can operate at a fraction of the cost of other platforms such as Zapier and Segment! By leveraging the scalability and pay-as-you-go pricing model of serverless, and giving you the option to seamlessly integrate your data pipeline with your existing infrastructure running in AWS.

Sign up to the early access and help us shape the future of data-intensive applications in the Cloud.

p.s. the guys drew me a new avatar!

Real-World Serverless podcast

Since the last update, we have 3 new episodes and over 2000 plays on the various platforms!

• #2: The case for Monorepos with Joe Emison
• #3: Building a fully serverless insurance company with Joe Emison
• #4: Understanding risk and vendor lock-in with Moneyou

Head over to realworldserverless.com to listen to all available episodes, and subscribe to the newsletter to never miss an update.

50% off my courses until end of March

I’m running a half price offer on both Learn you some Lambda best practice for great good! and Complete guide to AWS Step Functions until the end of March. As part of the promotion, I also added two new lessons to Lambda best practice for great good!.

• [Scalability] Handling RDS connections
• [Resilience] When to use Lambda destinations?

Take advantage of the half price offer before it runs out, go to theburningmonk.thinkific.com.

New posts

HTTP API goes GA today. I had the chance to test out the new features for API Gateway HTTP API before the GA announcement. In this post, I highlighted some of the new features and why they’re important for you.

How to: optimize Lambda memory size during CI/CD pipeline. I shared a simple approach on how to automatically fine-tune your functions’ memory settings for the optimal performance and cost as part of every CI/CD build. This is often the easiest and most effective way to get better performance from your serverless application, and to cut down on their cost too. And to do it on every CI/CD build ensures that you’re always running on the optimal setting. The best thing about it is that it’s easy to do with tools like the aws-lambda-power-tuning app by Alex Casalboni and the lumigo-cli.

Open source updates

Speaking of the lumigo-cli, here are two new features that you might find useful:

• There’s a new autoOptimize option on the powertune-lambda command. It allows you to tune and optimize (as in, update its memory setting) the function in a single command.
• The replay-sqs-dlq command now lets you replay a SQS DLQ to SNS/SQS/Kinesis in another account and/or region. This makes it easier to replay messages in a DLQ in a lower environment (e.g. staging, dev) which typically resides in a different AWS account.
• The clear-account command now deletes all NAT Gateways from the account (all regions) too. This command should be used with care given its destructive nature, but is immensely useful for clearing out playground and training accounts.

At the moment, I’m working on a new command to let you run S3 Select against files under a prefix. Think of it as a half-way house between S3 Select and Athena. Without the limitation of S3 Select (one file at a time) and no need to set up bespoke Athena tables for ad-hoc prefixes.

Production-Ready Serverless workshops

Due to the current corona virus outbreak, we had to postpone the Production-Ready Serverless workshop in Amsterdam this month. The Amsterdam workshop would now take place on July 7th-8th, at the same venue. Check it out.

I’m monitoring the situation closely and would provide update on my other in-person workshops accordingly.

In the meantime, we’re working on a new virtual workshop format. Thank you to everyone who took part in my poll 2 weeks ago. Over 80% of you said you have less than 2 hours of free time per night for your own studies when you’re working from home. This is totally understandable, especially in these special times where schools are closed and many of you have additional home schooling and child caring duties.

We are planning out the workshop curriculum with your schedule in mind, to make sure you get the most out of the workshop without stressing you out! The workshop would be running on the Senzo platform, thanks to Ant Stanley’s hard work. Please follow us on Twitter @senzo_HQ for updates in the coming days.

Thank you to my patrons

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

Alexis, Andre Silva, Bala Chalasani, 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 Kane, Michael Wills, Peter Miller, Shawn MacIntyre, Tendies123, Will Saunders, Yinan Xue

Thank you guys so much for your continued support!