Off-by-none: Issue #138

April 20, 2021

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Unleashing serverless workflows...

Welcome to Issue #138 of Off-by-none. This issue is sponsored by our friends at Stackery, Lumigo, and AntStack.

Last week, we learned about the challenges of Lambda in production, talked about serverless and machine learning, and simulated our data flows with Step Functions. This week, Cloudflare workers are unbound, EventBridge goes multi-region, and we learn why no one wants to manage Kubernetes anymore. Plus, we have plenty of content from the amazing serverless community.

Before we get started, does your organization need help following best practices for IaC and CloudFormation templates? Check out Stackery’s new product stack.new and how it can help visualize and improve IaC for security and reliability. Sponsored

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Cloudflare announced the general availability of Cloudflare Workers Unbound, giving you up to 30 seconds of compute. They also introduced WebSockets Support in Cloudflare Workers.

Lumigo announced a new free service called Stackoscope that scans your serverless applications and gives you recommendations for improvements.

Nimbella was named a Strong Performer as a Multi-Cloud Serverless Platform Provider in a recent industry report. I would tend to agree.

Flink announced the release of Stateful Functions 3.0.0 (aka StateFun). This new release brings remote functions to the front and center, plus the new Java SDK allows for all JVM languages in addition to Python.

Rockset has enabled real-time analytics for MySQL and PostgreSQL, which is pretty cool. Definitely something to keep an eye on.

Trend Micro debuted their security platform in the AWS Marketplace, making it easier to add it to your AWS workloads.

And in very interesting AWS news, they recently introduced OpenSearch, which is just a fork of ElasticSearch, because, let’s be honest, Elastic wasn’t going to win a game of chicken with AWS. For better or worse. 🤷‍♂️

Serverless Stories 📖

Matt Coulter wrote an excellent piece that looks back on 2020, the year he became an AWS Hero, started a conference, and won The Liberty Mutual Chairman’s Award. He’s accomplished a lot in a short amount of time, and that should be an inspiration for anyone looking to do this kind of work.

Juan Jolainez shares some AWS Lambda facts you wish to know before processing 2 billion Lambda executions, based on his own experience at CreditorWatch, of course.

And CC Pace put together a video case study on going serverless.

Serverless Use Cases 🗺

In terms of serverless use cases, how about a face recognition and analytics system using AWS serverless and Snowflake? Marius Ndini walks you through it.

And if you want to avoid the public clouds all together, Ederson Brilhante will show you how to build a serverless full-stack application using only git, google drive, and public ci/cd runners.

I’d personally rather just use Google Analytics, but if you really want to roll your own, check out this simple, privacy-friendly, and free analytics system using serverless functions from Veselin Romić.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Best Serverless Platforms to Watch out for in the Year 2021
Are you on the fence about migrating an existing or new project to serverless? Look no further because we have compiled the best serverless platforms which you should be looking at for your serverless transformation. Sponsored

Matt Morgan has your complete API Gateway and CORS Guide.

Serkan Özal explains why ignoring flaky tests for expediency is harming your team.

Noah Fischer has a great tool that shows you the latency comparison among serverless databases including DynamoDB, FaunaDB, and Redis. It’s really interesting to see.

Swapnil Kant gives you a lesson in decoding AWS Lambda and serverless architecture.

And finally, Ismail Egilmez thinks it’s a hard mock life for us (serverless developers). He’s not wrong.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Paul Swail has an amazing post that will show you how to test your EventBridge integrations. Lots of great stuff in here.

Shadi Ayoub put together a monster tutorial that shows you how to create your first serverless GraphQL API with AWS Lambda and a MySQL Database. It’s a 34-minute read, and anyone who puts that much effort into something deserves a shout-out.

I don’t know why it’s suddenly so popular, but Mohammed Izzy takes you through complex serverless event processing with Apache Flink.

And if you’re looking for more interesting serverless event processing, Adit Modi will show you how to trigger Lambda Functions from Amazon MSK.

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 troubleshoots performance issues and errors. Thursday, April 22, 10 AM PT. Sponsored

Serverless Reads 🤓

There were way too many interesting and thought-provoking articles this week, so I apologize if I overwhelm you.

First up Gunnar Grosch put together a list of resources for building your SaaS product on AWS. Lots of really useful information here that should keep you busy for a while.

Scott Carey wrote about why no one wants to manage Kubernetes anymore. I don’t want to say I told you so, but, then again, I have been ringing this bell for a while. Anyway, you might hit a paywall for this article, so incognito mode might help.

Speaking of telling you so, Ben Ellerby brilliantly explains why Serverless will enable the Edge Computing Revolution. This is something you definitely want to read.

Another short article that caught my eye was David Mooter’s, Event-Driven Architecture: This Time It’s Not a Fad. It’s ultimately hocking a report you can purchase, but I agree with the overall sentiment.

Serverless Architecture and Applications-All you need to know! is, unfortunately, far from it. The limitations pointed out are mostly laughable, but I included it because perception is reality. They’ve got to be getting this information from somewhere.

On the other side of the coin, Jérôme Van Der Linden outlines the facts and fallacies of serverless, which is a much more honest look (IMO). Also, Jones Zachariah Noel is super excited about Serverless SWAG! And it’s not what you think.

And lastly, Jeff Carpenter outlines a maturity model for cloud-native databases, with, of course, serverless databases being the ultimate goal.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #97: How Serverless Fits into the Cyclical Nature of the Industry, I spoke with Gojko Adzic about how serverless compares to timesharing mainframes, the limitations that led us to the PC revolution, where similar problems and limitations of serverless and the cloud will take us, and much more.

Marcia Villalba shows you how to deploy your application to AWS using CDK pipelines, letting you turn your CI/CD processes into IaC.

This is a nice round-up of the top 5 serverless meetup videos from March 2021 for you to enjoy.

New from AWS 🆕

There were a few really exciting serverless announcements this week, including Amazon EventBridge introducing support for cross-region event bus targets. James Beswick explains why this is so amazing.

In other event-driven news, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now integrates with AWS Lambda letting you invoke functions from Stored Procedures or User-Defined Functions.

And speaking of User-Defined Functions, they are now generally available for Amazon Athena, which is a very handy addition.

AWS Amplify now orchestrates multiple Amazon DynamoDB GSI updates in a single deployment, something that still isn’t possible with CloudFormation, I believe.

And here are a few more updates worth a look:

• You can now use macros and transforms in CloudFormation templates to create AWS CloudFormation StackSets
• You now can use AWS CloudTrail to log Amazon DynamoDB Streams data-plane API activity
• Amazon Rekognition launches tagging support for collections, stream processors, and Custom Labels
• AWS Identity and Access Management now makes it easier to relate a user’s IAM role activity to their corporate identity
• Review last accessed information to identify unused EC2, IAM, and Lambda permissions and tighten access for your IAM roles
• Now reference latest AWS Systems Manager parameter values in AWS CloudFormation templates without specifying parameter versions
• AWS Control Tower now provides configurable naming during Landing Zone setup
• AWS CloudFormation Modules now Provides YAML and Delimiter Support
• AWS announces general availability of AQUA for Amazon Redshift

Serverless Tools 🛠

Looking for some great serverless tools? Here’s a cool one from Matthieu Napoli called Lift to deploy static websites on AWS .

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

May 19, 2021 – Serverless Live (Twitch)

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 Ace Nassri (@serverl0ss). Ace is a Developer Programs Engineer III at Google, where he works on best practices for serverless on Google Cloud Platform. Ace has also worked for big names like TripAdvisor and Facebook. You can find some of Ace’s writing on the Google Cloud blog, and follow along with his work on GitHub. Thanks for all of your work in serverless, Ace! 🙌

Final Thoughts 🤔

I keep trying to cut down the number of links I share, but it’s a really hard thing to do. There is so much amazing content out there being produced by so many amazing people, that not sharing seems like a crime! Keep on creating everyone, and I’ll keep doing my best to share the most relevant serverless and cloud content with you all.

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 Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or email.