Author Spotlight: Luca Mezzalira, Principal Serverless Specialist Solutions Architect

[Amazon Web Services]

The Author Spotlight series pulls back the curtain on some of AWS’s most prolific authors. Read on to find out more about our very own Luca Mezzalira’s journey, in his own words!

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My name is Luca, and I’m a Principal Serverless Specialist Solutions Architect—probably the longest job title I’ve ever had in my 20-year career in the tech industry. One thing you have to know about me upfront: I love challenges. I tread an unconventional path, on which I found several hurdles, but, after a few years, I grew to love them.

Since I joined Amazon Web Services (AWS) in January 2021, I discovered (and continue to discover) all the challenges I’ve always dreamed of. I can also find solutions for customers, industries, and communities—what better place is there for a challenge-hunter like me!

I am self-taught. I learned my foundational skills from the developer communities I joined out of a thirst for knowledge. Fast-forward 20 years later, I still try to pay my “debt” to them by sharing what I learn and do on a regular basis.

Luca Mezzalira during the opening talk at JS Poland 2022

AWS gave me the opportunity to first help our Media & Entertainment industry customers in the UK and Ireland and, now, to follow my passion working as a Serverless Specialist.

“Passionate” is another word that characterizes me, both personally and professionally: I’m Italian and there is a lot of passion under our skin. I don’t consider what I do a job but, rather, something I just love to do.

During these past couple of years with AWS, I have been able to use all 360° of my knowledge. With customers experimenting with new ideas and solutions, with colleagues urging customers outside their comfort zone and onto new horizons or into new adventures with AWS, I am blurring the edges of different worlds. With each passing day, I provide new perspectives for solving existing challenges! With internal and external communities, I support and organize events for spreading our ever-growing knowledge and creating new, meaningful connections.

Another great passion of mine is software architecture. Design patterns, distributed systems, team topology, domain-driven design, and any topic related to software architecture is what I deeply love. Do you know why? Because there isn’t right or wrong in architecture—it’s just trade-offs! The challenge is to find the least-worse decision for making a project successful.

Moreover, architectures are like living organisms. They evolve, requiring care and attention. Many might think that architecting is only a technical concern, but it is deeply connected with the organizational structure, as well the communication and engineering practices. When we acknowledge these aspects and work across these dimensions, the role of an architect is one of the best you can have—or at least it is for me!

What’s on my mind

There are two main topics I am focusing on at the moment: (1) distributed architecture on the frontend (i.e., micro-frontends); and (2) educating our builders on thinking in patterns, choosing the right solution to implement at the right moment.

In both cases, I create a lot of content trying to bridge the gap between the technical implementation and the architecture characteristics a company wants to optimize for.

My favorite blog posts

Developing evolutionary architecture with AWS Lambda

The first contribution I wanted to provide in AWS was without any doubt architectural. Hexagonal architecture (or ports and adapters) is not a new topic by any stretch, however, I wasn’t able to find solid resources with a simplified explanation of this approach. Once in place, hexagonal architectures can help the portability of your business logic across different AWS services or even on a hybrid-cloud. Using this architecture on Lambda functions has generated a lot of interest inside the serverless community.

If you want to know more, I leave you to the re:Invent talk I delivered in 2021.

Let’s Architect!

The second resource I am extremely proud of is a collaboration with AWS’s Zamira Jaupaj, Laura Hyatt, and Vittorio Denti… the Let’s Architect! team.

I met them in my first year in AWS, and they share a similar passion for helping people and community engagement. Moreover, we all want to learn something new.
Together, we created Let’s Architect!, a blog series that publishes a fortnightly post on a specific topic since January 2022. For example, serverless, containers, or data architectures are explored, gathering four different AWS content pieces that provide an architect’s perspective on why that content is relevant (or still relevant).

This initiative has had a strong influence, and we now have customers and even many of our colleagues awaiting our upcoming posts. If you want to discover more, check out the AWS Architecture Blog.

Let’s Architect!

Server-Side Rendering Micro-Frontends in AWS

The last resource is part of my dream to lead the frontend community in their discovery of AWS services.

The frontend community is exposed to a lot of new frameworks and libraries, however, I believe they should look to the cloud as well, as they can unlock a variety of new possibilities.

Considering my expertise on micro-frontends and serverless, I started with a reference architecture to build distributed frontend using serverless. I recently started a new series on the AWS Compute Blog explaining the reasoning behind this reference architecture and how to approach server-side rendering micro-frontends using serverless. Read my first post on server-side rendering micro-frontends.

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