Off-by-none: Issue #284

June 18, 2024

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The Cost of Serverless 💰

In our previous issue, API Gateway increased its timeout, CloudWatch welcomed AI, and Amazon OpenSearch Serverless got a price cut. This week, S3 detects malware, Serverless Framework V4 goes GA, and linear scaling serverless strikes again. Plus, we have lots of great content from the serverless community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

There is a lot of serverless news to get to this week! Starting with AWS, you can now detect malware in new object uploads to Amazon S3 with Amazon GuardDuty (read more here), which is pretty cool, Amazon Bedrock is now available in the (London), (São Paulo), and Canada (Central) regions, and for you CDK folks, Release v2.146.0 is now available.

Amazon SES now provides custom values in the Feedback-ID header and now publishes email sending events to EventBridge. I like to see the continued investments in primitives like this. These new features lay the foundation for others to build better products on top of them.

Also, thank goodness for people like David Behroozi who discovered a Coldstart Performance/Bundle Size Regression in v3.577.0 of the AWS SDK for JavaScript.

There were some other interesting announcements as well. htmx 2.0.0 has been released, MotherDuck is now Generally Availability, and Databricks says it's going fully serverless.

The Serverless Framework V4 is also now Generally Available. New features include native Typescript & build support, a revamped Dev Mode, Terraform integration, and much more.

Finally, you may have seen this story from Steef-Jan Wiggers: Increased Popularity of Artist Platform Cara Led to Substantial Vercel Functions Expenses. There was also a Medium post: The Dangers of Serverless Hosting: A Cautionary Tale for getting a $96,000 bill. I'll be the first one to say that serverless can get expensive at scale, but it's super important to understand the difference between Vercel's billing model and the actual cost of a well-designed serverless application running on AWS.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Here are a few posts that can level up your serverless knowledge:

• Best practices for accelerating development with serverless blueprints by Ran Isenberg and Shani Adadi Kazaz
• Top 10 common errors I wish I hadn’t made using SQS by Corentin Doue
• Amazon DevOps Guru for the Serverless applications - Part 11 Anomaly detection on SNS (kind of) by Vadym Kazulkin
• Simplified Docker Deployments with AWS App Runner: An Introduction to AWS AppRunner by Ewere Diagboya

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

And some excellent tutorials:

• CDK Nested Stacks — The Why and How by Lee Gilmore
• Building a serverless connected BBQ as SaaS - Part 2 - User Creation by Jimmy Dahlqvist
• Convert an AWS DynamoDB table to global with zero downtime using CloudFormation by Chloe McAree
• Using S3 as a static data API with CloudFront by Gareth Cronin
• Using API Gateway for Generative AI uses cases with LLMs or workloads requiring longer timeouts than 29 seconds by Vivek V
• Mind Boggling Speed when Caching with Momento and Rust by Benjamen Pyle

Serverless Reads 🤓

Generative AI Is Not Going To Build Your Engineering Team For You
Seriously, if you only read one article this entire year, make it this one by Charity Majors.

SST Ditches AWS CDK: Time to Move on to Ion
Kiryl Anoshka kind of explains why CDK is problematic. Not sure Pulumi solves the larger issue at hand, but context is important.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Learn Serverless with Educloud Academy | Serverless Office Hours
AWS Serverless Hero, Rosius Ndimofor, joins Julian Wood to show how Educloud Academy is teaching cloud computing at scale for beginners and experienced developers.

Journey to the Cloud | Working in the cloud ☁️
Anastasia Kontratieva, Paul Chin Jr., and Danielle Heberling share their personal and professional journeys in cloud development and site reliability engineering (SRE).

AWS Bites #125: A first look at CloudFront Hosting Toolkit
Eoin and Luciano discuss the newly announced CloudFront Hosting Toolkit including the current capabilities and limitations and share their hands-on experiences trying it out.

Evolutionary Serverless: what the @#% is Clean, Hexagonal, and Onion Archit
Lee Gilmore walks you through what evolutionary architecture is and why we need it with serverless and cloud native solutions.

Deep dive into the LLRT runtime for Lambda
Richard Davison talks about this experimental lightweight Javascript runtime that has gotten a lot of hype recently and has a lot of promise for the future.

New from AWS 🆕

And here are a few more interesting announcements from AWS:

• AWS IAM Access Analyzer now offers policy checks for public and critical resource access
• Amazon CodeCatalyst now supports managing billing and access with a single AWS account
• Amazon ElastiCache Serverless now supports snapshot and restore for Memcached
• AWS CloudTrail Lake announces AI-powered natural language query generation (preview)
• Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion adds support for customer managed VPC interface endpoints
• AWS Identity and Access Management now supports passkey as a second authentication factor
• Amazon OpenSearch Serverless now supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

That Apple is giving away all AI/LLM features for free for all Apple users is a major milestone.

Consumers will expect to get GenAI features for free. Close to a billion of them (ones on Apple) will experience exactly this.

Making B2C AI revenue will get a lot harder!

— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) June 12, 2024

I have been trying to articulate a similar point, but Gergely hits the nail on the head here. Same thing happened with these PaaS and DevTool startups. You can only run on loss leaders and negative margins for so long. By then, the expectation is already set. 🤷‍♂️

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

August 31, 2024 - ServerlessDays Bengaluru 2024

Please send me your serverless events!

Star of the Week ⭐️

This week's star is Eric Johnson (@edjgeek). I've known Eric for a long time now, and he is honestly one of my favorite people. He's not only one of the best serverless advocates out there, but every time I see him speak I'm reminded of how much he loves the serverless community and the folks that are part of it. His enthusiasm is infectious, and whenever we connect, I walk away even more motivated. Thank you Eric for being an amazing human and a serverless inspiration to all.

Final Thoughts 🤔

I wanted to thank the organizers, speakers, and sponsors of ServerlessDays Milan. It was incredibly well run and a great opportunity for the serverless community to connect and learn. Looking forward to the next one!

Take care,
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.