I often get asked what software tools are ideal for a serverless developer. I like being asked for my tooling preferences as much as the next developer gal, but when you break it down, this particular question is flawed. Serverless is, after all, about using a massive suite of platform tools to let you do minimal management.

In this article we’ll introduce the AWS Cloud Development Kit and explore how it can boost the productivity of your development and infrastructure teams. Infrastructure-as-Code is fast emerging as a de-facto standard for development organizations.

There’s no sure-fire way to tell whether or not serverless tech is going to grow or even be around next year. Every post-apocalyptic movie has thought me that technology is the first thing to go after a catastrophic event happens. And if that happens we’ll have to return to some ancient tech like ** knock on wood ** containers.

In 2008, Netflix was struck by a disaster. A fast-growing global streaming service was well on its way to transform the entertainment industry when the management faced a problem exposed by a data center failure. Even though it was a single issue, it shut the entire service down, depriving the company of millions in profits and effectively ending the shipments of DVDs (they were still a thing in 2008).

ServerlessConf NY this past October was an important milestone for those of us tracking how software is built on cloud services. . We’ve seen the serverless talks evolve from “what is serverless” to “I built a weird thing” to “We built a new business” to “We refactored a legacy app and kickstarted our feature velocity.” We’ll come back to those last two soon, , but I want to highlight some points from one in particular by Tim Wagner.

Over the last decade, DevOps has become an important part of software engineering culture, influenced by the wide adoption of microservices, containers and cloud computing. A recent step in the evolution of cloud-based and microservice architecture is the serverless computing – a code execution model where the cloud provider takes total responsibility for the operating system and hardware management.

Serverless Hero Yan Cui explains when and why you should use API Gateway service proxies, and introduces an open source tool to make it easy to implement. One of the very powerful and yet often under-utilized features of API Gateway is its ability to integrate directly with other AWS services. For example, you can connect API Gateway directly to an SNS topic without needing a Lambda function in the middle. Or to S3, or any number of AWS services.

When you look at an X-Ray trace for a Lambda cold start, you will see an Initialization subsegment. This subsegment represents “the function’s initialization code that is run before the handler”. This is where the runtime would resolve any dependencies, or initialize global variables. These are executed only once, so they don’t have to run on every invocation. The more dependencies you have, the longer this initialization step takes.