February 2020 Summaries

Efi Merdler-Kravitz, Lumigo director of engineering, has been named a Serverless Hero by AWS, recognizing his enthusiasm for knowledge-sharing and impact within the community. As part of this honor, Efi joins a select group of individuals who have contributed to the adoption of serverless technology. His leadership in building a 100% serverless product and sharing his expertise through writing, speaking, and informal engagements have made him an ideal candidate for this recognition. Lumigo's relationship with AWS is further solidified by this latest achievement, which also highlights Efi's dedication to fostering a community-driven approach to serverless technology.

Serverless applications face challenges such as traceability, bloated libraries, emulating production hardware, and single responsibility due to their distributed nature. Open-source serverless libraries like aioboto3, DAZN Lambda Powertools, Lambda API, and AWS Serverless Express help address these concerns by providing tools for asynchronous communication with AWS services, bootstrapping specific tooling, implementing security measures, and abstracting away complexity through familiar frameworks and middleware. These libraries enable developers to quickly troubleshoot, diagnose, and resolve failures in serverless applications while maintaining data integrity and reducing duplication of effort.

The Amazon Builders' Library series highlights the key insights from an article by Mark Mansour on "Going faster with Continuous Delivery". The article discusses how AWS adopted Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery techniques to improve their business, which ultimately led to the development of the CodePipeline service. The value of Continuous Delivery lies in its ability to automate processes, reduce manual work, and increase quality and speed of releases. Amazon's journey with CD started over 10 years ago and involved automating processes, using tools like Pipelines, Testing prior to production, deployment hygiene, controlling when software is released, validating in production, and organizational improvement. These techniques enabled teams to release frequently, improve quality, and reduce defects, ultimately driving the growth of AWS as a business. The article emphasizes that Continuous Deployment can be adopted by organizations of any size with the right techniques, tools, culture, and goal of iterative improvement.

The text discusses the complexity of infrastructure for traditional applications, which often relies on a comprehensive tooling suite to iterate and improve resources. However, serverless development mitigates some of this complexity by removing hardware configuration control, but still requires tools for orchestration, maintenance, and deployment. The article highlights four must-have tools for serverless developers: AWS SAM, docker-lambda, Lumigo-CLI, and AWS Serverless Developer Tools. These tools address issues such as duplication in function configurations, rapid iteration, local execution environment mirroring production, and integration with various AWS services. The open-source nature of these tools allows developers to customize and expand their toolchain, making serverless development more seamless and reliable.