Real World Serverless with theburningmonk Yan Cui

In this episode, I spoke with Shawn Wang, who coined the term "AI Engineer" as a new title for engineers who are building the chains and agents that powers AI applications. This is likely to be the highest-demand engineering job of the decade.

We talked about the evolution of software development and how AI is changing everything. And why ambitious developers should attach themselves to AI and build thought leadership in this space.

We also touched on topics such as AGI (artificial general intelligence), and talked about Shawn's "smol-developer" project, which lets you bootstrap entire projects using prompt engineering.

If you want to see Shawn's short demo of smol-developer, then you can watch the episode on YouTube here.

Links from the episode:
Latent SpaceRise of the AI engineer articleOpenAI dev day keynoteOpenAI's Vision APIsmol-developerAI Engineer summit day 1AI Engineer summit day 2My post on orchestration vs choreography
Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with Patrick deBois, who is known as the "father of DevOps" as he coined the term "DevOps" in 2009.

In a wide-ranging conversation, we talked about the evolution of DevOps, what it means in 2023 and how it related to "Platform Engineering".

We also talked about AI, how AI technologies are impacting software development, and what developers can do to prepare themselves for what is to come.

Links from the episode:
Patrick’s YouTube channelPatrick's Twitter profilePatrick's LinkedIn profileEp81 with Matt Carey on LangChain and testing AI applicationsBlog post on testing GenAI applicationsEp84 with Charity Majors on Observability, OTEL, and DevOpsPatrick's course on learning LLM, from dev, sec and ops perspective
Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with Hieu Do, who is a Solution Architect at FPT Software in Vietnam. As a side project, he built a hotel booking system for a friend using entirely serverless technologies.

He shared his experience and learnings from building this system and how he was able to keep the cost down. After running the system for a year, the system only costs an average of $0.82 per month and serves over 3000 users per day.

There are some useful tips that everyone can apply. Such as reducing the cost of API Gateway by cutting out the OPTION requests associated with CORS. Or looking out for CloudWatch costs when using 3rd party services that poll CloudWatch data, such as NewRelic.

Links from the episode:
Hieu's article on running a serverless hotel booking system for a yearPuppeteerChrome Lambda LayerVendia serverless-express frameworkHieu's Linkedin profile-----

For more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please subscribe to the channel and follow me on X as @theburningmonk.

And if you're hungry for more insights, best practices, and invaluable tips on building serverless apps, make sure to subscribe to our free newsletter and elevate your serverless game! https://theburningmonk.com/subscribe

Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with Sandro Volpicella, who is a platform lead at Hashnode, a fully serverless blogging platform. He is also the co-author of AWS Fundamentals (https://awsfundamentals.com).

We explored Hashnode's architecture and went deep into its caching strategy, which is a crucial ingredient of a scalable and performant blogging platform.

Links from the episode:
Hashnode's overall architectureAWS FundamentalsCloudWatch BookStellateUpstashHow Hashnode implements the user feedOctoLenseServerlessQChoosing a database for serverless applications You can find Sandro on X as @sandro_vol

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For more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please subscribe to the channel and follow me on X as @theburningmonk.

And if you're hungry for more insights, best practices, and invaluable tips on building serverless apps, make sure to subscribe to our free newsletter and elevate your serverless game! https://theburningmonk.com/subscribe

Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with AJ Stuyvenberg, who is an AWS Hero and staff engineer at Datadog. We discussed the findings from the latest state of serverless report and spoke about Lambda cold starts at length. AJ has done some incredible research into Lambda cold starts and shared the 4 biggest mistakes people make regarding Lambda cold starts.

If you care about getting the best performance for your Lambda functions and minimizing cold starts, then this is the episode for you!

Links from the episode:
State of Serverless reportCorey Quinn's 17 ways to run containers on AWSCorey Quinn's 17 more ways to run containersAJ’s Linkedin profileAJ's re:invent session (COM305)AJ's Twitch streamAJ's post on Lambda proactive initialisationMichael Hart’s post on Lambda using full CPU during init You can find AJ on X as @astuyve

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For more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please subscribe to the channel and follow me on X as @theburningmonk.

And if you're hungry for more insights, best practices, and invaluable tips on building serverless apps, make sure to subscribe to our free newsletter and elevate your serverless game! https://theburningmonk.com/subscribe

Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In this episode, I spoke with Anton Babenko, who is an AWS Community Hero and creator of the Serverless.TF framework. We spoke at length about serverless development with Terraform and the problems that Serverless.TF aims to solve. We also discussed the recent seismic split in the Terraform community, with HashiCorp's license change and the initiation of the OpenTofu movement. Anton didn't hold back on his feelings about the oversized reaction to HashiCorp's announcement, and I agree with him!

Links from the episode:

* Serverless.TF framework
* Serverless.TF example for Lambda
* Anton's various other projects
* Hire Anton for consulting engagements
* HashiCorp's license change announcement
* OpenTofu

You can find Anton on X as @antonbabenko

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For more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please subscribe to the channel and follow me on X as @theburningmonk.

And if you're hungry for more insights, best practices, and invaluable tips on building serverless apps, make sure to subscribe to our free newsletter and elevate your serverless game! https://theburningmonk.com/subscribe

Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0