Off-by-none: Issue #273

April 2, 2024

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Some Serverless Competition 🏁

In our previous issue, Redis' OSS license change got some blowback, AWS updated its Savings Plan return policy, and we learned 5 simple steps for serverless resiliency. This week, Cloudflare continues to raise the serverless bar, CloudFormation gets better visualizations, and we learn how Lambda keeps secrets. Plus, we've got plenty of awesome content from the serverless community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

There were some noteworthy AWS announcements this week, including AWS CloudFormation Console introducing support visualization of stacks in Application Composer. I really like this as a learning tool, because if you've ever tried grokking a large CloudFormation template, you know how easily it can make your brain hurt.

Also, ElastiCache Serverless added more controls for scaling (still doesn't make it serverless), Amazon EventBridge announced an improved Learn page and other console enhancements (there are definitely some handy new features), and Amazon DynamoDB Import from S3 now supports up to 50,000 Amazon S3 objects in a single bulk import.

AWS Cost Allocation Tags now support retroactive application, meaning that as long as you have added tags to specific resources in the past, you can enable and disable cost allocation tags with historical usage for 12 months. This was a much-needed feature, especially since cost control is top of mind.

And, AWS announced increased default quotas for CloudWatch Logs APIs, so you can ingest your expensive logs even faster! 😉

There were plenty of serverless announcements from AWS in Q1, so here's their Serverless ICYMI Q1 2024 roundup if you need to catch up.

In other cloud news, it's Developer Week 2024 at Cloudflare, and they're coming out strong with the GA releases of D1, Hyperdrive, Queues, and Workers Analytics Engine. I like how Cloudflare keeps pushing on all this. I love AWS, but real competition is good for everyone.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Ultimate guide to secrets in Lambda
AJ Stuyvenberg compares Systems Manager, Secrets Manager, Key Management Service, and environment variables for handling secrets in your Lambda functions.

Cloudflare Workers vs AWS Lambda with New Pricing from Cloudflare
Emily Dunenfeld shares an in-depth comparison and breaks down Cloudflare's new pricing. Workers are still quite limited compared to Lambda, but it all depends on what you're trying to do.

Spring Boot 3 application on AWS Lambda - Part 2
Vadym Kazulkin explains AWS Serverless Java Container components like core and framework specific adapters for things like Spring Boot 3.

Optimizing Costs in the Cloud: Embracing a FinOps Mindset
Ran Isenberg share strategies and action items to help you adopt a FinOps mindset for optimizing costs and maximizing efficiency.

How do distributed databases handle secondary indexes? A survey
Alex DeBrie looks at the different ways that distributed databases handle secondary indexes and how they address potential issues when sharding data.

How to Hack (and secure) Serverless Applications
Raphael Jambalos shares six common types of attacks on serverless applications and how to mitigate them.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Serverless Integration Layer & Domain Adapters - Part 1 & Part 2
Lee Gilmore shares the first two parts of his series on building a Serverless Integration Layer & Domain Adapters. Very cool stuff.

And here are some more really interesting tutorials:

• Afraid of outgrowing AWS Rekognition? Try YOLO in Lambda. by Michal Šimon
• Building a Todo List API with AWS CDK: A Step-by-Step Guide by Yaroslav Kharchenko
• Using YAML anchors and aliases in a SAM template by Andres Moreno
• Using Step Functions to handle feature flags by Arpad Toth
• Automate AWS Cost & Usage report using Event Bridge, Lambda, SES, S3 & AWS Cost Explorer API by Girish B.
• AWS Cognito for Bedrock Storyteller running on Containerized Lambda Function with Web Adapter by Omar Omar
• Streamlining Event-Driven Architecture Documentation with Event Catalog: A Step-by-Step Guide by Daniel Castillo
• An Image-To-Speech Pipeline For A Visual Assistant by Itsuki

Serverless Reads 🤓

The Curious Case Of QA In A Serverless Team
"If the traditional QA approach was to find bugs, the modern approach is to prevent bugs." Sheen Brisals shares another insightful piece about modern cloud engineering.

Infrastructure as Code Is Dead: Long Live Infrastructure from Code
Infrastructure as Code isn't dead, it's just bloated and often unnecessary. Asif Awan share his thoughts on the IfC paradigm (albeit with a bit of bias - but we're all guilty of that 😉).

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

SaaS Orchestration with AWS Step Functions
Brian Rinaldi hosts four excellent lightning talks covering a wide array of uses for Step Functions within a SaaS application.

Ready, Set, Cloud Podcast! S2E5 - Everything you didn’t know about EDA
James Eastham chats with Allen Helton about all things EDA, including what to put in your events, how EDA compares to request/response architectures, observability, and more.

The Current State of Serverless with Kristi Perreault
Kristi Perreault joined Corey Quinn to discuss the current state of serverless, how AI and serverless fit in the next era of tech, and why serverless is not always the right solution.

Run a long execution job with no hassle and for free with Step Functions
Marcia Villalba gives a hands-on demonstration of the sync integration pattern within AWS Step Functions and shows you how to execute long-running tasks without incurring additional costs during the wait time.

Lambda low latency runtime | Serverless Office Hours
Creator of the Lambda low latency runtime (LLRT), Richard Davison, joins Julian Wood to show how LLRT offers up to over 10x faster startup and up to 2x overall lower cost compared to other JavaScript runtimes running on Lambda.

Ampt Live: Migrating Next.js to AWS with Ampt
I show you how to migrate your Next.js projects to AWS with built-in support for App Router, React Server Components, Streaming, and Suspense. We use Ampt to automate the entire process with a few simple CLI commands.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some other AWS announcements that might interest you. The Knowledge Bases stuff is getting really cool:

• AWS Global Accelerator extends bring your own IP address (BYOIP) to enable sharing IP space across accounts
• AWS Billing and Cost Management Data Exports now supports AWS CloudFormation
• Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock now supports Claude 3 Sonnet
• Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock now supports private network policies for OpenSearch Serverless
• Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock now lets you customize prompts and number of retrieval results
• Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock now supports metadata filtering
• Amazon EventBridge announces Confluent Cloud integration in the AWS console
• Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports Single-AZ Read Replica
• Amazon Transcribe launches Spanish language support for PII identification and redaction
• Well-Architected adds 4 new lenses to the Lens Catalog
• AWS CodeBuild now supports GitLab and GitLab Self Managed

Serverless Tools 🛠

Open-source Serverless Certificate Authority
Terraform module for Certificate Authority on AWS.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

April 13, 2024 - Serverless Conf – Blumenau 2024

May 21, 2024 - ServerlessDays ANZ - Sydney, AU

May 23, 2024 - ServerlessDays Belfast 🗣️

May 24, 2024 - ServerlessDays ANZ - Auckland, NZ

June 13, 2024 - ServerlessDays Milano 2024 🗣️

Please send me your serverless events!

Star of the Week ⭐️

This week's star is Matteo Depascale (@DepascaleMatteo). Matteo is a cloud architect at Storm Reply and an AWS Community Builder. Matteo has shared a ton of great blog posts on building serverless apps on AWS that cover a variety of topics and services. Thank you, Matteo, for sharing your knowledge with the community!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Happy April, everyone! It was a busy Q1, and it's going to get even busier in Q2. I'll be speaking on a panel at Pluralsight Connect24: Boston next week, and I'll also be speaking at ServerlessDays Belfast in May. 🙌

Also, stay tuned, because Off-by-none is launching something new on Thursday that should be both fun AND informative. 👀

See you then,
Jeremy

I hope you enjoyed this newsletter. We’re always looking for ideas and feedback to make it better and more inclusive, so please feel free to reach out to me via X, LinkedIn, or email.