Off-by-none: Issue #144

June 1, 2021

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The Cost of Cloud 💰

Welcome to Issue #144 of Off-by-none. This issue is sponsored by our friends at Lumigo, Fauna, AntStack, and Fastly.

Last week, we learned the current state of serverless, AWS realized configuring infrastructure was hard, and the DaaS market got a new player. This week, we learn about the long-term cost of cloud, rethink the AWS free tier, and yodel about ELBs. Plus, we’ve got plenty of serverless content from the community.

Stackoscope: Prevent serverless misconfigurations with a single CLI command. Try this free, open-source tool from the folks at Lumigo. Easily detect security performance and other issues. Sponsored

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

There were a couple of cool AWS serverless-related announcements this week, including Amazon SQS now supporting a high throughput mode for FIFO queues, allowing you to process up to 3000 messages per second. Plus, Amazon API Gateway REST APIs now integrates with Step Functions Synchronous Express Workflows, bringing it to parity with HTTP APIs.

In other news, Atlassian launched Forge, a new cloud app development platform, DataStax Astra is now available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, and Datadog announced support for application monitoring with AWS App Runner.

Plus, Cloudflare added a bunch of observability tool partners to Cloudflare Workers, Google Cloud continues to make data a first-class citizen, and Palo Alto Networks launch an open-source tool named Yor to automatically tag IaC resources for traceability and auditability.

And thanks to Forrest Brazeal, I can’t stop yodeling about Elastic Load Balancers.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Lee James Gilmore shares some ideas on practical logging when running serverless apps locally.

Tobias Schmidt put together a list of “Things I wish I knew before” working with AWS Lambda, as well as another post about creating a limitless CloudFormation Stack with Lambda-backed Resources.

Rafal Wilinski outlines 12 common misconceptions about AWS DynamoDB. He tackles a lot in this post.

The team at TechMagic published a comparison of the Serverless Framework and AWS SAM. There are plenty of good points in there to help you make the right choice for your project.

If you are going to use SAM, check out Part 5 of Paolo Fusari’s A Practical Guide to Surviving AWS SAM. This one focuses on parameters.

Maciej Radzikowski shares 6 Common Pitfalls of AWS Lambda with Kinesis triggers, Jones Zachariah Noel explains DynamoDB and TTLs, and Krishna Desiraju walks you through the process of designing a highly scalable serverless event scheduler.

And finally, AJ Stuyvenberg discusses why it’s better to develop against the cloud instead of locally, plus how you can accomplish that using the Serverless Framework.

Whether you’re building new microservices or augmenting existing services and applications, Fauna lets you simplify code, reduce costs and ship faster. Learn more. Sponsored

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Salah Elhossiny published a five-part series on Modern Full-Stack Serverless that covers building an application with AWS Amplify.

Fabricio Matias Quagliariello shows you how AWS cross-account messaging using EventBridge works.

Marcin Oleksiak added to his series on fetching from the Yelp API with a Netlify Function with React.js in Part 4 and Part 5.

Aaditya Pradeep Diwan teaches you how to create a REST API using the Serverless Framework and TypeScript in 2 parts.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Ibrahim Cesar wrote an open letter to AWS about the dangers of runaway costs past their free tier. This is becoming more and more of an issue, and hopefully, AWS will address it sooner rather than later.

Interesting article by R. Scott Raynovich about how Cloudflare’s manic growth hints at the future of cloud networks.

Mitul Makadia tells you everything you need to know about serverless architecture. Well, nowhere near everything, but it works as a primer.

Deepak Singh, vice president of compute services at AWS, spoke with the CUBE about how AWS looks to grow its partnership with Docker as containers gain momentum.

Joe McKendrick has some thoughts on Datadog’s State of Serverless report and why infrastructure is so 2019.

And finally, Martin Casado and Sarah Wang write about The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox. The short version is: You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud, but you’re crazy if you stay on it.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Webinar: Learn Distributed Serverless Development Made Easy
Join us as we, AntStack, dive into how we leverage Vendia for a rapid application development experience that takes advantage of Vendia’s data-sharing platform. We are joined by Cory Forsythe and Brian McNamara, Vendia’s Solutions Architects, as we navigate through AntStack’s journey developing upon Vendia Share. Book your spot for the webinar for June 7th at 10am CST / 8:30pm IST / 3:00pm GMT Sponsored

On Serverless Chats Episode #103: Differing Serverless Perspectives Between Cloud Providers, I chatted with Mahdi Azarboon about why understanding different serverless perspectives is important, what challenges you’ll face across providers, why you should take a more holistic approach when embracing serverless, and much more.

Marcia Villalba shows you how to build custom cloud infrastructure as code with AWS CDK by creating CloudFormation Custom Resources that are backed by Lambda Functions.

Aviran Mordo from Wix Engineering explains something very cool they are working on.

Zachary Randall talks about the benefits of serverless for staff-strapped teams on Episode #3 of Tiny DevOps.

New from AWS 🆕

Always plenty of announcements coming out of AWS. Here are a few that got my attention.

AWS announced general availability of Amazon Redshift ML, letting you create, train, and deploy machine learning models using familiar SQL commands. What developer wouldn’t love that?

They also introduced AWS App Runner integration in the AWS Toolkit for JetBrains IDEs, AWS Glue DataBrew added new nest and unnest transformations, and Amazon CloudWatch Logs announced Dimension support for Metric Filters.

Serverless Tools 🛠

The Towards AWS publication on Medium has a new email newsletter. Be sure to check out Issue #002 and sign up.

Paweł Zubkiewicz released a new tool called serverless-iam-test-helper to test AWS Lambda IAM roles that were created using the Serverless Framework.

Dinesh Sonachalam wrote a minimalistic Python wrapper for AWS DynamoDB.

And Andy Blackledge published a new State Machine Builder.

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

“What’s the ONE #serverless talk topic you want to see at this year’s #reinvent?” ~Chris Munns
I’m sure there’s still time to get your thoughts in on this. If not, just read through the comments to amuse yourself.

“Should developers be on call for their code?” ~ Noah Sussman
There are a lot of opinions in here, but an interesting debate nonetheless. “On call” could be replaced with “responsible,” though I’m guessing the debate would be just as intense.

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.

June 7, 2021 – AWS Serverless in practice

June 7, 2021 – Distributed Serverless Development Made Easy (webinar)

June 9-10, 2021 – AWS Summit – Europe, Middle East & Africa

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 Gareth McCumskey (@garethmcc). Gareth is a web developer, product builder, security analyst, development consultant, API Whisperer, and AWS Wrangler. Gareth has been a web developer for over 15 years working in different environments and technologies including high volume RESTful API’s as well as the world of security analysis, helping teams optimize their existing workflows and solve problems in their development environment. A Solutions Architect at Serverless Inc., he helps serverless customers plan building solutions using the Serverless framework, contributes to the Serverless, Inc. blog, and works in Developer advocacy for new developers discovering serverless development. Thank you, Gareth, for helping developers succeed with serverless! 🙌

Final Thoughts 🤔

Another busy week all around in the serverless ecosystem, with lots of cool things from Microsoft and Google as well as AWS. I think this pace of innovation is going to continue to fuel massive growth, and hopefully (given the trillion-dollar paradox), start driving long-term cloud costs down.

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.