Real World Serverless with theburningmonk

In this episode, I spoke with Mark White, who is a principal engineer at Dunelm, a leading home furnishing retailer in the UK.

We talked about Dunelm's journey from on-premise infrastructure to serverless and how they stayed agile while migrating their systems to this new paradigm safely.

We discussed the challenges of shifting the engineering culture and habits to fit the constraints and opportunities that serverless technologies offer. And we recounted Dunelm's success and failure stories along the way.

Links from the episode:

• Dunelm's Engineering blog
• Ep77 Microfrontends with Luca Mezzalira
• Unleashing The Power Of Frontend Distributed Systems With AWS

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 Austen Collins, founder and CEO of Serverless Inc. about the upcoming release of Serverless Framework v4.

We talked about the origin of the Serverless Framework and the challenges it faces. We discussed the rationale behind the upcoming changes in v4. Including the ability to easily switch between containers and Lambda functions as the deployment target, and the revenue share model for Extensions.

Links from the episode:

* Serverless v4 announcement post
* HashiCorp's license change announcement
* Ep87 with Anton Babenko on the Terraform pricing change
* Ep88 with AJ Stuyvenberg on Lambda cold start mistakes
* State of Serverless report 2023

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 Sam Williams about his drive for work-life balance and discussed his experience of building AI-powered apps using serverless technologies.

Links from the episode:

• Sam's YouTube channel
• OpenAI's Vision API
• smol-developer
• Episode 92 with Shawn Wang
• Production-Ready Serverless workshop
• Sam's course
• Luc van Donkersgoed's article on standing on the shoulder of giants

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 Shawn Wang, who coined the term "AI Engineer" as a new title for engineers who are building the chains and agents that powers AI applications. This is likely to be the highest-demand engineering job of the decade.

We talked about the evolution of software development and how AI is changing everything. And why ambitious developers should attach themselves to AI and build thought leadership in this space.

We also touched on topics such as AGI (artificial general intelligence), and talked about Shawn's "smol-developer" project, which lets you bootstrap entire projects using prompt engineering.

If you want to see Shawn's short demo of smol-developer, then you can watch the episode on YouTube here.

Links from the episode:

• Latent Space
• Rise of the AI engineer article
• OpenAI dev day keynote
• OpenAI's Vision API
• smol-developer
• AI Engineer summit day 1
• AI Engineer summit day 2
• My post on orchestration vs choreography

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 Patrick deBois, who is known as the "father of DevOps" as he coined the term "DevOps" in 2009.

In a wide-ranging conversation, we talked about the evolution of DevOps, what it means in 2023 and how it related to "Platform Engineering".

We also talked about AI, how AI technologies are impacting software development, and what developers can do to prepare themselves for what is to come.

Links from the episode:

• Patrick’s YouTube channel
• Patrick's Twitter profile
• Patrick's LinkedIn profile
• Ep81 with Matt Carey on LangChain and testing AI applications
• Blog post on testing GenAI applications
• Ep84 with Charity Majors on Observability, OTEL, and DevOps
• Patrick's course on learning LLM, from dev, sec and ops perspective

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 Hieu Do, who is a Solution Architect at FPT Software in Vietnam. As a side project, he built a hotel booking system for a friend using entirely serverless technologies.

He shared his experience and learnings from building this system and how he was able to keep the cost down. After running the system for a year, the system only costs an average of $0.82 per month and serves over 3000 users per day.

There are some useful tips that everyone can apply. Such as reducing the cost of API Gateway by cutting out the OPTION requests associated with CORS. Or looking out for CloudWatch costs when using 3rd party services that poll CloudWatch data, such as NewRelic.

Links from the episode:

• Hieu's article on running a serverless hotel booking system for a year
• Puppeteer
• Chrome Lambda Layer
• Vendia serverless-express framework
• Hieu's Linkedin profile

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For more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please subscribe to the channel and follow me on X as @theburningmonk.

And if you're hungry for more insights, best practices, and invaluable tips on building serverless apps, make sure to subscribe to our free newsletter and elevate your serverless game! https://theburningmonk.com/subscribe

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 Sandro Volpicella, who is a platform lead at Hashnode, a fully serverless blogging platform. He is also the co-author of AWS Fundamentals (https://awsfundamentals.com).

We explored Hashnode's architecture and went deep into its caching strategy, which is a crucial ingredient of a scalable and performant blogging platform.

Links from the episode:

• Hashnode's overall architecture
• AWS Fundamentals
• CloudWatch Book
• Stellate
• Upstash
• How Hashnode implements the user feed
• OctoLense
• ServerlessQ
• Choosing a database for serverless applications 

You can find Sandro on X as @sandro_vol

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For more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please subscribe to the channel and follow me on X as @theburningmonk.

And if you're hungry for more insights, best practices, and invaluable tips on building serverless apps, make sure to subscribe to our free newsletter and elevate your serverless game! https://theburningmonk.com/subscribe

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 AJ Stuyvenberg, who is an AWS Hero and staff engineer at Datadog. We discussed the findings from the latest state of serverless report and spoke about Lambda cold starts at length. AJ has done some incredible research into Lambda cold starts and shared the 4 biggest mistakes people make regarding Lambda cold starts.

If you care about getting the best performance for your Lambda functions and minimizing cold starts, then this is the episode for you!

Links from the episode:

• State of Serverless report
• Corey Quinn's 17 ways to run containers on AWS
• Corey Quinn's 17 more ways to run containers
• AJ’s Linkedin profile
• AJ's re:invent session (COM305)
• AJ's Twitch stream
• AJ's post on Lambda proactive initialisation
• Michael Hart’s post on Lambda using full CPU during init 

You can find AJ on X as @astuyve

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For more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please subscribe to the channel and follow me on X as @theburningmonk.

And if you're hungry for more insights, best practices, and invaluable tips on building serverless apps, make sure to subscribe to our free newsletter and elevate your serverless game! https://theburningmonk.com/subscribe

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 Anton Babenko, who is an AWS Community Hero and creator of the Serverless.TF framework. We spoke at length about serverless development with Terraform and the problems that Serverless.TF aims to solve. We also discussed the recent seismic split in the Terraform community, with HashiCorp's license change and the initiation of the OpenTofu movement. Anton didn't hold back on his feelings about the oversized reaction to HashiCorp's announcement, and I agree with him!

Links from the episode:

* Serverless.TF framework
* Serverless.TF example for Lambda
* Anton's various other projects
* Hire Anton for consulting engagements
* HashiCorp's license change announcement
* OpenTofu

You can find Anton on X as @antonbabenko

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For more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please subscribe to the channel and follow me on X as @theburningmonk.

And if you're hungry for more insights, best practices, and invaluable tips on building serverless apps, make sure to subscribe to our free newsletter and elevate your serverless game! https://theburningmonk.com/subscribe

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 Ran Isenberg, who is an AWS Serverless Hero and Principal Software Architect at CyberArk. Amongst other things, we talked about platform engineering at CyberArk, how they adopted CDK and how they approach testing and tenant isolations.

Links from the episode:

* Ran's blog
* Open positions at CyberArk
* cdk-nag
* Ran's AWS Lambda cookbook
* See Ran speak at re:Invent, session OPN305
* My approach towards serverless testing
* My course on serverless testing
* Episode 85 with Matt Bonig about CDK dos & don'ts

You can find Ran on X as @IsenbergRan

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For more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please subscribe to the channel and follow me on X as @theburningmonk.

And if you're hungry for more insights, best practices, and invaluable tips on building serverless apps, make sure to subscribe to our free newsletter and elevate your serverless game! https://theburningmonk.com/subscribe

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