Learn By Doing Newsletter

Week 17 is here and with it comes a ton of content relating to serverless and containers.

Yan Cui headlines this week with an objective post over on Logz.io that talks about the great debate, serverless vs. containers. The answer is actually quite simple, start serverless and if that doesn't make sense for the workload, use containers. Paul Johnston makes an appearance this week with a top notch article on serverless best practices. This weeks cool find dives into running a Minecraft clone that is written in C using OpenGL.

Check out those articles and many more below or share this newsletter with your friends by going to the landing page here.

☁️ Cloud

The Benefits You Need to Know about Infrastructure as CodeInfrastructure as code is a term that is being used a lot in the cloud provider space. However, I started to see that a lot of people weren't sure what it really means. So in this post I define it, talk about its benefits, its downsides, and the various infrastructure as code tools that exist today.

Serverless vs. ContainersYet another awesome post from Yan Cui, this time he focuses on the great debate - serverless vs. containers.

Amazon SQS as a Lambda event source = All The Fun!Using SQS as an event source for Lambda has been a requested feature for quite some time. It is now available and it is very slick to use, however, as this post points out there are some edge cases to be aware of.

Tutorial: How to deploy an app to production with an actual buttonThis is fun post from GitHub about how to configure an AWS IoT button for literal push button deployments. We've all wanted to do it before, so now we can live vicariously through this blog post.

Lessons Learned: Switching from CircleCI to Google Cloud BuildThis is one of the first posts I have seen of someone switching to the new Google Cloud Build service. Focuster moved from CircleCI to GCP Cloud Build and documented what they gained as well as what they lost.

Serverless Best PracticesPaul Johnston, co founder of ServerlessDays, lays out the best practices for serverless environments. There is a lot of top notch content in here like "functions don't call other functions".

On serverless, data lock-in and vendor choiceWhen cloud providers were just getting started a lot of folks were concerned about vendor lock-in and being stuck with a given provider. Nowadays we give very little thought to that argument, but we still haven't learned our lesson. This is a great post from Nick Gottlieb about how it's not about lock-in anymore, but about choice.

Our (not so smooth) journey productising a serverless app on AWSArcentry is a serverless app running on AWS. In this post they document their journey from day one to now. It is interesting that they started at humble beginnings by not choosing a infrastructure provisioning tool like Terraform, CloudFormation or Serverless.

New T3 Instances – Burstable, Cost-Effective PerformanceA new EC2 instance type came out this week, the T3 instance. Be mindful that unlimited bursting is enabled by default on these machines, which is a good thing if you need that performance.

Hitchhiker's Guide to AWS Step FunctionsAnother fresh cut from Yan Cui on the Epsagon blog. This time he dives into Step Functions and what the practical use cases are for them.

Serverless Streams, Topics, Queues, & APIs! Pick the Right Serverless Application PatternThis is an excellent webinar that Chris Munns, Senior Developer Advocate at AWS, hosted this week. It dives into the various communication channels you can use for serverless microservices and highlights that you aren't limited to just API calls.

🔨 Tools

lambda-cost-calculator - Forecast Lambda functions costs 💰Epsagon rolled out this new tool that allows you to estimate what your AWS Lambda costs are going to be. It checks out what functions you have deployed in your accounts and projects what your spend will be based on prior use.

aws-appsync-rds-aurora-sample - An AWS AppSync Serverless resolver for the Amazon Aurora relational database.A brand new AWS AppSync sample application that creates all of the necessary resources to have a Graph QL API in front of your Aurora cluster.

Johnny-Five - The JavaScript Robotics & IoT PlatformJohnny-Five isn't new by any means. However, it did just hit its v1.0.0 release. If IoT devices is something you are working on and JavaScript is your language of choice, give this framework a try.

windows95 - Windows 95 in Electron. Runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows.I think the maintainer of this says it best, "This is Windows 95, running in an Electron app. Yes, it's the full thing. I'm sorry.".

5 open source tools for container securityIf your running containers you probably have a need to scan those containers for vulnerabilities. The folks over at OpenSource put together this list of 5 open source tools for container security.

Code && Languages

Monitoring and Observability in the .NET RuntimeCheck out this post from Matt Warren that dives deep into the Core CLR of .NET to explore the features it has to support debugging and profiling.

Strategies for implementing user authentication in serverless applicationsWith serverless APIs, a common topic is user authentication. If you have never used a Custom Lambda Authorizer to handler that authentication, you should give this post a read. There is also a bit of a deep dive into why JWT tokens have become so popular in the serverless space.

React Native at Product Hunt feat. Radoslav Stankov and Vlad VladimirovThis is a cool podcast that DevChat put out this week with engineers from Product Hunt. There is a lot of content in here about what it's like to work at Product Hunt, but there is also some interesting bits about they are using React Native. So if you have been looking for real world examples or experiences, you might want to check this out.

Introductory Guide to Artificial IntelligenceTo be honest the math and science behind AI is still a black box to me. I found this guide the other day as I was reading other materials on the topic. I feel like this is a good post to get you started in the journey to learning more about artificial intelligence.

Generating CI Configurations at ScaleThis is an interesting case study from Globality on how they manage 80 microservices of varying stacks in production. I think the approach around consistency is interesting as it allows individual services to follow a defined pattern.

Designing microservices: Data considerationsMicroservice database strategy is a common question in the new world of microservices. It seems straightforward, each service has its own private data store that others can't touch. However, how do you implement this in practice?

😎 Cool find of the week

Craft - A simple Minecraft clone written in C using modern OpenGL (shadersIf you thought running your own Minecraft server was cool, how about creating your own clone of Minecraft using C and OpenGL?