Off-by-none: Issue #141

May 11, 2021

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It's not every day you turn 100 times old 🎉

Welcome to Issue #141 of Off-by-none. This issue is sponsored by our friends at Fauna, Lumigo, Hookdeck, and Fastly.

Last week, AWS launched CloudFront functions, Fastly leveraged its edge compute, and serverless helped us translate Mandalorian. This week, Serverless Chats celebrates a milestone, we get a plethora of Lambda performance optimizations, and Data APIs replace your databases. Plus, we’ve got some amazing content from the serverless community.

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Serverless News & Announcements 📣

This past week, Microsoft announced a preview service for building real-time web applications called Azure Web PubSub. It’s a fully managed service for WebSockets, and it looks very cool.

In cloud security news, Palo Alto Networks added some new innovations to Prisma Cloud to help you maintain compliance, and Tala Security integrated their services with Fastly’s Compute@Edge platform, which shows another example of how powerful serverless compute at the edge is.

And Trend Micro announced a new SaaS product that helps monitor open source vulnerabilities. This looks like a very useful tool to continuously monitor and ensure that all those dependencies you installed aren’t creating major security risks.

Serverless Stories 📖

Brian Foody explains why not everything is as it seems with AWS Fargate.

Arjit Jaiswal published the first in his series on Building Okayar, a personal OKR tracker service. This one focuses on how it started, plus how he built the backend using Lambda and Go.

Sarah Hamilton shares how her team built a massively scalable serverless chat application with AWS AppSync in just 4 weeks. Lots to learn from some really great details in this article.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Webinar: Why your next serverless project should use AppSync
Join AWS Serverless Hero Yan Cui and Lumigo Software Engineer Guy Moses as they discuss some of the power of GraphQL and AppSync and why AppSync + Lambda + DynamoDB should be your stack of choice in 2021 and beyond! Save your spot for the webinar this Thursday, May 20 at 10:00 AM PST / 1:00 PM ET / 18:00 CEST Sponsored

James Beswick shares the final post in his Operating Lambda series, this one on performance optimization.

And not to be outdone, Yan Cui shares 3 major ways to improve AWS Lambda performance in an epic piece with a ton of incredibly useful information.

But why stop there? Taavi Rehemägi shares an additional 4 tips for AWS Lambda optimization in production.

If you think Yan was finished writing for the week, you’re sadly mistaken. He also published a post on how to manage Route53 hosted zones in a multi-account environment and another one that discusses why Lambda layers are not a package manager, but a deployment optimization.

Ismail Egilmez explains why a CI/CD pipeline makes good business sense and also does a deep dive into identifying software bugs. And here I was thinking a Heisenbug was a character from Breaking Bad.

Christian Bandowski shows you how to orchestrate dependent workflows using AWS Step Functions, Paolo Fusari continues with part 3 of his Practical Guide to Surviving AWS SAM, and Louis McCormack proposes a really interesting way to balance cost with scalability by bursting to Lambda.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

If you’re looking for a straightforward way to get started with serverless, Rakshitha Rao presents a hello-world project with serverless offline.

Ken Choong shows you how to provision API Gateway StageVariables and deploy using AWS CDK.

James Sugrue gives a great overview of container images for AWS Lambda with Python, Vikas Solegaonkar walks you through AWS CloudFront Functions, and Michael Hoffmann shows you how to build and deploy a serverless GraphQL React app using AWS Amplify.

Michael Liendo has a quick tutorial on how to auto-populate schema fields in AWS Amplify, Liav Yona shows you how to spice up your Kubernetes environment with AWS Lambda, and Grant Timmerman gives a great overview of running gRPC on Google Cloud Run.

Also, you can use Hookdeck to ensure you never lose a webhook. It was built to manage spikes and easily replay webhooks after fixing an issue or after a system is down for maintenance. It takes 5 minutes to set up without provisioning infrastructure or code change. Check it out at hookdeck.com. Sponsored

Serverless Reads 🤓

Frédéric Barthelet discusses how they’re planning on implementing serverless webhooks  with Lift and the Serverless Framework.

Sebastian Bille gives a straightforward pros and cons list comparing the Serverless Framework, AWS SAM, and the AWS CDK.

There’s a good overview of using the Architect framework as a different approach to web application development.

Pieter Humphrey opines on why a serverless data API might be your next database, whilst Fauna’s CEO explains how cloud APIs help developers build apps without a database.

And finally, Elad Rosenheim has a piece called All Clusters Must Serve, All Clusters Must Die. There’s a lot in here, but at the very least, read the “Things to Want” section at the end, because it might just be your wishlist as well.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On the 100th episode of Serverless Chats, Rebecca Marshburn interviewed me about how I got started with serverless, why I started this newsletter and Serverless Chats, what I think is next for serverless and cloud, plus a whole lot more. It was a lot of fun and I hope you enjoy it.

Marcia Villalba and Kris Howard walk you through the AWS interview process and talk about what it’s like to work at AWS as a Solutions Architect. Marcia was also on a DevBeardOps live stream talking about migrating serverless applications.

On Episode #52 of the Real World Serverless Podcast, Yan Cui chats with Alex DeBrie about all things DynamoDB. There’s also plenty of justifiable shade thrown at PartiQL.

New from AWS 🆕

No exciting AWS serverless announcements this week, but here are a few things that caught my eye:

• Migration Evaluator announces a faster way to project AWS cloud costs with Quick Insights
• Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics supports cron expression for scheduling
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) adds support for renameCollection, $natural, $indexOfArray, $reverseArray, $zip and indexing improvements
• Amazon Translate increases the concurrent API limit for Batch Translation to 1000
• AWS Organizations launches new console experience
• Amazon Athena drivers now support Azure AD and PingFederate authentication
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now makes it easier for you to manage permissions for AWS services accessing your resources

Serverless Tools 🛠

Pawel Zubkiewicz says that testing serverless apps has never been easier if you’re using hexagonal architecture. He even created a serverless-hexagonal-template for you to use to get started.

Stephen Siegert shares a trick for displaying the active Amplify Environment alongside the current Git branch.

And Yinlin Chen shows you how to use a thumbnail creator serverless application.

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

#Serverless developers. What was the biggest change you went through when switching from traditional development to Serverless development? Put another way: When did you say, “I have to rethink the way I do this.” ~Eric Johnson
A very good question posed by Eric Johnson and an even better collection of comments and replies.

Serverless Jobs 👩‍💻 Sponsored

Senior Serverless Developer at Fastly
Fastly is searching for someone with a developer background to be our first Senior Serverless Solutions Architect based in the US helping enterprises launch edge apps and grow overall platform adoption.

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

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

May 11-13, 2021 – Apps On Cloud Summit (Conference)

May 12, 2021 – Intro to Serverless Computing (Workshop)

May 13, 2021 – The power of Serverless: Get more done easily

May 19, 2021 – Serverless Live (Twitch)

May 25, 2021 – Architecting for Serverless in 2021 (Webinar)

May 26, 2021 – Engineering at Scale #3 – Beyond Serverless and DevOps

June 7, 2021 – AWS Serverless in practice

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 Mike Roberts (@mikebroberts). Mike is Partner and Co-founder of Symphonia, a software consultancy specializing in AWS and how it impacts engineering organizations. Mike writes and talks about serverless architecture, and blogs on Medium and the Symphonia blog. He also co-runs the Extreme Tuesday Club NYC, an informal bar-located meetup for software developers in NYC. He is the author of the book Programming AWS Lambda: Build and Deploy Serverless Applications with Java, which he discussed on Serverless Chats. Mike, thank you for your relentless and diverse work to shine the light on serverless! 🙌

Final Thoughts 🤔

This was a long one, so I won’t keep you all. I just quickly want to thank everyone for their support of Serverless Chats over the last 100 episodes and for the amazing feedback we received from the latest episode. Looking forward to the next 100!

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.