Hero Guide: Serverless
This guide highlights sessions at re:Invent 2024 that are critical to the serverless journey—whether you focus on deployments, performance, patterns, or security—so you can ultimately accelerate the development of high-quality, scalable applications.
Hazel Sáenz
AWS Serverless Hero
Attending re:Invent can be overwhelming with the volume of content available, especially in the serverless domain. This guide is designed to streamline your experience by providing a curated approach to selecting sessions and workshops that will enhance your knowledge and skills in serverless technologies. With a focus on practical application, each recommendation is crafted to help you identify the most valuable learning opportunities based on your specific area of interest.
Drawing from my personal experience, I've built this guide to address the challenges and opportunities unique to serverless development. You'll find insights into the most impactful sessions and expert tips on how to make the most out of your time at re:Invent. My goal is to empower you to not only absorb the latest advancements in serverless but also to apply them effectively in your projects, ultimately accelerating the development of high-quality, scalable applications.
Breakout session
SVS320 | Accelerate serverless deployments using Terraform with proven patterns
In this session, discover best practices and proven patterns for using Terraform to build serverless applications safely, predictably, and repeatedly. Learn techniques for designing modular, reusable architectures and strategies to test applications locally. Understand how to manage ownership and separation of concerns between operations and development teams. Gain insights into efficiently deploying serverless applications to the cloud. Familiarize yourself with open source frameworks to accelerate your serverless journey with Terraform today. Leave equipped with practical skills for leveraging Terraform’s power in your organization’s modern cloud architectures.
API311 | Application integration for platform builders
Modern distributed applications leverage diverse integration components such as queues, event brokers, and workflows. To enhance developer productivity and enforce best practices, platform architects automate the management of these components, incorporating robust logging, monitoring, and security measures. In this session, explore the implementation of application integration using serverless components in enterprise environments. Gain insights on implementing effective data masking techniques, establishing comprehensive observability, and securely configuring cross-account access, and learn how to design and maintain scalable, secure distributed systems that align with enterprise-grade standards.
SVS321 | AWS Lambda and Apache Kafka for real-time data processing applications
In this session, gain practical insights into building scalable, serverless data processing applications by integrating AWS Lambda with Apache Kafka. Explore using event-driven models for real-time data streaming and processing. Discover different architectural patterns and best practices to achieve high throughput, fault tolerance, and low latency. Leave with the knowledge to design serverless data processing pipelines that extract valuable insights from real-time data streams efficiently and cost-effectively.
SVS401 | Best practices for serverless developers
Do you want to take advantage of the full power of serverless architectures for your production workloads? Are you wondering how events can help your applications scale? Have you been trying to tune your applications for higher performance and lower cost? This session provides architectural best practices, optimizations, and useful shortcuts that experts can use to build secure, high-scale, and high-performance serverless applications.
Builders' session
API203-R | Building common orchestrated workflows with AWS Step Functions [REPEAT]
Accelerate your data processing journey in this hands-on AWS Step Functions workshop. Build three orchestrated workflows: streamline data processing with Distributed Map state, integrate external systems using callback with task token, and establish consistency across distributed applications by implementing the saga pattern. Discover how to simplify managing and scaling distributed data processing, offload undifferentiated tasks, and overcome serverless parallelism challenges. Through real-world examples and best practices, gain skills to unlock new business value. Leave with a deeper understanding of how to use AWS Step Functions to build scalable, efficient, data processing architectures. You must bring your laptop to participate.
Chalk talk
API301-R | Accelerating event-driven architecture with event storming [REPEAT]
Event-driven architectures are experiencing a renaissance. While getting started is not difficult, builders may encounter challenges on their journeys. Domain-driven design is a tool that can help, but many developers are unfamiliar with how to get started. In this chalk talk, learn about a general framework that uses domain-driven design to think through, design, and build cloud-native event-driven architectures.
SVS312-R | AWS Lambda performance tuning: Best practices and guidance [REPEAT]
In this chalk talk, you learn about opportunities to optimize your serverless applications built with AWS Lambda, including optimizations in the function configuration and within your function code. This talk also covers how you can best measure and tune your function’s performance by configuring memory to get the right application performance. You also hear best practices for initialization logic and reuse to enable fast startup and fast function processing times.
API303-R | Building modern API architectures: Which front door should I use? [REPEAT]
Architects have a number of options for building modern APIs, including REST, GraphQL, and real-time APIs. In this chalk talk, explore these options along with their benefits and drawbacks. The talk then covers practical use cases that show how to implement each style of API on AWS, including using managed services such as Amazon API Gateway, AWS IoT, and AWS AppSync.
Workshop
SVS306 | Accelerate development with AWS Lambda Powertools for serverless APIs
In this workshop, start with an existing application built with Python and progressively improve your API event handler using Powertools for AWS Lambda. Learn how to implement request and response validation, dynamic routing, exception handling, middleware, and OpenAPI schema generation. Discover how to improve your API event handler with serverless best practices using Python that you can easily extend to other Powertools runtimes. You must bring your laptop to participate.
Closing comments
AWS re:Invent is a monumental event, and you'll definitely find much more content than you can cover. My best advice is to enjoy your time and attend the sessions you can. If you miss one or two, that's okay, you can always catch up with the recorded sessions later. But make sure to enjoy the company, the stories, and the networking as much as you can. All the content can be found online later, but not the people. Have a blast!