Six people on the cutting edge of serverless modernization
Serverless is a quickly-maturing technology and, if you’ve followed its evolution over the past several years, you’ve likely seen a host of great (and not-so-great) documentation of its technology and practices. Now that serverless is a much more mainstream topic for reputable outfits to report on, it’s become easier to comb through serverless fact and fiction in the media.
But when you have large legacy apps that need modernization, it’s critical that your understanding and sources on serverless is more than just factual. You need to stay on the cutting edge of serverless. To really do that, you need to follow people who are asking not just what serverless does and can do, but what it will do next. If you don’t already, take a minute to follow these six people who frequently talk about best practices that will become de rigueur two years later.
Yan Cui
ICYMI - here's the API Gateway security risk you need to pay attention to https://t.co/aHdIIczc8S #serverless #aws #security
— Yan Cui (@theburningmonk) January 8, 2020
Yan wrote the book on serverless. Yes, the actual first text on the subject that talks more about the mindset of serverless than the technical details. Few see the pano-view of serverless like Yan. His twitter is a treasure trove of insider tips, and he much of what he shared showcases easily digestible best practices.
Ben Kehoe
The Athena query federation system seems to be made by people in the "fat Lambda" camp. Federation is accomplish by one Lambda that can respond to different types of requests. It'd be nice if maybe a specially-constructed SAR app could allow for separate functions
— Ben Kehoe (@ben11kehoe) January 4, 2020
If you’ve got a hockey-puck shaped robot sweeping your floor right now, you can thank Ben Kehoe and his team at iRobot. While others make the cool robot hardware, Ben is a trailblazer when it comes to serverless-at-scale. Ben has worked on custom internal tools to handle many of the roadblocks all serverless teams face, and his twitter feed is a great start to learning about well-known problems and current thinking. I’m sure I could talk for hours with him about the challenges and best practices for breaking the monolith with serverless!
Chris Munns
Good News: I have no unread emails from 2020.
— Chris Munns (@chrismunns) January 6, 2020
Bad News: Hundreds of 2019 emails rotting in my Inbox like a dead animal on the side of the highway.
Whenever Chris Munns publishes something on his AWS Blog, I have a mixture of feelings. I’m excited to read his insights and sad I might not write anything quite so incisive. His feed is a mixture of AWS events and stories and goofy internet ephemera. A must-read.
Jeremy Daly
If you aren’t subscribed to the Off-by-None newsletter, sign up now! A handful of us have had the privilege of spending time with Jeremy -- he’s a great resource and very collaborative. He even co-hosted a community party at re:Invent this past year with our very own Farrah Campbell!
I've never seen so many grown men dressed as squirrels. 🐿️🤣 It was a blast! Thanks to our sponsors and everyone who joined us. #reInvent #serverless #ServerlessForEveryone #AlreadyPlanningNextYear https://t.co/jBN6isANRw
— Jeremy Daly (@jeremy_daly) December 10, 2019
As someone who comes up with clever article ideas for a living, Jeremy’s newsletter is always full of new and interesting stuff we can write about here at Stackery. Mine it for yourself!
Corey Quinn
I see the cowards at @awscloud didn’t release any new features or services today. I didn’t realize it was a place for lollygagging!
— Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) December 31, 2019
I’m sure they’ll make up for it tomorrow.
This list is incomplete without the guy who has a solid 15-minute standup routine about AWS. Corey’s newsletter isn’t solely about serverless and if you’re a specialist (like me) there will be some general AWS stuff that goes over your head. As I hope you know, that’s ok and in fact a good thing.
Regardless of your serverless acumen, Corey’s newsletter is always worth a look. His main work surrounds helping companies get more control over their AWS bill, meaning he gives real and actionable advice that saves money and time. Preserving renewable and finite resources?! What more can you ask for?
Bonus serverless icon cross-over time! Corey and Jeremy together in Vegas for re:Invent 2019:
Had to go to #OldVegas to bump into this guy! #reInvent pic.twitter.com/gQRluIX4sy
— Jeremy Daly (@jeremy_daly) December 4, 2019
Charity Majors
If you're scared of pushing to production on Fridays, I recommend reassigning all your developer cycles off of feature development and onto your CI/CD process and observability tooling for as long as it takes to ✨fix that✨.
— Charity Majors (@mipsytipsy) April 15, 2019
While Charity’s monitoring service honeycomb.io is neither AWS focused nor centered on serverless, she does provide some of the best advice in the business on DevOps. Her observability talks are can’t-miss and her Twitter is full of good advice for any team looking to modernize with serverless.
Shameless self-promotion time!
Follow me on Twitter here and let me know who you think it a must-follow in serverless/AWS!
You can also follow Stackery but if you’re reading this, you probably already know where to find our twitter icon (psst. lower left).
Related posts
