Off-by-none: Issue #150

July 20, 2021

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The answer is goin' serverless 🤠

Welcome to Issue #150 of Off-by-none. This issue is sponsored by our friends at Lumigo, Fauna, and Cockroach Labs.

In our previous issue, we discussed the impact of Infinidash, got a Q2 serverless recap, and embraced continuous refactoring. In this issue, serverless goes folk, SQS turns 15 years old, and we get several new ways to deploy our serverless applications. Plus, we have a whole bunch of awesome content from the serverless community.

We were on a break! 😀

There was no issue last week (as several of you noticed), but there’s no need to panic. Off-by-none has switched to a bi-weekly (or fortnightly) summer schedule to give the team and me some much needed respite and to allow us time to work on some enhancements we’ve been teasing for awhile.

It also gave me a bit of time to record Goin’ Serverless – A Serverless Folk Song, both as a way to pay tribute to Bob Dylan, and to encourage more people to jump on the serverless train.

Anyway, there will be no issues on July 27th, August 10th, and August 24th. Then we’ll be back to our weekly schedule on August 31st. But it’s nice to know we were missed. 😉

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Webinar: How to quickly deliver value with AWS Step Functions
Join AWS serverless hero, Yan Cui, and learn all about AWS Step Functions and how to use them to model business workflows. Thu, July 29, 10:00 AM PT. Save your spot! Sponsored

Lots of news to catch up on. Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) turned 15 years old, Pluralsight completed the acquisition of A Cloud Guru, and MongoDB 5.0 with Serverless Atlas launched.

There were also several new and interesting services launched to build and deploy serverless application. IBM rolled out CodeFlare, an open-source framework for machine learning apps, Anthony Campolo takes a first look at deno deploy, Igor Zalutski released digger.dev, and Eleventy is launching Eleventy Serverless to add dynamic data loading to their already amazing SSG tool (intro video here).

In other news, WebOps platform Pantheon raised $100M and Epsagon added Browser Tracing to correlate frontend and backend microservices.

James Beswick announced some new serverless patterns available on the Serverless Land site. They’re up to 57 templates now!

And in the “news to me” category, I just found out that PartiQL supports batch upserts even though the DynamoDB API doesn’t! 🤯

Serverless Stories 📖

Jiju Thomas Mathew figured out how to refactor a Lambda heap to use Layers. Not uncommon to see folks bundle the same code in all their functions.

James Eastham hit some limits, and challenged his architecture with a redefinition of serverless applications.

Roman Uholnikov shares a SAR app for creating a serverless media gallery.

Ivan Wong asks, “Servers? What Are Those?” Then explains how his team used Jets to take a serverless approach with Ruby.

And finally, Tal Bereznitskey shares his team’s experience using Node.js and zero servers. Lots of great use cases and practical advice in here.

Serverless Use Cases 🗺

Extend not having to worry about server administration to your database layer with Fauna. Use Fauna’s API to quickly create and deploy a document database with your application without worrying about scaling, sharding or any other database administration. Learn more. Sponsored

Noritaka Sekiyama, Keerthi Chadalavada, and Karan Vishwanathan walk you through building a serverless event-driven workflow with AWS Glue and Amazon EventBridge.

Roy Ben Yosef shows you how to send and receive emails with Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), all without an actual mailbox.

Anjali Singh gives us the know-how to convert Word files from an S3 bucket into PDF files using AWS Lambda.

And Ashish Mehra demonstrates how to use serverless to load test Amazon API Gateway with authorization. A very cool use case.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Alan Bird shares a list and comparison of serverless databases for your mobile or web app, Chinmay Gaikwad introduces us to Real User Monitoring (RUM), and Mahesh Samarasinghe shares some AWS Lambda Best Practices.

Jones Zachariah gives us an overview of DynamoDB with PartiQL (which, as I recently learned, has a few extra tricks up its sleeve), Kanika Modi helps you choose between AWS Kinesis and AWS SQS when building your apps, and Ismail Egilmez gives us an introduction to software testing.

Luca Mezzalira does an awesome job explaining how to develop evolutionary architecture with AWS Lambda.

Yan Cui shares some testing strategies for Step Functions.

And James Beswick helps us understand data streaming concepts for serverless applications.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Serverless SQL Database in the Cloud
CockroachCloud is a transactional database available as a PostgreSQL API. It’s simple and ops-free. No credit cards required. No commitments. Just connect your application to the database and instantly start building. Sponsored

Jabali Ndungu shows us how to handle CORS with Netlify POST requests.

Dilusha Gonagala demonstrates how to setup a shared API Gateway between multiple services.

Jimmy Dahlqvist walks us through migrating from Lambda@Edge to CloudFront Functions.

Lee James Gilmore gives you a quick lesson on Lambda Destinations.

Jason Wadsworth explains how to work with hierarchical data in DynamoDB.

Ivonne Roberts shows you how to add security headers to your serverless static site.

And James Wright gives us a full tutorial on using AWS Lambda and MongoDB Atlas to build your microservices.

Serverless Security 🔒

There were a whole bunch of serverless security articles over the past two weeks, so I’ve included several of them (since there are usually none to choose from). Some are better than others, but I do like to see people focusing on security.

Rajaram Srinivasan shares some security tips for those moving to AWS Lambda.

Mohamed Latfalla has some thoughts on how to secure your AWS serverless applications.

Febna V M points out a few bits about serverless security and some of its challenges.

Kashyap Vyas outlines how to detect vulnerabilities in Cloud-Native architectures.

Julian Wood continues with his Well-Architected serverless applications series with this excellent post on implementing application workload security (part 2).

And finally, Mark Faiers dives into the networking aspects of serverless security.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Swizec Teller tells us what he learned from Software Engineering at Google. Biggest take away for me is that “stubs and mocks make bad tests.”

Danielle Heberling shares her secret to getting more done. Finding the right strategies for working remotely can make all the difference.

Joe McKendrick writes about IBM’s vision of cloud computing’s destiny: operating as a single global computer, enabled by serverless. They’re probably not wrong.

Brandon Vigliarolo discusses a recent Accenture study that finds thinking of the cloud as a cost-saving tool puts businesses at a disadvantage. You’re much better using it as a vehicle for innovation.

Billie Thompson posits that Cloud Native means serverless. I’m not sure the Prussia comparison lands, but maybe it will for you.

And lastly, Peter Davidson outlines some promising trends in the serverless infrastructure market.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Marcia Villalba hosted Alex DeBrie to discuss 7 Common DynamoDB Patterns for Modeling and Building an App. You should definitely watch this.

Veliswa Boya is a Developer Advocate at Amazon Web Services and her YouTube channel is chockfull of great cloud content.

In this short video, Marc Brooker explains how AWS brought container support to AWS Lambda without adding latency.

New from AWS 🆕

Two weeks gives AWS plenty of time to launch plenty of new things, so here’s just a sampling of some of the cool things they’ve accomplished recently.

• Amazon Athena adds parameterized queries to improve reusability and security
• Amazon Athena expands Apache Hudi support
• AWS Now Allows Customers To Pay For Their Usage in Advance
• AWS Shield Advanced no longer requires AWS WAF logging
• Amazon SageMaker Pipeline introduces an automatic hyperparameter tuning step
• AWS CloudFormation now supports more stacks per AWS account
• Amazon CloudFront now supports ECDSA certificates for HTTPS connections to viewers
• Amplify Admin UI now supports importing existing Amazon Cognito User Pools and Identity Pools
• AWS Lambda now supports Amazon MQ for RabbitMQ as an event source
• NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB now helps you run frequent operations more easily to modify and access table data
• Amazon Lightsail now offers object storage for storing static content
• Amazon CloudFront announces new APIs to locate and move alternate domain names (CNAMEs)
• Coming soon: Expansion of AWS Lambda states to all functions
• Announcing availability of event-driven workflows with AWS Glue and Amazon EventBridge
• Mark individual best practices as not applicable within the AWS Well-Architected Tool

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

July 26 – 29, 2021 – AWS Database Modernization Week

July 29, 2021 – How to quickly deliver value with AWS Step Functions (webinar)

August 15, 2021 – ServerlessDays – Student Edition

September 14, 2021 – ServerlessDays – Nashville

September 17, 2021 – ServerlessDays – Hamburg

September 28, 2021 – ServerlessDays – Paris

November 3-4, 2021 – CascadiaJS 2021

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 Anurag Kale (@iAnuragKale). Anurag is a Cloud Consultant at Cybercom Group where he focuses on delivering data-driven solutions. An AWS Hero, he holds the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification, is a co-organizer of the AWS User Group Pune, helping to host and organize AWS Community Day Pune 2020 and AWS Community Day India 2020. He enables companies to embrace Cloud and build efficient data models and database designs, serverless data pipelines, data analytics, Infrastructure as Code, and sustainable cloud solutions. On his blog, he shares his knowledge of cloud computing and he has been a speaker at various national and international events such as AWS Community Day Nordics 2020. Anurag, thank you for your vast contribution to the cloud and serverless community. 🙌

Final Thoughts 🤔

Apologies again for any confusion about our summer schedule. 149 weeks straight was a lot, and this bi-weekly schedule will bring about all kinds of really cool (and hopefully useful) improvements to the newsletter and website. I hope you’re enjoying your summer.

See you in another two weeks,
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.