Real World Serverless with theburningmonk

Thank you to Momento for supporting this episode. Momento's real-time data platform empowers developers to build innovative products faster and more reliably than ever before. Visit gomomento.co/theburningmonk for more information.

David Behroozi, a 15-year Amazon veteran, tells us the inception story of Amazon Cognito and the cheat code for succeeding at AWS.

He also gave us a demo of Speedrun, his latest project since leaving Amazon. It turns your GitHub markdown into executable blocks of code that remember your context (e.g. AWS account and region) so your runbook can be executed right from the markdown.

I recommend watching the episode on YouTube so you can see the full demo: https://youtu.be/nhWYlzb8mSA

Links from the episode:

• David's LinkedIn profile
• David's Twitter profile
• Learn more about Speedrun
• David's blog
• How to Securely let Frontend Apps to Directly Access AWS services

Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Thank you to Hookdeck for sponsoring this episode. If you're looking to level-up your event-driven architecture, then check out their serverless event gateway at hookdeck.com/theburningmonk and help support this podcast.

Thomas Nixon, CTO of Baseline, shares stories from the trenches about the challenges of adopting serverless technologies.

He gave us a demo of Baseline.js, a new serverless development framework that captures the many hard-learned lessons his team has made in the last six years.

Think Amplify, but you own the source code and can easily customize things to suit your needs. I recommend watching the episode on YouTube so you can see the full demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6r8M8E_5n4

Links from the episode:

• Getting started with Baseline.js
• Baseline's Github repo
• Thomas' LinkedIn profile

Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Thank you to Hookdeck for sponsoring this episode. Please check them out and help support this podcast.

Allen Helton on being an enabler, building communities, and is serverless dead?

Links from the episode:

• Help Olivia's Fight Against Leukemia!
• Believe In Serverless community
• Ready, Set, Cloud!
• Momento, serverless cache
• Ep102: Peek behind the curtains of the AWS Heroes & Community Builders programmes, ft. Farrah Campbell

Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Take a peek behind the AWS Heroes and Community Builders programmes with Farrah Campbell, who was a former AWS hero turned AWS employee. Nowadays, Farrah heads up both the AWS Heroes and Community Builders programmes.

Links from the episode:

•  How to become an AWS hero by Danielle Heberling
• S3 no longer charges for unauthorized requests 
• AWS Heroes directory
• AWS Community Builders directory

Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with Brian LeRoux, co-founder of begin.com and creator of the Architect framework. Brian is also an AWS Serverless Hero and is currently working on enhance.dev, an HTML-first full-stack web framework.

In a wide-ranging conversation, we discussed:

• the Architect framework
• Lambdalith vs. Single-purpose functions
• Building a faster AWS SDK (aws-lite)
• Web components
• Functionless
• WASM
• Infra from code frameworks such as Ampt

Links from the episode:

• AWS Lite SDK
• Architect framework
• Begin
• Enhance framework
• The LocalStack episode
• The LLRT episode
• Ampt by Jeremy Daly
• My serverless testing course

Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with Waldemar Hummer, founder and CTO of LocalStack. We discussed what's new in the latest version of LocalStack and highlighted some of the most interesting additions.

One particular highlight for me is the ability to identify IAM permission errors between direct service integrations. For example, when an EventBridge pipe cannot deliver a message to a SQS target. And the ability to use test runs to generate the necessary IAM permissions so they can be added to your Lambda functions.

LocalStack v3 also allows running chaos experiments locally by adding random latency spikes, making an entire AWS region unavailable, or simulating DynamoDB throughput-exceeded errors.

Lots of exciting new features in LocalStack v3! Waldemar gave us a live demo of some of these features. You can watch the episode on YouTube and watch the demos here.

Links from the episode:

• My webinar with Waldemar after LocalStack v2
• LocalStack v3 announcement
• My blog post on when to use Step Functions vs running everything in Lambda
• LocalStack is hiring!

Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with Ian Griffiths, a Technical Fellow at Endjin, a Microsoft MVP, and the author of O'Reilly's Programming C# 10.0.

In this episode, we took a deep dive into Azure Functions, how it works and how it differs (significantly) from AWS Lambda.

Links from the episode:

• Bye bye Azure Functions, hello Azure Container Apps
• WASI (WebAssembly system interface)
• Endjin
• Introductions to Reactive Extensions for .Net

Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with Bob Hannent, the principal architect of DAZN's video playback and delivery system. This system is responsible for streaming live sporting events to millions of concurrent viewers.

We discussed the many challenges that come with streaming live videos at scale. How to ensure uptime even when your CDN partners suffer an outage. And how best to ensure the best playback experience for your customers across dozens of different platforms.

There's a lot to learn from this conversation. Honestly, I'm amazed by how much thought and engineering have gone into delivering those bytes from the stadiums to the customers.

And when you can push both AWS and CDN providers to their limits, every engineering decision has to be thought through carefully.

Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with Richard Davison, the creator of the new LLRT (Low Latency Runtime) for Lambda. We talked about the motivation for a specialised JavaScript runtime for Lambda, how it achieves the insane cold start time and the trade-offs they had to make.

Links from the episode:

• GitHub repo for LLRT
• API compatibility list
• QuickJs engine

Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with Jack Ellis, who is a co-founder of Fathom. We into the cost optimizations that he used to save Fathom $100k/year on their AWS bill.

Links from the episode:

• Fathom's technical blog
• Jack's personal page
• Jack's newsletter

Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0