Team Stackery has been hosting the PDX Serverless Architecture meetup at our Portland office since June of 2018, although the meetup began the year before. It’s always great to see repeat visitors and new faces, and especially to see our community change over the months. In February, we had an entertaining, dynamic, and knowledgeable speaker in Yves Gurcan.

This weekend I had the opportunity to participate in the AWS Hackathon in Portland. Based on the hackathons hosted at re:Invent, this brought together about 100 developers of all skill levels to break up into small teams and produce a demo product in 10 hours. I had a great time, and wanted to share what I learned! There may be organization-specific roadblocks to adopting AWS Lambda right now and therefore, it might not be the right fit for your team at this particular juncture.

In a real-time business scenario, various Azure services are integrated to define a business process. Day by day these business processes grow in complexity and monitoring them turns out to be a real challenge. In order to overcome these challenges, Serverless360 provides end-to-end tracking via Business Activity Monitoring.

Azure Functions team is back again for their monthly live webcast with a lot of interesting updates and community highlights. This webcast was quite special since their announcement on Social Media regarding the new Azure Functions management experience in the portal certainly created a buzz. In this session, Jeff Hollan, Byron Cardiff and Matthew Henderson joined to give us a picture of the latest happenings in the Azure Functions space.

Too often serverless is equated with just AWS Lambda. Yes, it’s true: Amazon Web Services (AWS) helped to pioneer what is commonly referred to as serverless today with AWS Lambda, which was first announced back in 2015. But in 2020, it’s important for enterprises to understand that the serverless landscape is much bigger with more opportunities. Serverless is sometimes (narrowly) defined as just being about functions-as-a-service, but that’s a very limited viewpoint.

The seamless scaling and headache-free reliability of a serverless application architecture has become compelling to a broad community of cloud specialists. But for those who have yet to become converts, a specific issue related to service startup latency—Cold Starts—has been one of the cited key objections. Fortunately, the serverless marketplace is maturing.

Serverless applications, due to their distributed nature, are often stuck having to reinvent the wheel. While small utility scripts and functions are often easily instrumented and monitored, anything of a transactional nature will need to implement special code to provide developers with common tools like stack traces, atomicity, and other patterns that rely on a singular flow of control.

Two years ago, I wrote a similar post on Microsoft Flow: How to pass the SQL data table results in a Markdown-formatted table into an Email notification or Approval Requests. It is still quite up to date, i.e., it is an excellent solution that you can still use today. The only problem with that article is that I was using “send an email” action in Power Automate Outlook connector that is currently deprecated.

Next in our series on the Amazon Builders’ Library, Mike Roberts of Symphonia picks out the key insights from the article Going faster with Continuous Delivery by AWS senior manager of software development Mark Mansour.