#82: Big things are coming for Lambda Powertools with Heitor Lessa
Sep 5, 2023
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Heitor Lessa, principal solution architect at AWS, talks about the challenges and learnings from building the Lambda Powertools project. They discuss the trade-offs of monolithic Lambda functions and the use of Lambda Layers. Heitor also announces upcoming features and discusses the importance of working in public and building internal communities.
Lambda Powertools project has a dedicated team to enhance existing features and add new ones.
Power Tools now supports observability providers, offering more flexibility for users to use their preferred tools.
Data Masking and Encryption feature simplifies encrypting and masking sensitive data for enhanced privacy and security.
Deep dives
Power Tools now has a team behind it
Power Tools, a toolkit for AWS, now has a dedicated team working on it. This is a significant milestone for the project and ensures that it will receive ongoing support and development. The team will focus on enhancing the existing features and adding new ones to improve the developer experience. This move also enables the team to have on-call support, prioritize feature development, and establish a release cadence.
Observability providers in Power Tools
Power Tools now supports observability providers, allowing users to easily switch between different providers for metrics, tracing, and logging. Previously, the features were tightly coupled with AWS CloudWatch and X-Ray. With the new observability provider feature, users can choose to use providers like DataDog or New Relic while still enjoying the same ease of use and benefits provided by Power Tools. This enhancement offers more flexibility for users to use their preferred observability tools with Power Tools.
Data masking and encryption with Power Tools
Power Tools introduces a new feature called Data Masking and Encryption, allowing users to easily mask and encrypt sensitive data in their applications. This feature is particularly useful for users dealing with personally identifiable information (PII) or data that needs to be securely stored in a data lake or other environments. By abstracting key management and providing a simple API, Power Tools simplifies the process of encrypting and masking data, making it easier for developers to ensure data privacy and security.
Event Handler in Power Tools
Power Tools now includes an Event Handler feature that simplifies routing events to the appropriate functions in a serverless application. Whether the events are triggered by API Gateway, ALB, or other sources, the Event Handler acts as a lightweight framework for routing events and provides a consistent runtime experience. This feature is especially useful for developers migrating from existing applications and allows them to leverage their existing APIs and routing mechanisms without having to rebuild everything from scratch.
Power Tools and working in public
Power Tools has embraced the concept of working in public, which involves actively engaging with the community, soliciting feedback, and maintaining transparency in the development process. This approach has garnered attention and inspired other organizations to adopt similar practices, such as creating internal open source cultures and sharing libraries and learnings within their teams. Power Tools' success in working in public serves as a model for building thriving communities and fostering collaboration among developers.
In this episode, I spoke with Heitor Lessa, who is a principal solution architect at AWS that specializes in serverless. He's also the man behind the popular AWS Lambda Powertools project which is available in a number of languages.
We talked about the history of the Lambda Powertools project, and the challenges and learnings from building in public. And Heitor shared the public roadmap for the Lambda Powertools and announced some exciting features that are going to be available soon.
Additionally, we also discussed the trade-offs of monolithic Lambda functions, aka "fat functions", and why Heitor prefers them nowadays. And we talked about Lambda Layers and when it's a good idea to use them. Hint: You shouldn't use Lambda Layers as a replacement for package managers such as NPM.
You can also watch this episode on YouTube here, and see the code samples that Heitor shared during the episode.
You can find Heitor on X as @heitor_lessa and his LinkedIn profile here.
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