Off-by-none: Issue #129

February 16, 2021

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Is serverless ready to go mainstream? 🤓

Welcome to Issue #129 of Off-by-none. This issue is sponsored by our friends at Epsagon, Lumigo, and Stedi.

Last week, re:Invent videos went live on YouTube, Lambda upgraded to Node 14, and we learned how to build a business for serverless developers. This week, we fill our YouTube queue with DynamoDB sessions, learn how Lambda can transform your corporate email, and discover the value of Minimal Viable Migrations. Plus, we’ve got a bunch of great serverless content from the community.

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Serverless News & Announcements 📣

When looking for serverless news, don’t ignore the tangential stuff as it can be quite telling. For example, Qrvey announced an $8.5 million investment, proof that a company built using serverless can scale, or at least use the buzzword to raise more capital. Also, Trend Micro expanded their XDR capabilities through the new Vision One platform, which isn’t specifically targeted at serverless workloads but doesn’t ignore them either.

In other cloud-related news, Frost & Sullivan recognized Tencent Cloud’s competitive strategy, and rightly so. Tencent is one of the fastest-growing public cloud providers and they are not limiting themselves to China. They have a very interesting serverless offering as well.

If you’re looking for some other serverless reading, Alex Ellis published his first book called “Serverless For Everyone Else”. And Nimbella released a whitepaper on “The State of Serverless in the Enterprise” authored by Rishidot Research.

Serverless Stories 📖

Everyone loves a good story of a DDoS attack, especially when it didn’t happen to them. This person wasn’t so lucky.

Even though it’s a polished case study, this post on how AWS enables Audiencerate to process over a billion requests per week provides some useful insights.

And while this is more of a use case/tutorial, Nick Fink’s series on serverless ArcGIS feature service automation and IaC is a wonderful tale of the complexities of interoperability.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

James Beswick’s third installment of his Operating Lambda series focuses on choosing and managing runtimes, networking and VPC configurations, and different invocation modes. I highly suggest you read this.

Also from AWS is the recent publication of the Disaster Recovery of Workloads on AWS: Recovery in the Cloud whitepaper. Lots of super interesting information in here.

And if you want to get a rundown of The Serverless Essentials, Vaishali Bhatt gives you a great overview of serverless and some things to consider when adopting it.

Webinar: Making CI/CD Work with Serverless
Join AWS Serverless Hero & Lumigo VP Engineering Efi Merdler-Kravitz on a journey to build a 100% serverless CI/CD pipeline. Save your spot for the webinar on Feb 24 at 10:00 AM PST / 1:00 PM ET / 18:00 CEST Sponsored

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Lots of great tutorials this week, including this one from Nicole Yip about access management for your personal AWS account. Something too many of us often overlook.

James Beswick (aka Serverless Shakespeare, but easier to understand) has another great post on building serverless browser automation with AWS Lambda and Puppeteer. 🤯

Aco Mitevski shows you how to host a serverless static website on AWS with API Gateway. This is a good example of how certain serverless patterns inadvertently create expensive infrastructure.

Every time I read posts like Sofian Hamiti’s Deploying a Multi-Model Inference Service With AWS Lambda, Synchronous Express Workflows, Amazon API Gateway, and the CDK, I realize how little I actually know about machine learning.

For all you .NET fans, if you have an afternoon free, take a look at Marwan Nakhaleh’s monster tutorial to build a serverless API like a senior developer. Part 1.

Finally, Allen Helton will save you some time by showing you how to build auth once with a shared Lambda Authorizer.

Serverless Security 🔒

We don’t get many serverless security articles anymore, but Manuel Benz has a follow-up to his How to Prevent Code Injection Vulnerabilities in Serverless Applications using AWS WAF post.

And who doesn’t love a good reference architecture? Vigneshwaran Gunasekaran created this one for real-time serverless self-service security analytics, but it made me go a bit crossed-eyed.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Mike Vizard asks, “Is serverless computing ready to go mainstream?” I think you know what my answer would be.

We’ve mentioned the importance of the API economy (and the role of serverless) multiple times. This isn’t the best article on the subject but makes some good points about the growth of API management solutions.

Ben Ellerby has an excellent post about Minimum Viable Migrations  and how you can bring agility to cloud modernization.

For anyone worried about low-code and no-code platforms automating you out of a job, Aytekin Tank has some thoughts on why no-code doesn’t mean no coders.

And the team at AntStack shares the best serverless platforms to watch out for in 2021. I can’t help but think that there are a few missing.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #88: Azure Functions, I spoke with Jeff Hollan about building Azure Functions with triggers and bindings, how to compose functions using Durable Functions and Logic Apps, how to operationalize your serverless apps in the Microsoft Azure ecosystem, and a whole lot more.

If you’re already watched all the serverless re:Invent videos, Craig Liebendorfer put together a post that lists all the Amazon DynamoDB session videos from AWS re:Invent 2020. Some of my favorite talks are in here.

And Marcia Villalba shows you how to build serverless applications using Aurora Serverless, the Data API, and the CDK. I love that she is using the Data API Client. It really does make things super simple.

New from AWS 🆕

Wow, AWS was busy this past week! In the interest of saving time, here’s a rapid-fire list of some of the announcements that piqued my interest:

• Amazon Simple Email Service launches a redesigned service console experience – it certainly couldn’t hurt.
• AWS WAF adds support for JSON parsing and inspection – awesome, and much-needed improvement.
• Amazon Aurora Global Database supports managed planned failover – for those of use that still need RDBMS.
• Announcing General Availability of Amplify Flutter, with new data and authentication support – crazy fast bootstrapping of Flutter apps.
• AWS Glue DataBrew supports transformations for seven additional datatypes – I was surprised this didn’t exist already.
• AWS Glue now provides column importance metrics in the FindMatches machine learning transform – I’m not exactly sure what this means, but it seems important.
• Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) now supports next generation, burstable general-purpose Amazon EC2 T3 instance types – for the right workloads, this is awesome.
• Amazon Timestream now offers cross table queries, query execution statistics, and more – every announcement like this increases my chances of actually using this.
• Introducing Serverless Image Handler v5.2 – building your own would be foolish at this point.
• Update content of inbound and outbound emails using AWS Lambda in Amazon WorkMail – this is scary, but also amazing.
• AWS Cloud9 launches visual source control integration for Git – also makes me reconsider using this.
• Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) now supports PCI DSS compliance to help you run payment processing workloads more easily – definitely not considering this, but for those of you stuck on Cassandra, at least you have PCI compliance now. 🤷‍♂️

Serverless Tools 🛠

Superwerker is a free, open-source solution that lets you quickly set up an AWS Cloud environment following best practices for security and efficiency. It was built by Soenke Ruempler and the teams over at Kreuzwerker GmbH and Superluminar GmbH, so you know it’s good!

It’s been around for quite some time, but Yan Cui has another post on automating serverless tasks with the Lumigo CLI. A very handy tool for your serverless toolbox.

Serverless Jobs 👩‍💻 Sponsored

Serverless Engineer – stedi.com
At Stedi, we’re working in one of the biggest markets on the planet – EDI, the technological backbone of the physical product economy. We’re building a next-generation platform: a ubiquitous commercial trading network to automate the trillions of dollars in B2B transactions exchanged by nearly every company on Earth. If you’re interested in what we’re building and how we’re building it, we’d love to hear from you.

Have a job listing you’d like to share? Please contact me for more information.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

There are a lot of upcoming serverless events, webinars, livestreams, and more. If you have an event you’d like me to mention, please email me.

February 24, 2021 – Serverless & APIs Conference

February 24, 2021 – Webinar: Making CI/CD Work with Serverless

Serverless Star of the Week ⭐️

There is a very long list of people who are doing #ServerlessGood and contributing to the Serverless community. These people deserve recognition for their efforts. So each week, I will mention someone whose recent contribution really stood out to me. I love meeting new people, so if you know someone who deserves recognition, please nominate them.

This week’s star is Mark Nunnikhoven (@marknca). Mark is an AWS Community Hero and the Vice President of Cloud Research at Trend Micro, a long-time AWS Advanced Technology Partner, and a provider of security tools for AWS Cloud. Mark helps organizations around the world modernize their security practices, and he helps bridge the gap between DevOps and traditional security through his writing, speaking, and teaching. Thanks, Mark, for helping to make the digital world safer and easier to navigate! 🙌

Final Thoughts 🤔

I know I’ve been teasing this for a while, but I’ve got some big personal news to announce, and it looks like Thursday is finally the day. I’ve been searching for ways to have a big impact on the future of serverless and to help make it more accessible to others. I think I found it, and I’m excited to share it with all of you.

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 Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or email.