Off-by-none: Issue #285

June 25, 2024

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

The State of Cloud Costs 🤓

In our previous issue, S3 started detecting malware, Serverless Framework V4 went GA, and someone got another big serverless bill. This week, OpenAI acquires Rockset, Claude 3.5 Sonnet makes its way to Amazon Bedrock, and Datadog studies cloud costs. Plus, we have plenty of serverless content from our amazing community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Some very interesting news this week (and likely alarming for every other AI company out there) is that OpenAI acquired Rockset. The logical assumption is that OpenAI will use Rockset's data engine to enhance their RAG capabilities (probably by connecting to customer's data), continuing to eliminate entire classes of AI startups that likely shouldn't have existed in the first place.

In AWS news, Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet model is now available in Amazon Bedrock. This model is extremely powerful and comes in at one-fifth the cost of Claude 3 Opus. Also, Amazon Bedrock now supports compressed embeddings from Cohere Embed and Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock now offers observability logs.

Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports JSON Web Token (JWT) authentication, which will simplify a lot of use cases, plus AWS Billing and Cost Management now provides Data Exports for Cost Optimization Hub, giving companies the ability to visualize and potentially automate these recommendations.

In other database news, Fauna announced the Open Beta of Fauna Schema, a "comprehensive suite of tools that enables development teams to define, manage, progressively type, enforce, and evolve their database schema to meet changing business needs." Sound cool.

And finally, Datadog released their State of Cloud Costs report. Some facts are more interesting than others, but it did find that "more than 80 percent of container spend is wasted on idle resources." I mean, nobody said containers were going to fix the over-provisioning problem, right? 🤷‍♂️

Serverless Concepts 🏗

There were lots of great articles this week that should help expand your serverless knowledge:

• Essential AWS Lambda Interview Questions. by Vikas Taank
• My Top Dev Tools for Cloud Development in 2024! by Kisan Tamang
• My Flow and Productivity has Improved with the Simplicity of Neovim by Benjamen Pyle
• Spring Boot 3 application on AWS Lambda - Part 8 Introduction to Spring Cloud Function by Vadym Kazulkin
• Serverless Architectures With Java by Zeki Jusufoski
• Mastering AWS Lambda: 5 Essential Design Patterns for Developers by Ashan Fernando
• Amazon CloudFormation Custom Resources Best Practices with CDK and Python Examples by Ran Isenberg

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here are some useful tutorials for you:

• Kinesis Data Stream Enhance Fanout with CDK — Part 2 by Abhishant Prakash
• EventDriven with NoSQL: connecting AWS EventBridge and MongoAtlas by Williams O
• Mastering Blue-Green Deployments with AWS Lambda for Zero-Downtime Releases by Jorge Freitas
• Mitigating Fake Account SignUp Spambot Attack on a Microservice Serverless by Vin Busquet
• DynamoDB to Redshift using AWS Glue ETL by Tania Banerjee

Serverless Reads 🤓

Is The Serverless Fairytale Over?
Sheen Brisals recounts the history of serverless, where it is now, and where it's going. The technology landscape is constantly evolving, which means we'll continue to see exciting new things. But as Sheen says, the Serverless Fairytale is far from over.

From Vercel to Monolith, improving API speeds
Titouan Launay discusses why his team moved a particular workload from Vercel's serverless offering to AWS ECS. I don't believe this a "serverless issue", but rather the perils of choosing a one-size-fits-all implementation in the first place.

I Will F**king Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again
I too have been highly skeptical of adding AI to everything just because we can (or feel as though the hype demands it), but Nikhil Suresh's post is much bolder and brilliantly refreshing. I'm not anti-AI (there are plenty of great use cases out there), but as Nikhil points out, yours probably isn't one of them. #mustread

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Serverless Craic Ep55 Unveiling The Secrets Behind The Value Flywheel Effect
The Serverless Craic team discuss why they wrote the book, plus the benefits of modernizing engineering practices, prioritizing meaningful outcomes, and providing insights on change leadership and decision-making techniques.

Integrating time-series databases | Serverless Office Hours
Balwanth Bobilli and Jatin Singla join Julian Wood to show how Amazon Timestream for LiveAnalytics can process trillions of time series data points per day, scale limitlessly, and provide storage tiering, all accessible using its purpose-built query engine.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some other AWS announcements that you might find interesting:

• Amazon now offers a capability to analyze issues and recommend granular tasks
• Amazon MWAA now supports Custom Web Server URLs
• Default Role in CodeCatalyst Environments
• AWS Glue adds additional 13 new transforms including flag duplicates
• AWS CodeArtifact now supports Cargo, the Rust package manager
• Amazon Redshift Query Editor V2 now supports 100MB file uploads
• AWS Billing and Cost Management now provides Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0 (Preview)
• Amazon CodeCatalyst now supports GitHub Cloud and Bitbucket Cloud with Amazon Q
• CodeCatalyst allows customers to use Amazon Q Developer to choose a blueprint
• Amazon CodeCatalyst now offers the ability to link issues

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

Some interesting Saturday afternoon back of the napkin math (well, interesting to me anyway). If you have background tasks that run for more than 10 seconds on Lambda Functions, it actually starts to become cheaper to run them on Fargate instead (even with the 1-minute minimum… pic.twitter.com/1QidzRdbFZ

— Jeremy Daly (@jeremy_daly) June 22, 2024

Speaking of cloud costs, I shared some thoughts on using Fargate versus Lambda for running serverless background tasks on AWS. It's surprising how fast Lambda functions can become the less preferable option.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

August 31, 2024 - ServerlessDays Bengaluru 2024

Please send me your serverless events!

Star of the Week ⭐️

This week's star is Kisan Tamang (@kisanpakhreen). Kisan is an AWS Community Builder, creator of the TowardsAWS community, and publisher of The Cloud Handbook on Substack. Thank you Kisan for continuing to amplify developer voices and help educate serverless and cloud builders!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Another week in the books. I somehow remain simultaneously fascinated, annoyed, hopeful, and terrified by the continued AI hype. After talking to a bunch of developers at some recent conferences and reading a few brilliant pieces on the subject, I've realized that I'm not the only one. It'll be interesting to see where we are in a year. That goes for serverless too.

Until next week,
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.