Anyone who has used step functions will tell you the DX leaves something to be desired, but we can still make it work — I am an advocate for using step functions when building workflows in AWS. I genuinely feel like it’s a powerful service that can handle many use cases better than Lambda. For months, I’ve been under the impression that I shared a common opinion with developers in the serverless community. …

A huge part of serverless API design is handling retries or accidental resubmits. Without it, data integrity goes out the window. — When I first got into cloud development, my team and I dove headfirst into all aspects of modern software design. One of the most fun discussions we had was around idempotency. Not because of the academic discussions we’d have around it, but because none of us knew how to pronounce…

Whenever we talk about serverless, there’s always the one person who brings up cold starts — I was eating dinner the other day with my family. My four year old looked at her plate and said to me, “I don’t want this chicken.” Naturally, I asked her why to which she responded, “It has sauce on it.” See, a few months ago, we had a meal…

This is my journey of doing one thing for years — In August, I was honored to be named an AWS Serverless Hero. When I first got the email, I couldn’t believe it. After the public announcement, I believed it less. Once I started getting congratulations from my friends, family, coworkers, and strangers, none of it felt real. …

Normalizing standards for building microservices provide strong, consistent software anyone can pick up and maintain — Microservice is a funny word. Not in the sense that it sounds funny or is spelled funny. But in the sense that most devs know what it means, yet they have no idea what it means. Even if you’ve never heard the phrase, context clues are pretty easy. It’s a…

What it took starting at nothing to getting two completely serverless apps live — Serverless has been quite an adventure for me. It started in early 2019 when I was tasked to “go figure out this whole cloud thing.” As I mentioned in my last post, my team and I had our work cut out for us. In addition to learning about serverless, we…

A multi-tenant application is a complex piece of software that could end in disaster if not built with these things in mind — A few years ago, I was given the privilege to take a team of engineers and “go figure out how to build in the cloud.” There were (mostly) no guidelines, just a vague idea of what kind of app we were supposed to build. Sounds like a developer’s dream, right? …

Serverless is gaining more and more popularity. What can we expect from it in the future? — I am a cloud architect for my day job. I don’t code as much as I did when I was a developer. Instead, I spend my time thinking about the future. I make 1, 3, and 5-year plans for how we progress in the cloud efficiently while continuing to use…

When designing an application, you need to plan for three steps in the future — A few years ago, I was asked to design a standalone application. It had a singular purpose and was meant to be used independently of any other application we had at my company. So I took the requirements and designed an application that was just that. It had everything self-contained…