Learn By Doing Newsletter

By now you are likely aware that it's re:Invent week down in Las Vegas. The flagship conference of AWS where thousands of developers flock to Vegas to hear what is next for the cloud provider. This year, like most years, did not disappoint.

That means a large chunk of this week's newsletter is dedicated to Cloud content. Chosen here are some of my favorite announcements from re:Invent. There is the new open source project, Firecracker, which is the foundation of how Lambda operate. There is a first look from Jeremy Daly on the new Aurora Serverless Data API. We also have a sample implementation of the new Custom Runtime of Lambda, no longer waiting for your favorite language to arrive, you can implement it yourself.

It's been a busy week, my head is still spinning from all of the announcement. The coming weeks are guaranteed to be just as exciting as folks start to get their hands on these services. Share this newsletter with your friends so they can join in all of the excitement as well.

☁️ Cloud

Build a Continuous Delivery Pipeline for Your Container Images with Amazon ECR as SourceThe suite of continuous deployment tools at AWS just keep getting better. To be honest, these tools had quite a few rough spots when they were first released. But now AWS CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, CodeBuild, and even CodeCommit are improving at a lightning clip. I have become a huge fan of these tools and this blog post announces a brand new improvement to them, ECR integration.

Firecracker: Secure and Fast microVM for Serverless Computingre:Invent 2018 is going down in Las Vegas and the first day started with a serious bang. The AWS team has open sourced Firecracker, the underlying foundation to AWS Lambda. To say this is ridiculously cool is an understatement.

Aurora Serverless Data API: A First LookAurora Serverless now has a new HTTPS data API that is going to make it easier for serverless applications to interact with a relational database. Here Jeremy Daly is back with a ridiculously quick first look at this new API. I think it's important to check out the latency pieces around this because these are probably non starters for most of us right now.

How to Easily Customize The AWS Amplify Authentication UIExtra cloud content this week for obvious reasons. This is a new post I put together that walks through how you can customize the Amplify UI components for authentication. It was surprising to me how little documentation existed around this topic, so I put this together for you and for my future self. With Amplify Console announced right before re:Invent, I see Amplify growing even more in popularity.

🔨 Tools

modules.tf — Convert visual AWS diagram into Terraform configurationsA ton of folks are switching to Cloudcraft for drawing out their AWS architectures. Well now, using modules.tf, you can port those diagrams directly into Terraform so you can easily make all of your diagrams a reality.

aws-lambda-rust-runtime - A Rust runtime for AWS LambdaA huge announcement out of re:Invent around Lambda and serverless is the roll out of Custom Runtimes. Yes, now you can define your own runtimes for AWS Lambda by adhering to the runtime specification that makes it work. Making it possible for you to implement functions in the language of your choice. For all of the Rust fans out there, here is a sample runtime.

AWS Serverless Applications Well Architected ReviewIt looks like not only were there massive Lambda announcements this week, but there is also an updated well architected review doc. Check this out if your just getting started in a serverless world as it will give a baseline and probably avoid you future pain.

Code && Languages

CockroachDB 2.1 is now 50x more scalable than Amazon AuroraIt seems interesting that the folks over at Cockroach Labs would release this blog post this week. Kudos to them for doing it. There is some very direct shots at Amazon Aurora in this post but the underlying logic seems sounds. Will everyone jump ship from Aurora and switch to Cockroach? Not likely. But this could cause AWS customers to demand more from Aurora which Amazon will undoubtedly listen to.

Why might a project/company use a monorepo?Ben over on dev.to purposed this interesting question this week on monorepos. In the world of development this is becoming an interesting question. We kinda swung to one end of the spectrum with microservices and each service having its own repo. But this introduces its own set of problems. So now a monorepo is popping up more and more, introducing solutions to some problems but bringing its own along with it. This is definitely worth a read if you are interested in the topic.

😎 Cool find of the week

event-stream: I don't know what to say. This isn't a Cool Find this week. But rather it's a reminder that a lot of us rely on open source projects like event-stream. We tend to overtrust these libraries because quite frankly we don't have a ton of choice. Given the constraints of time, speed, and performance in developing software we often want to avoid recreating wheels that have already been developed. Unfortunately, those wheels sometimes become compromised as is the case with event-stream. It's worth reading this issue and exploring how this all happened.