Off-by-none: Issue #136

April 6, 2021

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I think I see a serverless pattern here 🧩

Welcome to Issue #136 of Off-by-none. This issue is sponsored by our friends at Stackery, Lumigo, and AntStack.

Last week, serverless joined the fight against COVID, managed services proved better at TCO, and we debunked the myth of NoOps. This week, the AWS team gives us serverless patterns aplenty, we learn the value of making data migrations easy, and we start living on the edge. Plus, we have plenty of serverless content from the community.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Need help following best practices for your IaC and CloudFormation templates? Read about Stackery’s new product stack.new and how it can help visualize and improve your IaC for security and reliability. Sponsored

The Serverless Advocate team over at AWS released the Serverless Patterns Collection over at ServerlessLand.com. Lots of great patterns there to get you started with serverless.

Azure was named a Cloud Functions leader, coming in at number three behind AWS and Alibaba. Not a surprise to me, as I think Azure is doing some great work in the serverless space.

Perhaps only interesting to the wonks out there, but this post about Cloudflare stock might just give you some insights into why edge is the next frontier.

Paul Krill has a quick write-up about the new Deno Company that just formed. Node.js isn’t moving as fast as some would hope, so let’s see if this lights a much-needed fire.

In what seems to be a very smart move, DataStax unveiled a zero-downtime cloud migration tool to move workloads from Apache Cassandra to DataStax Astra. Something to be learned from these customer onboarding strategies.

And speaking of database migration, Google just launched its serverless Database Migration Service into general availability, making it hella easy to migrate MySQL and PostgreSQL to Google Cloud.

Serverless Stories 📖

If you’re looking for some serverless success stories, you can read how AMPLYFI manages variable traffic machine learning workloads on AWS Lambda.

Or you can read this post by Serdar Gokay Kucuk about how HeyJobs scaled with Serverless Framework on AWS.

Serverless Use Cases 🗺

Jérôme Van Der Linden laid out a great use case for anonymizing your data using Amazon S3 Object Lambdas.

Plus, Ram Gopal Srikar Katakam shows you how to build your own YouTube mp3 downloader with serverless on AWS.

Webinar: How Medtronic Finds & Fixes Serverless Issues
Join experts from Medtronic and Lumigo as they review Medtronic’s serverless architecture that processes one billion Lambdas a month. They will show how Medtronic monitors and troubleshoot performance issues and errors. Thursday, April 22, 10 AM PT. Sponsored

Serverless Concepts 🏗

James Beswick has another excellent post in his Operating Lambda series, this time focusing on logging and custom metrics.

The Dashbird has two helpful posts this week, one from Kay Plößer on when to use Docker on AWS Lambda, Lambda Layers, and Lambda Extensions, and another by Anna Anisienia that outlines 10 mistakes to avoid when sizing cloud resources.

And Alex DeBrie is back with another post about the three DynamoDB limits you need to know. And you definitely should know these.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Pawel Zubkiewicz has a great tutorial that shows you how to use Amazon EventBridge API Destinations with a parametrized endpoint URL and Mailchimp integration.

Florian Kapfenberger explains how to password protect your (Vercel) site with Cloudflare Workers.

If you’re curious how serverless authentication with AWS Lambda works, then let Laura Carballo show you the way.

And finally, Dunith Dhanushka gives you the rundown on sending and receiving custom events with the AWS EventBridge Schema Registry.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Yan Cui built a custom IAM system, which made him appreciate AWS IAM even more. He tells you all about it here.

James Beswick is so prolific with serverless content, he had to publish another post just to show how much serverless content he created in Q1 2021. 🙌

Mihika Pal shared a post that lists 28 serverless gurus and experts that one must follow in 2021. I’m honored to be on that list.

Vicky Reyzelman shares why the future of computing is at the edge and Sam Crowder adds some more context about Cloudflare’s role in it.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #95: Going Serverless with IBM Cloud Code Engine, I spoke with Jason McGee about IBM’s approach to serverless, the recent GA of IBM Cloud Code Engine and how it opens up even more serverless use cases, and IBM’s view of a serverless future.

Yan Cui released Real World Serverless #50: Making serverless more accessible for frontend engineers with Swizec Teller.

And if you are really interested in how Lambda works behind the scenes, Marcia Villalba interviewed Marc Brooker, a Senior Principal Engineer at AWS and one of the persons behind the AWS Lambda platform. He shares how the platform has changed over time, the challenges, the innovations, and more.

New from AWS 🆕

There were no major “serverless” announcements this past week, but CloudWatch Metric Streams, which lets you send AWS Metrics to partners and to your apps in real time, was recently released. This is a super cool way of integrating reporting into other systems.

Some other notable announcements include new options to trigger Amazon SageMaker Pipeline executions from EventBridge, AWS WAF now supports Labels to improve rule customization and reporting, and the ability to reduce unwanted traffic on your website with new AWS WAF Bot Control.

Serverless Tools 🛠

Sam-patterns-cli is a super cool little tool that lets you browse the content of the Serverless Patterns Collection and inject patterns directly into your SAM template. Supports both JSON and YAML.

Assemble scalable and definitive architecture with serverless technologies and focus on building, not maintenance
Our colony of ants are well-equipped with building cloud-native apps based on serverless technologies. We help clients streamline their infrastructure and application delivery and assist businesses in achieving their objectives and speeding up their delivery of new features. Sponsored

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

10 things I learned while helping to build a technical community at AWS ~Nader Dabit
Excellent thread by Nader (who just left AWS, BTW) about the things you should be doing to build a developer community. Definitely worth the read.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

If you have an event, webinar, etc. that you’d like me to mention, please email me.

April 22, 2021 – How Medtronic Finds & Fixes Serverless Issues (webinar)

April 22, 2021 – DevDay Online with AWS & Stackery: Modernizing your .NET App

April 30, 2021 – CDK Day

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 Mete Atamel (@meteatamel). Mete is a Senior Developer Advocate at Google. Prior to Google, he worked at Microsoft, Skype, Adobe, EMC, and Nokia building apps and services on various web, mobile, and cloud platforms. He has spoken around the globe about serverless, including at .NET fwdays’20, GDG Istanbul, and Devoxx Ukraine. Thank you, Mete, for your work spreading the word about serverless around the world! 🙌

Final Thoughts 🤔

It’s amazing watching the serverless ecosystem and community continue to grow, especially into all sorts of startups and SaaS providers. And speaking of communities, my good friend Farrah Campbell is now a Senior Product Marketing Manager for Modern Applications over at AWS and will be working with the serverless and container communities. Such a great fit. I think I’m more excited than she is!

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 Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or email.