Monthly roundup — October 2023

Hi, here’s a quick round-up of everything I have done in October 2023.

Podcast

We aired three episodes on the Real-World Serverless podcast:

• #84 — Charity Majors on Observability, OTEL, AI ops, DevOps and Friday deploys
• #85 — AWS CDK dos and don’ts with Matthew Bonig
• #86 — AWS Serverless Hero on adopting CDK in an enterprise environment [Ran Isenberg]

Blog posts

I published four blog posts.

• Help! How do I set DeletionPolicy to Retain for production only?
• How I built an affiliate tracking system in a weekend with serverless
• Amplify: how to share code without Lambda Layers or private NPM
• Serverless v4 will start charging users, but that’s a good thing

If there are any topics that you’d like me to write about, please feel free to reach out and let me know on X (as @theburningmonk) or LinkedIn.

YouTube

I published eight videos.

• “Test in Production” is not what you think it means
• How to Test AWS AppSync APIs
• Building Multi-Region (Active-Active) Serverless Apps
• What’s so hard about testing Event-Driven Architectures?
• What is Amazon Cognito? User Pool vs Identity Pool Explained
• What is Amazon API Gateway? Key Concepts Explained
• What is Amazon File System (EFS) and should you use it with Lambda?

If you like the topics I cover then please subscribe to my channel and never miss a thing.

Workshop

We wrapped up the cohort of my Production-Ready Serverless workshop and we received so many great questions from the students. It was a blast working with everyone to help them through these questions. I learned a lot along the way and enjoyed brainstorming through them!

Here are some of my favourite questions:

• How to migrate databases for a live service?
• How best to set up IAM permissions for CI roles?
• How to calculate the max TPS that my function can handle?
• How to implement canary deployments?
• How to implement multi-language support for user-generated content?
• How to do data migration with DynamoDB?
• What are your thoughts on fat Lambda function vs single-purposed functions?
• How to choose between IaC tools — Serverless vs SAM vs CDK vs Terraform vs SST?
• How to share information between Terraform (favoured by platform teams) and Serverless/CDK/SAM?
• At what point would you consider using containers?
• How do you deal with the FUD slingers wrt serverless?
• How to automatically add Cognito users to an RDS database?
• How to do cascade deletes with DynamoDB?
• How do we automate schema migrations for RDS as part of CICD?
• How do you implement idempotency?

The next cohort starts in January 2024. If you sign up now, you can still enjoy 30% off with our early bird tickets. The price goes up on the 1st of December.

Also, starting with the January workshop, we will be supporting CDK as well. So students would be able to choose whether to use the Serverless framework or CDK to do the exercises.

Looking ahead to November

I’m hosting a free webinar session with Waldemar Hummer, CTO of LocalStack, on some key takeaways from running and debugging serverless applications locally. It’s happening on November 9th, it’s not too late to sign up and join us.

Hope to see you around :-)

Originally published at https://theburningmonk.com on November 1, 2023.