Off-by-none: Issue #130

February 23, 2021

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Is anyone not building a new cloud native platform? 🌩

Welcome to Issue #130 of Off-by-none. This issue is sponsored by our friends at Epsagon, Lumigo, and Stedi.

Last week, we watched DynamoDB re:Invent sessions to our heart’s content, we learned how Lambda can transform corporate email, and discovered the value of Minimal Viable Migrations. This week, I finally share my big announcement, Microsoft is looking quite Dapr, and we learn how to make CI/CD work with serverless. Plus, we’ve got lots of amazing content from the serverless community.

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Serverless News & Announcements 📣

My big announcement dropped last Thursday! I’ve joined Serverless, Inc. as the GM of Serverless Cloud, a next-generation cloud offering, with the mission to make serverless easier and more accessible to everyone. And don’t worry, this newsletter and the podcast are here to stay!

Speaking of Serverless, Inc., a new update was released with improved credential handling and faster deployments for Components. There was also this helpful update about adding safer credential handling to Serverless Components.

Microsoft’s Dapr, the open-source project to help developers build cloud-native apps released version 1.0. Is this the framework to end all frameworks? Probably not, but the marketing video for it certainly makes it sound like it.

CTO.ai launched Serverless Kubernetes, a platform that allows every development team to easily consolidate all of their workflows on Kubernetes & deploy Cloud Native Apps instantly. 🤷‍♂️

And if you want another containerized application orchestration platform, take a look at Wavenet’s new ahasa.

Serverless Stories 📖

Bill Buckley tells the story of how CloudZero built an engineering culture of cost autonomy. As more companies move to serverless, “every line of code is a buying decision.”

Damon Siusta shares how Spektrix migrated their Box Office App  from self-hosted hardware to a serverless backend on Azure, plus Varun Vachhar explains how his team built a profile card generator for Storybook, using serverless of course.

Jeremy Chan has a six-part series on using Next.js and serverless to create a personal webpage. He used a few managed services, wrote a little code, and the whole thing only took him a few hours. If only everything with serverless was this easy.

Zell Liew has an interesting post about choosing between Netlify, Vercel and Digital Ocean. There’s something fishy going on with the cost of bandwidth, but that certainly shouldn’t be the reason for wanting to keep using servers. 🐟

Serverless Use Cases 🗺

Noah Fischer provides a nice use case for creating a Roadmap Voting App using Serverless Redis. I’m not sure I even knew Upstash was a thing.

Since crypto currency suddenly seems to be all the rage again (thanks, Elon), Rommel Silva decided to build a tool to get crypto balance updates with Cloud Functions. 🪙

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 Concepts 🏗

If you’re wondering how to make CI/CD work with serverless, Efi Merdler-Kravitz can explain how Lumigo does.

If you’re a true beginner, Omar Bheda explains AWS Serverless Architecture for Dummies, plus David Lares shares some cloud computing fundamentals.

Sarjeel Yusuf published part 2 of the Ebbs and Flows Of DevOps Debugging, Vipul Kumar shares the details of working with Lambda’s service quotas, and Gert Leenders explains the problems with Lambda Cold Starts.

Alisdair Broshar gives us 10 reasons why Koyeb loves Firecracker MicroVMs, and Taavi Rehemägi recaps how to build complex Well-Architected Serverless infrastructures on AWS.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Serverless Ruby fans can rejoice once again, as Ken Collins teaches you how to build static Ruby Gems for Lambda Zip or Containers using Docker and Amazon Linux.

Conor O’Dwyer shows you how to do serverless side rendering using Angular Universal and AWS Lambda. If Angular isn’t to your liking, Jason Conway-Williams shows you something similar using a Vue micro-frontend. Still not satisfied with your SSR choices? Paul Chin Jr. performs serverless side rendering with Deno and Begin.

Jason Wadsworth has a great tutorial for working with Geo Data in DynamoDB. Maneesha Venigalla shows you how to migrate an existing Express app to AWS using serverless, and Steven Staley explores an OpenAPI/Swagger-first approach to serverless development on AWS.

If you’re looking to build a serverless BigQuery ingestion pipeline using Google Cloud Workflows, Christian Kravanja has the tutorial for you.

Sarah Hamilton shares a really interesting integration testing strategy for EventBridge-based serverless architectures, Dan Norton has a tutorial for creating an RSS Feed with a Netlify serverless function and Contentful, and Matt Morgan explores a one-step S3 website with esbuild and AWS CDK.

Serverless Security 🔒

We love us some good security tools, and Dr. Swarup Kumar Sahoo and team just released an open source tool called Deepfence SecretScanner to detect secrets and reduce your attack surface.

Michael Vizard summarizes a recent report and gives his thoughts on the trouble with cloud security.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Amit Lichtenberg and Hen Peretz explain the recent Slack outage and the role of third-party dependencies. It’s a good reminder to build resiliency into your systems.

James Kobielus has some thoughts on the client-serverless revolution and why it’s poised to take over the world.

Joydip Kanjilal has a post about nanoservices, explaining where they fit and where they don’t. I’m not a big fan of that term, and the last thing most teams need are more things to manage. But in the right circumstances, small standalone services can be very useful.

Grzegorz Musiał outlines how serverless computing can improve your software development process. Nothing particularly novel in here, but it may be worth sharing with your engineering manager.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #89: Serverless in a DevOps World, I chatted with Sarjeel Yusuf about the value of DevOps for modern application development teams, how serverless makes it easier to shift left and deploy better software faster, why CI/CD is so important, and how serverless can help you automate all the things.

Daniel ZivKovic shares four talks to celebrate 3 years of the Serverless Toronto User Group. Lots of really interesting stuff in here.

And if you’re interested in serverless security (and you should be) Marcia Villalba will show you how to prevent SQL injections with AWS WAF.

New from AWS 🆕

This is another long one, so we’ll rapid fire these AWS updates. Nothing super interesting on the serverless front, but plenty of other great ecosystem announcements.

• Amazon SNS now supports sending SMS messages to US destinations using ten-digit long codes and toll-free numbers. This is actually pretty cool since there used to be a monopoly on toll-free text numbers.
• Amazon RDS Publishes New Events for Multi-AZ Deployments. You can never have too many events.
• Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes version 1.19. If that’s something that excites you.
• AWS Glue Studio now supports reading uncatalogued data from Amazon S3 and inferring its schema. Anything that speeds up working with AWS Glue is much appreciated.
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service adds Trace Analytics, a new feature for distributed tracing. But still not serverless.
• Support for KMS encryption on S3 buckets used by AWS Config. More security. ✅
• AWS Control Tower now provides region selection. Thank you very much.
• AWS Fargate increases default resource count service quotas to 1000. This should reduce some support tickets.
• Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics supports canary events with Amazon EventBridge. Automate all the things.

Serverless Tools 🛠

re:Web interfaces with the Lambda Runtime API. It translates API Gateway requests back into HTTP requests and passes them to the web application. I can’t wait to see how this gets misused. 😂

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 Julie Elkins (@JulieAElkins). Julie is an AWS Training Architect for A Cloud Guru, an AWS Certified Solutions Architect, holds all three AWS associate certifications, both professional certifications, as well as two specialty certifications for Security and Advanced Networking. On her YouTube channel, Julie shares AWS certification training materials related to AWS. Julie, thanks to you for helping others succeed with their cloud certifications! 🙌

Final Thoughts 🤔

I’m so happy I was finally able to tell you all about Serverless Cloud. If you close your eyes and think to yourself, “what’s the one thing I’d love to pour my heart into more than anything else”, Serverless Cloud would be my thing. So let’s just say, I’m super excited about this!

And I know I sound like a broken record, but many people have asked. The Off-by-none newsletter and the Serverless Chats Podcast aren’t going anywhere. I have an awesome team that helps me with these each week, so stay tuned for even more exciting things to come!

Have a great 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.