Off-by-none: Issue #297

September 17, 2024

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The end of #officeless 🏢

In our previous issue, Amazon Bedrock upgraded its Stability AI models, InfluxDB said "no" to AI magic beans, and we got some new heroes. This week, Amazon Q writes SQL, AWS becomes buddy-buddy with Oracle, and WFH says WTF to RTO. Plus, we have a bunch of serverless content from the community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Lots happening over at AWS this past week. Amazon EventBridge Pipes now supports customer managed KMS keys, allowing you to encrypt Pipes filter patterns, enrichment parameters, and target parameters with your own keys.

Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases now supports cross-region inference to better manage traffic bursts. We're seeing continued investment in Amazon Cognito with user pools now offering email as a multi-factor authentication (MFA) option. And they announced the general availability (GA) of Amazon Q generative SQL for Amazon Redshift in a further attempt to make data scientist obsolete. 😉

AWS also announced that Amazon RDS for MySQL zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift is now generally available. This is pretty cool and promises to enable near real-time analytics.

Last week we mentioned the GCP/Oracle partnership. It looks like AWS didn't want to be left out.

In other AWS news, Andy Jassy sent an update informing employees that starting in January, they are required in the office 5 days a week. That, plus the 15% reduction in the manager to IC ratio, prompted some reactions.

Oracle seems to be the belle of the ball lately. Modal Labs, a serverless platform for AI, ML, and data developers, has selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as its provider of choice.

Also, there's good news if you're in the business of trying to relate with developers. 😀 The Linux Foundation announced its intent to form a Developer Relations Foundation to support and unify best practices.

Finally, be sure to check out Lee Gilmore's new Serverless Advocate Newsletter. It's super slick and packed with all kinds of useful links, tips, and more.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

How to accidentally create read-only DynamoDB items
Maurice Borgmeier shares a really interesting DynamoDB behavior that's probably worth knowing about.

Modern Serverless applications on Azure
I don't pay too much attention to Azure, but Stas Lebedenko shares his thoughts on the bigger picture, available frameworks, .NET changes, and platform maturity.

Serverless compute in Databricks
Avin Kohale says that Databricks can be expensive, but also explains how the new serverless option can solve that.

Introduction to true serverless databases
Will the real serverless database please stand up? Kirk Kirkconnell is obviously biased towards Fauna here, but I certainly don't hate his list of must haves.

Never Miss a Beat: Better CloudWatch Alarms on Metrics with Missing Data
Elias Brange shares an excellent post on using math expressions in your metrics to get your alarms right.

Cloudflare Workers vs Cloudflare Functions vs Cloudflare Pages: A Comprehensive Comparison
Ever wonder the difference in these services? Sehban Alam provides a great overview plus a handy comparison chart.

Using search as a primary datastore since the docs said not to Sponsored
I love this little test project that Nicole Tietz created with Typesense. Using Typesense as a primary datastore might not be the best idea, but it's clear that it is an excellent choice for your search use cases. +1 for using htmx. 😉

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here are some recent tutorials that I found useful:

• Reduce ETL Time by Converting Sequential Code to Parallel AWS Lambda Execution by Hafiz Syed Ashir Hassan
• Spring Boot 3 application on AWS Lambda - Part 11 Measuring cold and warm starts of Lambda function using Docker Container Image by Vadym Kazulkin
• AWS lambda layers: Creating a Python layer with custom code and its dependencies for using it in all your Lambda functions by Debora Gomez Bertoli
• Developer guidance on how to do local testing with Amazon MSK Serverless by Simon Peyer
• Batch Process in AWS - An Exercise in Nuance by Matthew Bonig
• Leveraging Lambda@Edge to seamlessly manage frontend maintenance window like a pro by Vimal Paliwal
• Using Private Endpoints as destination in AWS Eventbridge by Prateek Jain
• Scaling community growth with code by Allen Helton
• Fine-grained access control in API Gateway with Cognito access token and scopes by Yan Cui

Serverless Reads 🤓

How to Fix Serverless Vendor Lock-In
Marco Troisi suggests we could make serverless more adoptable if it utilized industry standard interfaces. Interesting thought.

Faster development with Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Q Developer
This seems too good to be true; because it probably is. As others pointed out, natural language will only get you so far if you don't have the required domain expertise for the service you're building for.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Serverless is for everyone
Sheen Brisals discusses the serverless technology landscape, ways to adopt it, and why it sometimes fail. He points out that serverless can be hard if you "don't make engineers architects." I agree with this, but I don't agree that it's the right path for all engineers.

API dev using SmartBear SwaggerHub | Serverless Office Hours
Sean Butler and Matthew Bonner join Julian Wood to talk about how SwaggerHub helps standards and collaboration with OpenAPI and AsyncAPI.

Building real-time apps with Momento
Yan Cui shares a full course on how to use this serverless caching and real-time data platform designed for speed, scalability, and simplicity.

Can you build a full stack Disney princess app with one Lambda function?
Allen Helton and Andres Moreno build a Disney princess quizlet using a single Lambda function, Momento, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

Believe In Serverless Podcast #9: To SQL or NoSQL, that is the question
James Eastham and Khawaja Shams discuss recent highlights in the serverless community.

Ampt Live: Scheduling Recurring, One-Off, and Long-Running Tasks on Ampt
I demonstrate the power of Ampt's task interface to easily define, schedule, and execute tasks on AWS using just your application code.

Serverless Persistence with Cloudflare D1 & Rust
James Eastham shows you how to add persistence to your Cloudflare applications using the D1 database service that Cloudflare provides.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are a few more AWS announcements that you might find interesting:

• Amazon Redshift now supports altering sort keys on tables in zero-ETL integration
• AWS WAF Bot Control Managed Rule expands bot detection capabilities
• Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports OpenSearch version 2.15
• Amazon Redshift Serverless now supports higher base capacity of 1024 Redshift Processing Units
• Amazon QuickSight now supports Direct Query for Google BigQuery connector
• Amazon Redshift now supports enhanced VPC routing warehouses in zero-ETL integration

Thoughts from Social 🐦

After years of using @awscloud Aurora, we are moving back to dedicated hardware. MySQL K8s operators are great, storage is cheap, memory is cheap, cpu is cheap, I can run 5.7 as much as I like and no AI. I'll miss database cloning and instant read replicas. 1/n

— Goran Opacic (@goranopacic) September 15, 2024

Maybe Goran is over-correcting here, but I certainly agree that AWS looks a lot different than it did just a year or so ago. I still love their ecosystem, and I still believe there's plenty of innovation potential, but focus is everything.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

September 20, 2024 - ServerlessDays Lima

September 21, 2024 - ServerlessDays Tokyo

October 10, 2024 - ServerlessDays Cardiff

October 19, 2024 - ServerlessDays São Paulo

December 2-6, 2024 - AWS re:Invent 2024

December 13, 2024 - ServerlessDays Rome

February 20, 2025 - ServerlessDays Manchester 2025

Please send me your serverless events!

Star of the Week ⭐️

This week's star is Chris Munns (@chrismunns). Up until a few days ago, Chris was the Tech Lead/Advisor for AWS Startups Solution Architects at AWS. Prior to that, he was the Senior Manager/Principal Developer Advocate for Serverless that built and led the Developer Advocacy team focused on the Serverless ecosystem at AWS. It's hard to quantify Chris' contribution to the growth of serverless and the serverless community. Whether it was through the content created by his team, his re:Invent and conference talks, or his passion for serverless innovation, he was one of the most influential serverless advocates ever to exist. It's hard to imagine AWS without him. Thank you for everything, Munns, and good luck on your next adventure. Cheers. 🥃

Today was my last day at Amazon/AWS. After 12+ years in total I've decided to take on a new adventure and will be starting my new gig in a few weeks. No badge on laptop photos, no Day 1 quotes. It's been a lot of a lot and im grateful to friends along the way. Cheers!! pic.twitter.com/8lcEO7ahjK

— Chris Munns (@chrismunns) September 13, 2024

Final Thoughts 🤔

The only constant is change. I really hope they know what they're doing. 😐

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.