iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 10/07/2025

TIL web neural network API, an emerging web standard for building in-browser AI apps that lets you use those new NPUs in phones and laptops. w3.org/TR/webnn

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 27/03/2025

Through chaos experiments, the Lambda team reduced response time to an AZ outage by 90%! 🤯

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 20/02/2025

Nice to see a full house at the serverless days Manchester 💪

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 22/01/2025

This is AWESOME!! EventBridge now delivers events to cross-account targets directly without having to send them to the default bus in the target account first. More details here: aws.amazon.com/about-aws/wh...

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 18/01/2025

Here's a mindmap of everything we'll cover in my 4-week boot camp starting on Monday. Are we missing anything that one should know for running serverless workloads in production? Detailed curriculum here: productionreadyserverless.com#curriculum

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 10/01/2025

oh, this is a toughie...

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 10/01/2025

Stop wasting money on CORS preflight requests. Here's a quick tip for reducing API Gateway costs. 👇

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 09/01/2025

This is still my favourite answer to "What does a software architect do?" Source: youtube.com/watch?v=FGKG...

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 05/01/2025

I'm speaking at AWS Community Day Romania this April, in the beautiful city of Timisoara. Hope to see you there 👋 Their CFP is open until February, so there's still time to submit your talk. More details here: aws-community.ro

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 03/01/2025

AWS WAF Classic (or v1) was recently deprecated, and classic Web ACLs no longer appear in the new WAF console. So it's easy to miss any classic web ACLs you have that are no longer in use, especially if you don't spend much time in the AWS console because you do everything through IaC!

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 30/12/2024

I just burned $10,000 on marketing, and it taught me the hardest lesson of my career. I spent $10,000 on an ad agency and only got 3 sign-ups for my workshop, despite months of ad campaigns and plenty of clicks. Yet, 30% of students joined through word of mouth, another 30% through social media.

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 29/12/2024

Do you build mulit-region applications on AWS? Then bookmark this page of AWS services and their multi-region capabilities. repost.aws/articles/AR0...

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 28/12/2024

An eng manager at Netflix once told me that "It'd cost 7x to run Netflix if Netflix ran on Lambda". But what he said next was even more insightful. "But, not everything at Netflix runs at Netflix scale." And that's true for most enterprises!

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 27/12/2024

When you use fetch in Node 20 or later, the X-Ray SDK doesn't propagate trace headers downstream. If you have a Lambda -> API Gateway -> Lambda, the two invocations will not appear in the same trace. This is the two-line fix you need. (you need to install the aws-xray-sdk-fetch module first)

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 18/12/2024

Skype is pushing everyone to a subscription model for voip phone calls. Are there any alternatives that's still pay-as-you-go? I looked at a few, like Viber, but they are all subscriptions-based as well.

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 17/12/2024

There is still coupling in Event-Driven Architectures (EDAs)! Coupling means changes on one side have to propagate to the other side and it can be measured in multiple dimensions. Even in EDAs, there are multiple forms of coupling:

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 11/12/2024

ICYMI, my next serverless workshop is going to include a new Terraform track. That's 3 courses for the price of 1! 👉 buff.ly/2JVuG1o ps. early bird (30% off) tickets are available until Dec 16th

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 09/12/2024

Finally home from re:Invent! Long journey, but me, Sam and Tim all made it back in one piece.

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 03/12/2024

Thank you @antstack.com for the thoughtful gift! It's just what I needed 😀

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 02/12/2024

Keeping my Tim Tam (thanks @nickt.com.au) in the safe so I don't forget to take my passport with me!

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 29/11/2024

Ok, looks like I will see you guys in Manchester next year 👋 www.serverlessdaysmanchester.com

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 28/11/2024

4 soundtracks to get to know me

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 28/11/2024

I wonder how many people are moving away from Terraform not because of the license change itself but the uncertainty of it 🤔

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 27/11/2024

But with the S3 failure destination, you can use Athena to analyze the S3 files, identify patterns, group failed events by error type and then selectively decide which events to replay.

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 27/11/2024

The new Lambda S3 failure destination is better than you think. Here's why 🧵

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 25/11/2024

I'm releasing the DDD lessons from my upcoming serverless workshop on YouTube, hope you'll like them! If you wanna see how they relate to building EDAs on AWS and get hands-on experience building with serverless, then check out the curriculum: buff.ly/4fEJKit

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 22/11/2024

Has the JS AWS SDK yoyo'd again on whether to leave "removeUndefinedValues: true" as default? I haven't seen this error in a while, and I thought that's the default now. I mean, if your DB can't handle {} why do I need to tell the SDK to remove them? So stupid...

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 21/11/2024

This is a nice upgrade for CloudFront Functions! 🚀 You can now dynamically route requests to different origins (or create new ones) without Lambda@Edge. It is cheaper, faster, and you don't need to deal with all the quirks of Lambda@Edge. aws.amazon.com/about-aws/wh...

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 21/11/2024

preinvent has been so crazy they didn't even have time to announce this little gem! CloudWatch Logs Insights no longer limit you to just 20 log groups (which was a silly limitation anyway) Thanks to @sebastianbille.com and @eliasbrange.bsky.social for sharing this on X.

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 21/11/2024

There are bunch of stuff to look out for though:

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 20/11/2024

Ok, this is kinda cool, a new managed CloudFormation hook that lets you run validation logic with Lambda. You can choose when the hook runs, based on resource type, name, deployment action, stack name, etc. Official announcement: aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops...

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 20/11/2024

"Elasticity" is as much about scaling down as scaling up. I don't think there was ever the narrative that you can only scale with the cloud. If you run on-prem, you can just stack more servers. We all knew and understood that. What the cloud gives you and where it adds a lot of value is: 🧵

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 20/11/2024

AWS has introduced a way to centrally block ingress & egress traffic at the VPC level. But I'm not sure if this does anything for Lambda users. 🤔 Official announcement is here: aws.amazon.com/blogs/networ...

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 17/11/2024

If you're new here and are looking for the accounts you followed on Twitter, this Chrome extension will help you find them. chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sky-f...

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 16/11/2024

QUIZ: if the target function is constantly throttled, how much (as in time) retry do you get with SNS, EventBridge vs. direct async invocation? A: 6 hours B: Depends on the event source

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 16/11/2024

Giving the new IAM root account management stuff a go. It's pretty neat!

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 14/11/2024

However, this is not true for async invocations. The Event Invoke Frontend service accepts the request and passes it onto an internal queue. Concurrency limits are not checked at this point and are instead applied later when the internal poller attempts to invoke the function synchronously.

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 09/11/2024

lol why is my desk so messy? "dynamic workspace", right...

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 06/11/2024

I spent two days with the Booking team in Amsterdam this week, workshopping how to test serverless architectures. They are a lovely bunch. I met some really smart people there, who were all very kind and welcoming. And they have a gorgeous office! This view is simply stunning!

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 06/11/2024

This is the perfect case study for why startups should start with serverless. I spoke with Hieu Do to find out how he built a hotel booking system for $0.82/month and his cost-cutting tips! www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2wp...

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 23/02/2024

Are you stuck with having multiple IaC tools in your stack? Platform teams often prefer Terraform but feature teams want the likes of AWS SAM, CDK or the Serverless Framework. How do you exchange information between them? How do feature teams discover ARNs of resources created by Terraform?

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