Off-by-none: Issue #228

April 4, 2023

Only have a few minutes? Check out this week's MOST POPULAR links as chosen by our email subscribers.

Lattice not worry about networking 🌐

(Sorry for the terrible pun 🙃)

In our previous issue, SAM enabled “skip infra sync”, Momento introduced Topics, and we discussed the future value of CS degrees. This week, Amazon VPC Lattice goes GA, Cloudflare workers get more “nodey”, and SSM Parameter Store still reigns supreme. Plus, we’ve got a whole bunch of awesome content from the serverless community.

Help us shape the future of edge functions by taking the State of Edge Functions Survey. SPONSORED

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Lots of interesting news from AWS this week! Though not specifically serverless focused, AWS announced the general availability of Amazon VPC Lattice, their network service that was designed to simplify connecting, securing, and monitoring service-to-service communication. As Danilo Poccia points out in his post, there are lots of new useful features like custom domain names and the ability to use NLBs or ALBs.

AWS also announced that Amazon EventBridge Scheduler is now available in 18 additional regions, AWS Toolkits for JetBrains and VS Code now support AWS SAM Accelerate to speed up application iteration, and Amazon CloudFront now supports HTTP status and response generation using CloudFront Functions.

Plus, Amazon SNS launched the Extended Client Library for Python to support payloads up to 2GB. This automatically takes large payloads and puts them in S3 for you. This has become a standard practice, so it’s nice to see an official solution for it.

In other cloud news, additional Node.js compatibility has been added to Cloudflare Workers, Version 4 of the Node.js programming model for Azure Functions is in preview, Vercel added streaming for Serverless Node.js and Edge Runtimes, Google announced new ways to run AlloyDB and BigQuery, and MariaDB added auto-scaling and serverless analytics to its cloud database-as-a-service.

Also, my startup announced that Cloud Pioneer Adrian Cockcroft has joined Ampt’s Board of Advisors, plus Filip Pýrek announced Awengers, a new Discord Community for AWS-disrupting startup teams.

And finally, don’t forget to say Happy 5th Birthday to Lumigo!

Serverless Concepts 🏗

The Solution Architect’s Guide to Serverless
Allen Helton attempts to set the record straight for some of the major serverless myths out there and outlines a few best practices to consider when transitioning to serverless.

Observability as a Software Development Tool
Steve Coochin explains how observability can become a game-changing software development tool and why monitoring, tracing, and logging is so important in modern applications.

The Old Faithful: Why SSM Parameter Store still reigns over Secrets Manager
Yan Cui makes a compelling case as to why SSM Parameter Store continues to hold its ground as the go-to secrets management solution for serverless apps.

Five Ways to Deal With AWS DynamoDB GSI Throttling
Vlad Holubiev shares a number of effective strategies to optimize performance and maintain seamless operations of your DynamoDB tables.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Serverless deployment process
Thiwanka Wickramage breaks down the steps and practices his team used to provide seamless serverless application rollouts to multiple stages.

Build a Serverless Gym App with ChatGPT, Twilio and WhatsApp
Labourdy Mohamed shows us how to build a powerful serverless gym app that sends a workout plan to your WhatsApp number using ChatGPT.

A new simple approach to diagram as code on AWS with CDK and D2
This is pretty cool. Gernot Glawe teaches us a new approach to Diagram-as-Code using CDK and D2. Love the idea of polling CloudFormation for the deployment status of the resource and only showing resources that are being created or have been created.

Cross-Origin Whitelist with API Gateway
Benjamen Pyle shows you how to use a Lambda Function to manage a whitelist of domains and returns of the necessary CORS headers.

Cross-Account AWS SAM Deployment
Navigate cross-account AWS SAM deployments like a pro with this informative guide by Afraz Khan.

AWS Lambda Cookbook - Elevate your Handler’s Code - Part 4 - Environment Variables
In part 4 of his series, Ran Isenberg discusses environment variables and shares some practical tips and tricks to optimize your serverless app configuration.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Ranking AWS Lambda Runtimes with ChatGPT 4
I really do like ChatGPT’s ability to parse, organize, and even visualize data for you. Davo Galavotti did this with Lambda runtime performance data.

Improving our dead-letter queues
Tom Collins shares some of the hard lessons learned about dead letter retention limits and alarm configurations.

Zero to Serverless Car Insurance – Part 1
Matthew Wilson shares how his team built with serverless on AWS and how “The Lambdalith” approach affected some of their design decisions.

How personalization crashed BBC iPlayer at the height of lockdown, and how it was fixed
Interesting story about how the BBC team optimized DynamoDB to handle personalization at massive scale.

AWS Lambda: Lessons learned over 5 years and 100 functions in production
Andrea Falzetti shares his team’s experience with AWS Lambda including the Good, the Bad, and some recommendations.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

DynamoDB under the hood – How does it works? What is the architecture of the database service?
Marcia Villalba is joined by Somu Perianayagam and Akshat Vig, two principal engineers that built DynamoDB, to discuss the details of how DynamoDB works.

New from AWS 🆕

The good folks at AWS have been very busy:

• Announcing the ACK Controllers for Amazon EventBridge and Pipes
• AWS Service Catalog announces support for Terraform open source
• Amazon Simple Email Service now detects gaps in BIMI configuration
• Amazon ElastiCache for Redis simplifies creating new clusters in the AWS Management Console
• AWS WAF is now available in the Zurich, Spain, Hyderabad, and Melbourne regions
• Announcing policies validations during synthesis time with AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK)
• Amazon Textract announces updates to the AnalyzeDocument – Tables feature
• AWS re:Post now includes AWS Knowledge Center articles
• AWS Well-Architected Tool Announces Consolidated Report and Enhanced Search functionality
• Amazon Textract announces Bulk Document Uploader to test Textract on multiple documents
• Amazon Simple Email Service now supports delivery and engagement graphs
• Amazon Athena adds minimum encryption to enhance query result security

Serverless Tools 🛠

LocalStack v2.0.0
Their second major release with many new features, enhancements, and improved parity for more extensive integration across the AWS tooling ecosystem.

Genezio
“The Coolest Way to Write, Deploy and Use a Serverless API.”

PURISTA
A typescript framework for building backend services and API in a modern, modular and scalable way.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

April 20, 2023 – Serverless.LAB(meetup) #4 – Prague Edition

May 6, 2023 – AWS Community Day Turkey

June 7, 2023 – ServerlessDays Paris

June 22, 2023 – ServerlessDays Zurich

September 21, 2023 – ServerlessDays Cardiff

Serverless Star of the Week ⭐️

This week’s star is AJ Stuyvenberg (@astuyve). AJ is a Senior Software Engineer at Datadog and an AWS Community Builder. His articles and posts have been featured here on Off-by-none as he writes about serverless observability and monitoring. He was recently a guest on Allen Helton’s Ready, Set, Cloud podcast discussing KPIs vs infra metrics and the future of observability. Thank you, AJ, for your continued passion and contributions to the serverless community!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I had another week of actually being able to do some coding, including some very cool work with TailwindCSS and Prism. Looking forward to releasing a few videos in the next couple of weeks as well. Stay tuned for that.

Happy coding,
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 Twitter, LinkedIn, or email.