This small article suggests 3 things you should look at to improve your devops practices, and from my point of view your productivity: Functions, Workflows and Events. Using Serverless functions as microservices, Workflows to orchestrate them and Events to provide communication between them while minimizing coupling. Serverless architectures in a word!

Interesting point of view from Mika Yeap in this article. To summarize it, I will just quote this: "Serverless is intimidating for newcomers, which is ironic because those are the people it’s supposed to benefit most."
I actually don't know if people think Serverless is too complicated. But I can only encourage you to give a try to Lambda and see.

Great feedback from Lumigo on how they manage their serverless projects. Lots of tips on developer experience and duties, on testing, CI/CD, tools they are using... It's not a deeply technical article but worth reading.

Using EventBridge is definitely a great way to decouple your microservices but it may be tough to test. This article provides a simple but clear example of how to do that. Unit testing in that case is almost impossible and you should favor integration tests, leveraging short-lived stacks to simulate the target environment (prod) and other services like SQS to check for events. Nice one.

Let's continue with EventBridge. AWS recently announced the release of a new feature: API Destinations. It permits sending events to SaaS applications, HTTP endpoints or webhooks. Really cool because you don't need a Lambda function anymore to perform this call. Also it is able to perform authentication (Basic, OAuth, API Key) transparently.
In this article, Geoarge Mao provides a sample of an HTTP API, protected with Cognito, and EventBridge to send some events to this destination. I love when you can perform this kind of things without writing a single line of code!

I love this kind of story where someone is able to serve millions of users, thousands of requests per second and much more for just a few hundred bucks thanks to serverless. This article describes what they did at Lenskart, using Firebase and other GCP serverless services. First of a coming series, stay tuned.

Eltana is a bagel restaurant located in Seattle. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, they had to shift their business and provide online ordering and delivery. This article relates a really great success story on how serverless helped them build that solution quickly, at almost no cost and provided a significant increase in their sales. API Gateway, Lambda and few other services constitute the recipe of this success.

This looks really cool! Serverless Stack (SST) allows you to develop and test your Lambda function locally with hot reload. Watch this video to get a quick overview. But Serverless Stack is actually more than that, it's a complete framework to build your serverless apps (just like serverless or SAM). I need to try!

I already spoke about Firecracker last month, and how it is used by AWS under the hood of Lambda. In this article, the startup Koyeb explains why they love it and use it for their platform.

AWS extensions were announced in October 2020, and were primarily intended for monitoring and security. But this article provides another interesting use case: caching data and configuration. Using extensions to cache data retrieved from Parameter Store or DynamoDB, he's able to significantly reduce the cold start (by 62%) and execution time (by 80%) of the function.

James Beswick continues his series of articles on Lambda. Since the last newsletter, he wrote 2 series of 2 articles:

• First one was about security: Building a solid security foundation (part 1 / part 2).
• Second one is about debugging: Debugging code (part 1 / part 2).

Last but not least, a great improvement has been announced for EventBridge / X-Ray. You can now propagate X-Ray traces through EventBridge to several serverless services (Lambda, SQS, SNS, Step Functions...). It is really an important update as more and more serverless architectures are leveraging EventBridge to decouple functions and services.