Real World Serverless with theburningmonk

In this episode, I spoke with Gerard Sans, who is a Google Developer Expert and my co-author for the AppSync Masterclass.We talked about Google's new AI platform, what it entails and how Google's AI offerings compare to OpenAI. For example, what can you do with Bard and Duet AI and why one might consider using them instead of ChatGPT or CoPilot. We discussed Midjourney vs. Stable Diffusion, and how platforms need to be more responsible with their AI offerings. And we also touched on the idea of AI agents and once again, LangChain was part of the conversation.You can also watch this episode on YouTube here and see Gerard's slides and demos.Links from the episode:Google's MakerSuite announcementAI for Google WorkspaceStable DiffusionStable Diffusion's new DreamBooth featureAdobe FireflyMidjourneyMidjourney's new inpainting featureHow ElevenLabs's voice cloning made me sound ScottishGoogle BardAnthropic Claude 2Ep81: AI development with LangChain with Matt CareyYou can find Gerard on X as @gerardsans.-----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/subscribeOpening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with Heitor Lessa, who is a principal solution architect at AWS that specializes in serverless. He's also the man behind the popular AWS Lambda Powertools project which is available in a number of languages.We talked about the history of the Lambda Powertools project, and the challenges and learnings from building in public. And Heitor shared the public roadmap for the Lambda Powertools and announced some exciting features that are going to be available soon.Additionally, we also discussed the trade-offs of monolithic Lambda functions, aka "fat functions", and why Heitor prefers them nowadays. And we talked about Lambda Layers and when it's a good idea to use them. Hint: You shouldn't use Lambda Layers as a replacement for package managers such as NPM.You can also watch this episode on YouTube here, and see the code samples that Heitor shared during the episode.Links from the episode:Lambda Powertools RoadmapLambda Powertools discord My post on when to use Lambda LayersYou can find Heitor on X as @heitor_lessa and his LinkedIn profile here.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/subscribeOpening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with Matt Carey, who's a senior engineer at Aleios, a premium AWS consultant that focuses on serverless technologies.The focus of our conversation was LangChain, Matt explained what it is and demoed some AI applications that he has developed with LangChain. Such as the popular Quivr app and Code Review GPT. If you want to see the demos in their full glory, then please go to YouTube and watch the episode here.We talked about some common challenges with AI development, such as testing, and how Matt and his team have developed a novel approach for dealing with the non-deterministic nature of these applications.Links from the episode:* Quivr* Code Review GPT* LangChain docs* PrivateGPT* Theodo's OrionTools* Blog on testing Gen AI applications* GenAI days eventsYou can find Matt on X as @mattzcarey and his LinkedIn profile here. You can also learn more about Aleios and their work at https://www.aleios.com. 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/subscribeOpening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with Randall Hunt, who's the VP of Cloud Strategy and Innovation at Caylent and had previously worked at Vendia, Facebook AI, AWS and SpaceX.We talked about AWS Bedrock, what is it and how it works and saw a demo of a simple AI application built with Bedrock and LangChain. Randall explained the advantages of using Bedrock and why tales of AWS's supposedly weakness in AI are far-fetched.I had a lot of fun talking to Randall and learnt a lot from the conversation and I hope you will too. This episode includes some live demo, which is best enjoyed if you watch the episode on YouTube here.Links from the episode:The "Attention is all you need" whitepaper from 2017OWASP top 10 for LLM applicationsPinecone vector database for AIMomento announced its upcoming serverless vector database AWS re:Inforce 2023 talk on data security with BedrockCaylent's career pageFor 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!Opening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I caught up with Ben Kehoe, who is an AWS Serverless Hero and one of the earliest adopters of serverless technologies.In a wide-ranging conversation, we discussed many topics around serverless and AI, including:The natural evolution of marketing terms and the need to focus on specific functional characteristics rather than defending the term. For example, including of arguing about what "serverless" means, we should instead talk about "pay-per-use".AWS should focus DX around the core service (e.g. CloudFormation) rather than trying to find client-side solutions by adding workarounds in SAM, CDK, etc.These client-side answers have a higher Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Developers often don’t see the increased TCO they are taking on, but when things break, it’s a problem.Developers put too much emphasis on author time benefits and not enough on runtime and operational time costs. They should be more thoughtful about the operational time cost.The “infrastructure from code” movement is taking burdens off the developer but leaving them with the developer’s business, which is a bad thing.Developers often have a hard time separating delivering business value vs. coding.As an industry, a flawed narrative has emerged that developers are somehow special within an organisation and that it’s OK for them to ignore their responsibilities to security if there is friction in the process.Ai has the potential to impede human growth as the current AI systems are not designed to generate new ideas and challenge the status quo. “an AI generator that is trained on modernist art would never invent post-modernism”.Links from the episode:The meaning(lessness) of serverlessServerless is a state of mindThe serverless spectrumEp16 - Serverless at iRobot with Ben KehoeFor more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please follow me on Twitter as @theburningmonk and subscribe to this podcast.Want to step up your AWS game and learn how to build production-ready serverless applications? Check out my upcoming workshops and I will teach you everything I know.Opening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with Eduard Bargues, who is a Principal Engineer at Ohpen, a cloud-native open banking platform.We talked about Ohpen's migration from EC2 to a mix of Fargate and Lambda, and along the way, we touched on many topics:migration patternsthe "serverless-first" mindsethow to choose when to use Lambda vs Fargatewhy monolith functions are painful and should be avoidedrecommendations and pitfallswhy you should build a DX teamWe also talked about how being cloud-agnostic makes you use the cloud in a way that is inefficient and creates many layers of unnecessary abstraction layers in your architecture, which Eduard calls "legacy lock-in"!We talked about their event-driven architecture and how they are using an in-house Event Broker to add FIFO support (which EventBridge doesn't support) for some subscribers. It's similar to what Luc van Donkersgoed talked about in episode 68. We talked about their EventBridge topology and how they manage over 200 AWS accounts, and finally, what are the biggest shortcomings with EventBridge right now.Links from the episode:Job openings at OhpenEpisode 68 with PostNLEpisode 73 with NNLuc van Donkersgoed's Twitter and LinkedInThe decoupled invocation patternFor more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please follow me on Twitter as @theburningmonk and subscribe to this podcast.Want to step up your AWS game and learn how to build production-ready serverless applications? Check out my upcoming workshops and I will teach you everything I know.Opening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with Luca Mezzalira, who is the author of "Building Micro-Frontends" by O'Reilly, and a Principal Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS focusing on serverless.We talked about micro-frontends and dived deep into his experience with them at both DAZN and AWS. We got a high-level overview of micro-frontends: what it is, how they work, and who should adopt micro-frontends. And why it worked out so well at DAZN, which had the challenge of supporting more than a dozen of devices including set-top boxes with custom versions of HTML!We were also able to dive deep into some technical topics, such as how to manage the shared user state (e.g. credentials and session); how to build micro-frontends from a CI/CD pipeline POV; and how to maintain a consistent styling and layout across all your micro-frontend pages.Links from the episode:The frontend-discovery-service open-source project in AWS LabsLuca's Microfrontends bookFor more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please follow me on Twitter as @theburningmonk and subscribe to this podcast.Want to step up your AWS game and learn how to build production-ready serverless applications? Check out my upcoming workshops and I will teach you everything I know.Opening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with Eric Peterson who is the founder and CTO of CloudZero, a leading vendor that helps AWS customers reign in their AWS spending by revealing hidden savings and preventing costly mistakes.We discussed a range of topics, including common mistakes AWS users make and how CloudZero once saved a customer potentially a million-dollar on CDN bills by alerting them of spending abnormalities early.We also talked about the trade-off between having cloud cost controls and the cost overhead they add. We talked about FinOps and how CloudZero can understand the unit cost of their own systems and how much each customer costs them because of the pay-per-use pricing model of serverless technologies.And we discussed the wider economic trends in 2023 and how that might impact companies going forward and how it might change their views on serverless and the cloud more broadly.Links from the episode:Erik's Twitter, Linkedin and personal blogBuilding a fully serverless insurance company with Joe EmisonFor more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please follow me on Twitter as @theburningmonk and subscribe to this podcast.Want to step up your AWS game and learn how to build production-ready serverless applications? Check out my upcoming workshops and I will teach you everything I know.Opening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with Dax Raad to talk about SST and the challenges of building an open-source community. Honestly, I think AWS can learn a thing or two from Dax's approach towards open-source, an approach that puts the needs of the customers first at the cost of the convenience of the maintainers.We talked about some shortcomings of CDK, the origin of SST and what problems it's supposed to solve; who are the intended users; and how SST differs from other simpler products on the market.We talked about  Dax's journey into serverless, via Kubernetes. And the self-realization that deep down, behind all the arguments about "vendor lock-in", he was pushing back on serverless because he was trying to avoid learning another thing.And we reminisced about learning programming languages and our shared appreciation for Erlang and the actor model!Links from the episode:Check out SST hereThis episode is sponsored by Momento. Get all the benefits of database caching and none of the operational headache with Momento Serverless Cache. Start free at gomomento.co/realworld.For more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please follow me on Twitter as @theburningmonk and subscribe to this podcast.Want to step up your AWS game and learn how to build production-ready serverless applications? Check out my upcoming workshops and I will teach you everything I know.Opening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with Kirk Kirkconnell to talk about his experience with database technologies and serverless. Kirk had been involved with databases his whole career, including recently with the DynamoDB and Momento teams.We talked about single table design with DynamoDB - when to use it and some common drawbacks to consider. We discussed the strength and weaknesses of DynamoDB DAX and when to use it vs a general-purpose caching solution like Momento.But the big discussion was about the rise of faux serverless services and the important, yet often underrated role of scale to zero. And why there needs to be a litmus test for serverless storage services so people have a better idea of what they're getting themselves into!Links from the episode:Litmus for serverless (blog post)Jobs at MomentoGetting started with MomentoThis episode is sponsored by Momento. Get all the benefits of database caching and none of the operational headache with Momento Serverless Cache. Start free at gomomento.co/realworld.For more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please follow me on Twitter as @theburningmonk and subscribe to this podcast.Want to step up your AWS game and learn how to build production-ready serverless applications? Check out my upcoming workshops and I will teach you everything I know.Opening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with Vijai Ramcharan to talk about his experience with introducing serverless at NN, a 175 years-old financial services company based in the Netherlands.We touched on many topics, from changing existing mindsets and training engineers about AWS and serverless, to vendor lock-in and challenges with adopting serverless at the enterprise scale.Links from the episode:Vacancies at NNVijai's article on kickstarting serverless adoption at NNWerner Vogel's keynote at re:invent 2022Gregor Hophe's talk on Modern cloud applications: Do they lock you in?This episode is sponsored by Momento. Get all the benefits of database caching and none of the operational headache with Momento Serverless Cache. Start free at gomomento.co/realworld.For more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please follow us on Twitter as @RealWorldSls and subscribe to this podcast.Want to step up your AWS game and learn how to build production-ready serverless applications? Check out my upcoming workshops and I will teach you everything I know.Opening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I caught up with Rowan Udell to talk about his book The Practical AWS IAM Guide and get his takes on IAM best practices.Links from the episode:AWS IAM AnalyzerCloudsplainingIAM livePermissions.CloudTrackIAMAWS services that work with IAMThis episode is sponsored by Momento. Get all the benefits of database caching and none of the operational headache with Momento Serverless Cache. Start free at gomomento.co/realworld. For more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please follow us on Twitter as @RealWorldSls and subscribe to this podcast.Want to step up your AWS game and learn how to build production-ready serverless applications? Check out my upcoming workshops and I will teach you everything I know.Opening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I caught up with Ben Bridts, who is an AWS Community Hero and consultant at Cloudar in Belgium.We talked about many topics, including common mistakes companies make in AWS; the problems with AWS Organizations; pitfalls with platform teams; and some success stories from his work as a consultant.Links from the episode:Alex DeBrie's post on GraphQL and Single-table designFor more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please follow us on Twitter as @RealWorldSls and subscribe to this podcast.Want to step up your AWS game and learn how to build production-ready serverless applications? Check out my upcoming workshops and I will teach you everything I know.Opening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I caught up with Sarah Hamilton, who is an AWS Community Builder and a software engineer at LEGO.We talked about her journey into serverless and LEGO's serverless adoption has changed since I spoke with Sheen and Nicole on this podcast. In the two years since they have grown from 6 features teams to over 25, all focused on serverless technologies. We also talked about some of Sarah's previous work, especially a project where she used Step Functions, and her approach towards testing Step Functions.Links from the episode:Sarah's talk on advanced event-driven architectures at LEGO groupEpisode 12: Serverless at LEGO with Nicole Yip and Sheen BrisalsFor more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please follow us on Twitter as @RealWorldSls and subscribe to this podcast.Want to step up your AWS game and learn how to build production-ready serverless applications? Check out my upcoming workshops and I will teach you everything I know.Opening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with Sam Williams, who runs the Complete Coding YouTube channel where he teaches about AWS and Serverless. He recently published a new video course called "Master AWS Serverless with 7 Real World Projects" and shared some helpful tips on picking the right course and how you can get the most from these courses.Sam is also a serverless consultant and has helped many startups adopt serverless technologies successfully. We also discussed why it's a no-brainer for startups to choose serverless over containers nowadays!Links from the episode:Sam's new video course, "Master AWS Serverless with 7 Real World Projects", get 20% OFF with the code YANSam's YouTube channelSam's video using his homemade lightboardMy "AppSync Masterclass" video courseFor more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please follow us on Twitter as @RealWorldSls and subscribe to this podcast.Want to step up your AWS game and learn how to build production-ready serverless applications? Check out my upcoming workshops and I will teach you everything I know.Opening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with AWS Serverless Hero Luc van Donkersgoed about how PostNL is using serverless technologies and discussed the challenges of building event-driven architectures and how PostNL tackles problems such as schema validation and testing.Links from the episode:Build cloud-native apps with Serverless interaction testingIT vacancies at PostNLAWS Distro for OpenTelemtryAWS X-Ray vs LumigoMy upcoming Testing Serverless Architectures video courseFor more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please follow us on Twitter as @RealWorldSls and subscribe to this podcast.Want to step up your AWS game and learn how to build production-ready serverless applications? Check out my upcoming workshops and I will teach you everything I know.Opening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I caught up with Eoin Shanaghy to talk about his work at FourTheorem, a boutique consultancy based out of Ireland. We touched on many topics, including the challenges for serverless adoption at enterprises and a super interesting client project he worked on, which involved using serverless at scale in a high-performance computing environment.Links from the episode:FourRheorem websiteAWS Bites#39: Fighting COVID with serverless with Denis BauerFor more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please follow us on Twitter as @RealWorldSls and subscribe to this podcast.Want to step up your AWS game and learn how to build production-ready serverless applications? Check out my upcoming workshops and I will teach you everything I know.Opening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with Nick Tune and Kacper Gunia to talk about Team Topologies, i.e. how to structure businesses and teams so that you can get stuff done faster. Companies often struggle to adopt modern software development practices and technologies because their team structures are misaligned with the practices they're trying to adopt. In this conversation, we will discuss what is team topologies, having the right incentives and funding models for teams, common anti-patterns, the problems with scrum and so much more! Links from the episode:London DDD meetup groupIndependent Value Streams with Domain-Driven Design (3h video course)teamtopologies.comFor more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please follow us on Twitter as @RealWorldSls and subscribe to this podcast.Want to step up your AWS game and learn how to build production-ready serverless applications? Check out my upcoming workshops and I will teach you everything I know.Opening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I caught up with Adam Elmore (@aeduhm), AWS DevTools Hero and an active member of the AWS community. We talked about how he passed all 12 AWS certifications in 2 weeks and how they have helped him find success on the AWS IQ platform. We also touched on his new project, public.dev, the general lack of performance-focused site builders, live streaming on Twitch and his plans for a new video course.Links from the episode:Adam's Twitch channelAWS IQpublic.devAppSync MasterclassFor more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please follow us on Twitter as @RealWorldSls and subscribe to this podcast.To learn how to build production-ready serverless applications, check out my upcoming workshops.Opening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Links from the episode:AWS Startup blog: how Emerald Cloud Lab is revolutionizing the laboratory using AWSwww.emeraldcloudlab.comFor more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please follow us on Twitter as @RealWorldSls and subscribe to this podcast.To learn how to build production-ready serverless applications, check out my upcoming workshops.Opening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0