Off-by-none: Issue #151

August 3, 2021

Only have a few minutes? Check out this week's MOST POPULAR links as chosen by our email subscribers.

Building serverless pipelines 🚰

Welcome to Issue #151 of Off-by-none. This issue is sponsored by our friends at Lumigo, Fauna, and Cockroach Labs.

In our previous issue, serverless went folk, SQS turned 15 years old, and we learned about several new ways to deploy our serverless applications. In this issue, we get a content repository for heroes, Fastly introduces zero cold-starts, and AWS makes building CI/CD pipelines a lot easier. Plus, we have two weeks’ worth of amazing serverless content from the community.

Before we get started, the organizers of the Moar Serverless Conference gave us 50 free tickets just for Off-by-none subscribers. Lots of great speakers including Ali Spittel, Brian Leroux, Gwyneth Pena-Siguenza, and more. The first 50 readers to register with this link will get their tickets for free!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Webinar: Secrets of Serverless Monitoring Revealed
Join Lumigo co-founder Erez Berkner as he explores what’s unique about serverless observability and best practices for monitoring and debugging serverless apps. Sponsored

So much has happened in the last two weeks, including the launch of the AWS Heroes Content Library. There’s a lot of really interesting content there already, and I’m sure it’ll grow like crazy.

In other AWS related news, AWS SAM introduced Pipelines, CDK Pipelines went GA, and AWS AppSync now supports custom authorization with AWS Lambda for GraphQL APIs (with some more details here). Plus, Yan Cui shared the email many of us got about changing retry behavior of async Lambda functions with zero concurrency.

Thundra introduced Thundra Foresight, a new CI observability tool, plus they added Python support to Thundra Sidekick.

Fastly launched a “New Era of Highly-Secure Serverless JavaScript” with zero cold starts in their Compute@Edge product. Imagine what you can do with that?

Also, Serverless Stack raised $1M, Trend Micro took home the 2021 AWS Global ISV Partner of the Year Award, and Google promises to stop killing all the apps you use.

Serverless Stories 📖

Jean Baptiste Muscat continues his AWS serverless story of detecting locked bicycle stations.

Dorian Machado wants to rescue lost pets in Uruguay, serverlessly, of course.

And Maria Zacharia shares how your team can make your website SEO friendly with CloudFront and Lambda@Edge.

Serverless Use Cases 🗺

Lizzie Siegle shares how to detect mask wearers using Twilio Video, machine learning, and JavaScript.

Arghya Ghosh explains how to build an automated screenshot service on Netlify in ~140 lines of code.

Lee James Gilmore covers the same use case, but takes a different approach using Lambda Layers.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

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

Wojciech Matuszewski help us understand the Lambda Logs API, Lee James Gilmore gives us some serverless Lambda storage options, and Dhaval Nagar shares some MongoDB Atlas Serverless testing results.

AJ Stuyvenberg explains the What, Why, and When of mono-Lambda vs single function APIs. I’m a proponent of single-purpose functions, but there are lots of reasons not to choose that option.

Taavi Rehemägi outlines some ways to solve serverless cold starts, Matteo Moroni gives you the details of caching and real-time notifications in a fully serverless AWS based web application with long-running workflows, and Paolo Fusari shares Part 6 of his Practical Guide to Surviving AWS SAM that focuses on cross-account release change.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

There were lots of interesting tutorials over the last two weeks. Here are some of my favorites:

James Beswick gives us lots of modeling tricks for creating a single-table design with Amazon DynamoDB.

Kosta Kirov explains why Puppeteer and Lambda Container Functions are  a match made in heaven.

Matthew Mascioni teaches you how to build a link shortener with Cloudflare Workers.

Vedran Cindrić shares The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Laravel Vapor. Good stuff for Laravel fans looking to go serverless, but also some interesting insights into the migration process.

Ryan Dsouza shows you how to perform sentiment analysis with Step Functions using the CDK.

Liav Yona gives you superpowers using SQL triggers with AWS Lambda.

Michael Yuan explains what you can do with Rust and WebAssembly Serverless Functions in Vercel.

Lee James Gilmore (again) has a great tutorial on serverless load testing using Artillery.

Julian Wood shares some practical tips on building well-architected serverless applications by regulating inbound request rates.

Jones Zachariah Noel has another post in his series about DynamoDB with PartiQL.

Melina Schweizer shows you how to use Java in your DB-connected AWS Lambdas.

Salah Elhossiny shares a few ways to debug serverless API issues.

Rommel Baltazar explains how to reference AWS Lambda Layers in Serverless Framework using a Cloudformation reference.

And finally, in just a few simple steps, Syam Iyer shows you the easiest way to deploy a Typescript Express API serverlessly.

Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) Study Guide
This study guide goes in-depth on the topics you need to pass the CKAD exam from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Learn core principles of services and networking, and gain a thorough understanding of state persistence and volumes. Practice with real sample exercises. Sponsored

Serverless Security 🔒

I came across an article reporting that nearly half of cloud privileges are misconfigured. This actually seems a bit low to me.

Serverless Reads 🤓

AJ Stuyvenberg shares his thoughts on serverless at (team) scale.

Andy Richardson explains why GraphQL requests over HTTP/s are slow and tests whether or not WebSockets might be a better answer.

Riaz Virani has some perspective on choosing serverless as your next backend. Interesting thoughts, but not sure I agree that the “ecosystem isn’t there…to replace traditional server architecture.”

David Anderson shares his 7 tenets of serverless data.

And finally, Emily Forbes asks if the Serverless Revolution is on track or stalling? (sigh) Serverless still has a long way to go, but so does cloud. As more teams move to cloud, serverless services will be key components to their systems, even if there are still some EC2 hold outs.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Marcia Villalba shows you how to get event based notifications depending on your location with Amazon Location Services and EventBridge.

And Ivonne Roberts kicks off a series on how to design a RESTful API on AWS (using serverless services, of course).

New from AWS 🆕

AWS launched the Construct Hub Preview, giving you a one-stop destination for finding, reusing and sharing CDK constructs authored by AWS, AWS Partner Network partners, third parties, and the developer community.

Amazon CloudWatch added support for trimmed mean statistics to cut off outliers, Amazon MQ now supports RabbitMQ version 3.8.17, and the Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) SDK for Java 2.x is now available.

AWS Amplify now supports Sign in with Apple, Amazon CodeGuru Profiler announced a new automated onboarding process for AWS Lambda functions, and the Amazon Redshift Data API added support for multi-statement query execution and parameters.

Plus, EC2-Classic is retiring, and I can only imagine the rest of the EC2 service won’t be far behind. 😉

And AWS support for Internet Explorer 11 is ending because it’s not 2013 anymore.

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

4000 users infrastructure costs this month ~ Paul Johnson
Paul shares how much he pays for 4,000 users on his serverless application per month. $1.80 seems about right.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

August 12, 2021 – Moar Serverless Conference (first 50 get free tickets)

August 15, 2021 – ServerlessDays – Student Edition

August 24 – 26, 2021 – AWS Summit Online – Americas

August 26, 2021 – Serverless NYC Meetup with Ben Ellerby

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 Zack Kanter (@zackkanter). Zack is the founder & CEO of Stedi, a global network structured messaging platform for B2B trade where they provide companies the ability to quickly connect and transact with their trading partners. Featured on the AWS Startups Blog, Stedi is simplifying the B2B transaction process by leveraging a serverless-first architecture. Zack blogs about entrepreneurship, startups, and productivity. As the founder of several startups, Zack is a futurist who shares his philosophy on the TedX stage and through insightful Twitter threads about serverless. Zack, thank you for bringing your vision to life and helping shape the future of serverless! 🙌

Final Thoughts 🤔

Collecting two weeks worth of serverless links is like not checking your email for a few days! But it gave me even more perspective into how much is happening in the serverless ecosystem and the amazing people that are making so many contributions. We’re off again next week as part of our summer schedule, but I look forward to being overwhelmed with another two weeks of awesome content. 😉

Cheers,
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.