· Ala Shiban · 4 min read
Newsletter issue #3
Klotho is an open source tool enabling adaptive cloud applications through Architecture-from-Code and intelligent code transformations
AWS re:Invent ended last week and there were a slew of exciting announcements. Here are some of the ones we liked and impressions from others:
Introducing AWS Application Composer (Preview)
Arguably the “fanciest” announcement, coming from an acquisition AWS made a couple of years ago. It’s a WYSIWYG editor for infra, where you can you can drag, drop, and connect AWS services into an application architecture by using AWS Application Composer’s browser-based visual canvas.
We’ll see how this will be used with real applications, especially transitioning from the visual editor to code / infra definitions and back. Werner Vogels did mention VB6 in the same breath, and while that reference might be lost on 70% of the audience for being too young, we’re all eyes ? to see how this fits into the ecosystem. (Brainboard’s life just became a bit harder)
Java Lambda SnapStart
Java functions can start up to 10x faster, at no extra cost. The idea here is similar to how Windows Hibernate used to work, taking a snapshot of the already-booted function, and caching that for the next cold boots. Managed languages are ones that struggled with cold-boots due to the heavier runtimes being loaded.
New AWS Glue 4.0 – Engines, Data Formats and More
We spent spend time with engineering leads around the Glue team, and there’s a general sense that Glue is saturating the audience it initially targeted and thought there were more of. This puts the pressure on the team to either move into incremental product cycles or find workloads that would attract more users but dilute the product focus.
One of the markers of a Serverless service was it’s on-demand billing aspect. AWS is starting to get liberal with what Serverless means. They announced a new Preview: Amazon OpenSearch Serverless which provisions a “minimal” 4 OCUs that will begin billing from the get-go, which doesn’t feel quite Serverless-y.
Also look at Amazon CodeCatalyst, Amazon Inspector Now Scans AWS Lambda Functions, Step Functions Distributed Map,
re:Invent had little to no distancing or mark requirements at re:Invent (unlike Kubecon), which lead to a significant uptick in infections. You know it’s happening when there are Reddit threads about it. We were also impacted, but the team has recovered since.
Klotho Updates
Worldwide Software Architecture Summit
Our co-founder Aaron Torres gave a talk about Adaptive architectures in the Software Architecture Summit. It’s now available on Youtube:
DevTalks - Week Wrap-up 11/12/2022 - Klotho
This week the team walks through the new Python persist capability, one that allows developers to mark ORMs, file system objects or Redis clients as persistent and Klotho will generate and wire the cloud infrastructure to the application code. This brings Python closer to full parity with JavaScript.
We have a new tutorial that demonstrates how to create a Python REST API with FastAPI and use Klotho to transform it into a cloud-native application. You’ll have it up and running in less than 7 minutes.
Overhauled Getting Started Flow - Try it out!
You can now get started way faster. We’re now on brew on the Mac, and pushed out the more informational bits and pieces to after you create your first Klotho-powered application.
We’ve made the Klotho web site a tad prettier, and emphasized new capabilities. We have a cool new animation on the front page too. Check it out!
Notes for next time
We never got around to this one - We’re publishing a blog post covering new projects in the cloud space. In the meantime check out Encore, Functionless, WingLang and Ampt!
We’re happy to take questions both on our Discord server and Twitter!
