Most of us think all we need to do is push logs to an APM vendor to track our KPIs. There’s a bit more to it than that. — If you’ve ever partnered with AWS when building an application you know that you go through an Infrastructure Event Management (IEM) plan in the weeks leading up to your go-live event. Part of the IEM is walking through all aspects of your application with key personnel from your company to…

With Revue shutting down later this month, I had to find another option for my newsletters. So I built one. — This is the last week before the newsletter service Revue shuts down. It’s the service I’ve been using for the past 7 months to publish my newsletter. It worked decently well, had some nice features that shared the weekly summary with me, and it integrated directly with Twitter so people…

With a new year comes a new focus. This year is especially important in serverless apps — The serverless world is constantly growing with feature sets and the number of adopters. While this might seem great, it can lead to rapid growth issues like losing the true meaning of serverless. As a community, we need to bring it back to the basics. We’ve learned and established comfortable…

It has been an incredible year for serverless. Let’s recount some of the amazing things that happened. — On January 4th, I announced the tech word of the year was async. Personally, I was prepared for a year of education on event-driven architectures. I was determined to go full-swing at work into 202 status codes and background processes. The architectures I designed were loosely coupled and relied on…

Writing so many blog posts this year was intense, but I learned so much more than I expected — I started writing in 2019. I was excited about a technique to run retrospectives I developed and wanted to share it. I knew getting developers engaged in a retrospective was difficult, and I wanted to share with other scrum masters the success I had. So I wrote my first post……

Publishing my blogs on several platforms takes up a lot of time every week. There had to be a better way — I do a lot of writing. I’ve written and published a blog post every week for the last 50 weeks. It’s something that I do because I have a passion for writing and sharing the things I learn with others. Writing not only provides me with a great way to…

The definition of serverless is changing, and nobody seems to agree on what it actually is — Something you probably wouldn’t expect an AWS Serverless Hero to say is, “I don’t know what serverless is.” I’m not proud of that statement. In fact, I’m a little upset about it. I used to have a firm grasp on serverless, but that seems to have been shaken up recently. …

With serverless applications, observability is crucial to your success. Learn why you need to build with observability as your first thought. — When I started building my first serverless application, I was super excited to see how fast it started to come together. Serverless lends itself really well to rapid development, shorter iteration cycles, and finding the right product-market fit as quickly as possible.

API Gateway direct integrations are shrouded with mystery and doubt. But they shouldn’t be. Here’s why. — Last week I was on a panel discussion at the Serverless Summit. We were having great discussion talking about app modernization, testing event-driven architectures, and answering questions from the audience. But one question went by that we didn’t have an opportunity to answer. So I wanted to take the time…