Serverless Craic Ep50 AWS re:Invent 2023

We talk about what we would like to see announced at this years AWS re:Invent 2023 looking at Observability, Generative AI, PartyRock, Developer Experience to name a few.

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Transcript

Dave Anderson: 0:05

Welcome to the next edition of Serverless

Craic. It's re: 0:07

Invent season. We're going to spend some time

talking about AWS re: 0:26

Invent, the annual conference that AWS run in Las Vegas. I am doing a G-P talk, which should be interesting.

Mark McCann: 1:05

We're starting to see some of the announcements coming through over the last number of days with lots of serverless updates. And lots of announcements on Observability and the Testing Framework Beta for serverless testing.

Dave Anderson: 1:30

Observability is a big one. We notice that for distributed systems, observability is king. There is lots coming in about tying observability together and being less dependent on certain tools. It's something that AWS is enabling or facilitating.

Michael O'Reilly: 1:52

It will be good to see where AWS is going with Observability. There's a lot of work going on in OpenTelemetry within the community and for teams adopting serverless architecture and serverless workloads. Trace propagation can be an issue and a challenge. I'm wondering if we'll see anything on their roadmap that gives us clues as to how they're thinking.

Dave Anderson: 2:24

It is interesting and complicated. When you break Observability down into dispute tracing, logging, alerting and metrics people are confused. It's definitely one that needs to be consumable for everyone. Gen AI will be everywhere. PartyRock came out there. You don't need an AWS account, you can do a quick app and pump in a prompt in an LLM model.

Mark McCann: 3:33

Removing barriers to entry and demystifying some of that stuff is important. PartyRock is a powerful capability. So it's great to be able to experiment without standing up an AWS account and spending lots of money on LLM costs.

Dave Anderson: 3:51

Let's give Mark Craddock a shout out for his Wardley Map in February on Prompt Engineering, when he pointed out that it's not about LLM, it's about product engineering. PartyRock makes prompt engineering a little easier, by writing an app around it.

Mark McCann: 4:10

It will be interesting to see developer advocates experiment with drawing architecture diagrams, generating code and stitching it together. And if there is anything formal from AWS to close the developer loop from idea to production ready code and leveraging AI capabilities to speed up the feedback loop.

Dave Anderson: 4:44

Code is a liability. In the EDA space, I don't see EDA or event driven area quieten down. I predict a lot of more things happening around EventBridge, Step Functions and additional features.

Mark McCann: 5:07

EventBridge has additional metrics. EventBridge is a key EDA capability within AWS. I'm sure there'll be capability improvements.

Michael O'Reilly: 5:27

I'm keeping an eye out for talks on decentralised event driven architectures. There's lots of opportunity for advances. And I did see the announcement that Step Functions can drive from an error state, which is big for resiliency and EDA.

Mark McCann: 6:04

I am looking foward to hearing about better guardrails or faster feedback loops for good practices. Well-architected, Trusted Advisor, Security Hub, Resiliency Hub and Compute Optimizer are becoming more consumable and timely. Like faster feedback loops for developers to guide them along their journey. It's definitely come a long way in the last year or two, so it will be interesting to see if that continues.

Dave Anderson: 6:47

There's a big trend around heuristics, Resiliency Hub and Security Hub and the idea of non functional hubs. Will there be a Gen AI Well-architected hub where you can have better monitoring to make easier for admins to ensure everything is working well.

Mark McCann: 7:08

AWS is democratising expertise that you used to acquire by spending time reading white papers. It's more approachable and available. So hopefully, that continues.

Dave Anderson: 7:16

In the same vein, developer enablement and tooling is massive. It's always been a criticism that developer experience is tough. AWS started to invest in that a few years ago and I don't expect that to slow up.

Mark McCann: 7:39

It would be good to see Serverless Land enhancements, testing practices and guidance on testing serverless for EDA architectures. The Serverless Testing Kit came out in beta. It'll be good because it is one of the things developers struggle with. And even though there is guidance about local testing versus testing in the cloud and change in the testing pyramid, it would be good to see more tooling, guidance, advice and capabilities, to make testing easier.

Dave Anderson: 8:16

I wonder if we will see enablement tools for productivity hacks? Will there be productivity hacks aimed at developers not like DevOps Guru or CodeGuru, but something

Michael O'Reilly: 8:52

Observability or Generative AI are grounded in LLM'ish.

Dave Anderson: 8:57

There is a mountain of knowledge on the AWS engineering ways of working and principles. Teams are starting to ask for good traceability through a distributed workload and what things that they need to look at from a non functional site with white papers, blogs and labs. I wonder will they perspective when they are dealing with AI based capabilities? In other words, the things that you need to stand at scale in a production based scenario. I looking for talks on how our teams and orgs have solved those issues. pump that into a model and facilitate people to ask questions? And it answers your question and gives you a couple of references. The car echo move? AWS re:Invent is always an

Mark McCann: 10:08

People have pulled together capabilities themselves. I wonder if it'll be a formal AWS offering. I have seen announcements like the Hyundai partnership with Amazon.com selling cars and disrupting that vertical. I think they're going to partner up on their infrastructure stack as well. So that is a bit left field. exciting event. We're planning a post re:Invent episode to review the annoucements and see what companies have now been Follow us @ServerlessEdge, or Serverless Craic podcast and on disrupted. our blog TheServerlessEdge.com. Thanks very much.