Real World Serverless with theburningmonk

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...

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 o...

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 y...

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&ap...

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 r...

In this episode, I spoke with Matthew Bonig, who is an AWS DevTools Hero and co-author of The CDK Book. We talked about the Dos and Don'ts of CDK, and Matthew shared some tips on testing and how to organize your CDK project. Links from the episode: The CDK Book Advanced CDK Course Construct Hub CDK Patterns CDK Community Survey 2023 cdk.dev Wing Lang Ampt CDK Days track 1 CDK Days track 2 You...

In this episode, I spoke with Charity Majors, who is the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, a popular observability platform. We had a wide-ranging conversation about Parse (and its acquisition by Facebook), observability, devops and why you should deploy on Fridays (but you still need to apply good engineering sense!). Links from the episode: Honeycomb   Honeycomb blog Honeycomb's AI-powered q...

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 Diffu...

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 t...

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 pleas...

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 weakne...

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 a...

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 patterns the "serverless-first" mindset how to choose when to use Lambda vs Fargate why monolith functions are painful and should...

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 m...

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...

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...

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 wh...

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: Vacanc...

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 Analyzer Cloudsplaining IAM live Permissions. Cloud TrackIAM AWS services that work with IAM This episode is sponsored by Momento . Get all the benefits of database caching and none of the operational headache with Momento Serverl...

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 design Fo...

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...

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...

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 testing IT vacancies at PostNL AWS Distro for OpenTelemtry AWS X-...

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 we...

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 t...