Off-by-none: Issue #288

July 16, 2024

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Jumping the GenAI shark? 🦈

In our previous issue, Amazon Q Developer took over your IDE, some folks are launching a site to make it easier to get started with AWS, and Girls in Tech shut down after 17 years. This week, AWS has another GenAI-heavy summit, App Studio promises enterprise-grade applications without software development skills, and AWS faces some backlash from developers. Plus, we have plenty of serverless content from our amazing community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

I'm writing this newsletter from an undisclosed location at a secret meeting of the council of AWS Heroes. So, yes, we're in Seattle. 😉 But seriously, there are 180 AWS Heroes from around the world here and it is amazing.

Last week there were several announcements from the AWS Summit in New York. Yes, it was almost 100% GenAI focused (more on this in a bit), but some of those things are quite intriguing.

The Agents for Amazon Bedrock now support code interpretation (Preview) and retain memory (Preview) announcements seem pretty cool. More on the official blog post, but this is something that can supercharge agents.

They also made Amazon Q Apps and Vector search for Amazon MemoryDB generally available.

Other AI related DevEx announcements include IDE workspace context awareness in Q Developer chat, the ability to Customize Amazon Q Developer code recommendations, and receive chat responses in the IDE (Preview), and Chatting about your AWS resources is now generally available for Amazon Q Developer.

The announcements that really caught my eye were Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock can now detect hallucinations & safeguard apps using any FM, Amazon Bedrock Prompt Management and Prompt Flows now available in preview, and of course, the announcement of AWS App Studio preview. I have more thoughts to gather on that last one, but I need to spend some more time with it.

Finally, in non-GenAI news, Amazon OpenSearch Serverless levels up speed and efficiency with smart caching. Nice.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

• Amazon Event Bridge by Bharathvajan G
• Building Scalable Systems with AWS: Fan-Out Architecture Using SQS, SNS, Lambda, and CDK by Răileanu Alex
• 7 practices I learned while developing applications with API Gateway service integrations by Arpad Toth
• The Many Facets of Coupling by Gregor Hohpe

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here are some great tutorials from this past week:

• A Short Guide in Using Lambda@Edge to Password-Protect Your Development and Staging Environments by Ike Gabriel Yuson
• How to right use maxage, s-maxage, and stale-if-error headers?
• Step Toward Better Tenant Provisioning by Jason Wadsworth
• Building and Integrating Lambda Layers with Serverless API by Ahmed Salem
• AWS SAM CLI: Speed up Development with this configuration by Williams O
• How to create, publish and use layers for Java 21 Lambda functions by Vadym Kazulkin
• Event Driven Architecture using Amazon EventBridge – Part 2 by Saurabh Sharma and Jordan Rosenbloom

Serverless Reads 🤓

Dear AWS, please let me be a cloud engineer again
Luc van Donkersgoed shares his frustrations over AWS's seemingly exclusive focus on GenAI over the last year+. Of course AWS has released a number of non-GenAI things lately, but this post deeply resonates with me. It feels like AWS's obsession with GenAI is a major overcorrection that's starting to backfire with its most loyal and ardent supporters.

Amazon GenAI Services
Luc isn't the only one. Corey Quinn's review of the AWS Summit New York is a no holds barred rebuke of AWS's GenAI focus. This goes beyond Corey's typical snark and actually says the thing everyone is thinking.

Why are Hosting services overpriced?
Not sure you'll learn anything particularly new, but this sentiment is popular out in the wild. Serverless advocates have some work to do.

DevRel's Death as Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon
Shawn "swyx" Wang shares some interesting thoughts on the state of Developer Relations since the "free money" dried up and tech companies needed to start focussing on the bottom line.

Could AI be a bubble?
Yes. Sam Klebanov shares some thoughts on the fact that tech companies will need to generate $600 billion per year to justify the current level of investment in AI. Good luck with that.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Serverless Craic Ep58 - The Value Flywheel Effect Chapter 2.2
The Serverless Craic team continues their discussion on facilitating effective collaborative mapping workshops and creating Wardley maps for strategic planning.

AWS Bites #127 - Which Load Balancer should you use?
Eoin and Luciano give a great overview of load balancers and explain how they distribute traffic across multiple servers and provide high availability.

Building REST APIs developers love
Kevin Swiber from Postman shares all you need to know about building effective REST APIs with an unbeatable developer experience.

Build Request/Response integrations in an asynchronous world
James Eastham explains how you can use asynchronous, event-driven communication when integrating two services together, rather than the classic Request/Response model.

Faster Fargate container image launching | Serverless Office Hours
Olly Pomeroy joins Maish Saidel-Keesing to deep dive into AWS's open source Seekable OCI (SOCI) and how it helps applications scale out quickly and reduces update roll out times.

How to Handle DynamoDB Race Conditions?
Helpful video for understanding how to deal with race condition issues when working with high throughput data events in DynamoDB.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are several more AWS announcements that you might find interesting:

• Amazon EventBridge Schema Registry now supports AWS PrivateLink VPC endpoints
• AWS Secrets Manager announces open source release of Secrets Manager Agent
• Amazon ECS now enforces software version consistency for containerized applications
• Amazon OpenSearch Serverless expands support for time-series workloads up to 30TB
• Amazon OpenSearch Service announces Natural Language Query Generation for log analysis
• Fine-tuning for Anthropic's Claude 3 Haiku in Amazon Bedrock (Preview)
• Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock now supports additional data sources (preview)
• Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock now supports advanced RAG capabilities
• AWS Security Hub launches 24 new security controls

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

August 31, 2024 - ServerlessDays Bengaluru 2024

September 20, 2024 - ServerlessDays Lima

October 10, 2024 - ServerlessDays Cardiff

February 20, 2025 - ServerlessDays Manchester 2025

Please send me your serverless events!

Star of the Week ⭐️

This week's star is Luc Van Donkersgoed (@donkersgood). Luc is an AWS Serverless Hero, Principal Engineer at PostNL, and recipient of AWS's "Now Go Build" award. He's also building aws-news.com on the side to help people digest the unrelenting firehose of AWS news and announcements. Not only has Luc been speaking at several conferences this year sharing his passion for serverless, but his recent post about AWS's GenAI hype was an important step in letting others know they aren't alone and can start saying the quiet part out loud. Thanks for everything you do, Luc!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I was planning on keeping the newsletter short this week. If I had more time I would have. Now back to the Heroes Summit. 🙂

See you 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.