Off-by-none: Issue #154

September 7, 2021

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Infrastructure management is going extinct 🦖

Welcome to Issue #154 of Off-by-none. This issue is sponsored by our friends at Lumigo.

Last week, CloudFormation took a huge step in the right DX direction, Serverless Chats came back from a summer break, and we got a glimpse at the future of self provisioning runtimes. This week, we launch Serverless Cloud, Event-Source Mappings finally get their due, and we learn why infrastructure management is going extinct. Plus, we’ve got plenty of awesome serverless content from the community.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

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Big news this week for me (and the Serverless community at large), was the Exclusive Launch of Serverless Cloud. Our team has been working on this for quite some time, so if you’re a JavaScript/TypeScript developer looking for a code only serverless developer experience, give it a look.

In other serverless platform news, Nimbella has been acquired by DigitalOcean (congrats to Rodric and the team over there!), HUAWEI’s AppGallery Connect recently rolled out a bunch of new serverless services, and Verizon’s CDN service has been renamed to Edgecast, one more step towards heating up the serverless edge compute space.

And AWS launched cross-account event discovery for the Amazon EventBridge schema registry. Definitely worth checking out.

Serverless Stories 📖

Jerrel Fielder shares the story of how his team migrated their Spring boot App to AWS Lambda functions with Thundra.

Gareth Cronin takes you through his experience adding server-side functions to his tiny responsive web apps.

Serverless Use Cases 🗺

Mike Timofiiv explains how and why he built a favicon fetching service using AWS Lambda.

Ray Schouwenaar built SocialUniqorn to help you compose Twitter threads, all without servers.

SSH to EC2 instances via an AWS Lambda Function makes for some interesting use cases. Tebogo Moloi explains.

And Joakim Wånggren walks us through building a serverless email delivery service on AWS.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Wojciech Matuszewski takes the Circuit Breaker pattern a step further with the unsung hero of serverless apps – Event Source Mappings.

Two helpful posts that explain what is AWS Glue? and what is AWS Athena? Tutorials included.

Robert Slootjes explains his approach to building a dynamic rate cron using Step Functions in 2018 versus 2021. I love solutions where Lambda functions don’t need to know their context.

I love exploring new products, and I thought these two reviews were worth sharing. One is for Upstash (serverless Redis) and the other is PlanetScale, horizontally scalable MySQL in the cloud.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Another week, another giant batch of serverless tutorials. Here are a few I thought looked interesting.

Anitha Deenadayalan has a very cool post on building a serverless distributed application using a saga orchestration pattern. Lots to learn in here.

Eric Cabrel Tiogo shows us how to use a Lambda container with the Serverless Framework, Parth Trambadiya teaches Infrastructure as Code with AWS Cognito, Federated Identity, and Serverless, and Gerard Hynes demonstrates how to overcome CORS with serverless functions.

For you AppSyncers/Amplifiers, Robert Berger walks you through accessing AppSync APIs that require Cognito logins outside of Amplify, Mohammed Ali Chherawalla explains the process of resolving mutations in AppSync directly off of Aurora Serverless, and Jones Zachariah Noel shows you how to assign a custom domain on Amplify with Route53.

Anthony Campolo explains how to deploy a Docker container on AWS Lambda, plus he also shared a first look at Serverless Cloud. 😉

Mohd Afzal shows us how to access Secrets-Manager values in a Serverless Framework script, Richard Miles tells you how to run serverless Step Functions locally, and if you love Java, let Mark Sailes show you how to increase performance of Java AWS Lambda functions using tiered compilation.

Alex Casalboni has a great piece on how to accelerate performance and availability of multi-region applications with Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points.

And last but not least, Ken Collins shares his thoughts on getting started with GitHub Codespaces from a serverless perspective.

Serverless Security 🔒

Johannes Späth asks if your AWS Account is vulnerable to the newest attack presented at Black Hat 2021? I haven’t tried this myself (and this is a vendor piece), but it seems legit.

A move away from IaC to provide better security? Bill Doerrfeld explains in The Last Cloud-Native Puzzle Piece: Security Automation.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Matt Asay suggests that open source is selfish, at least for corporations. He’s not wrong.

Congrats to Forrest Brazeal who is now the Head of Content at Google Cloud. Corey Quinn shares a wonderful piece about why AWS made a huge mistake losing him from the AWS community.

Brian Kaufman says the next phase of enterprise application delivery is Cloud Run. 🤔

An interesting piece by Jakub Lewkowicz that examines infrastructure management going extinct with serverless.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #109: Serverless for Newbies, Rebecca and I chat with Emily Shea about how she got started with serverless, the technical challenges she faced, the hurdles she overcame, and how she uses that to help her customers become better serverless practitioners.

Marcia Villalba shares best practices for architecting your cloud apps with an introduction to the Well-Architected Framework. Plus, she and Gunnar Grosch show you how to add location data to applications with Amazon Location Service.

New from AWS 🆕

Lots of AWS announcements this week, but not too many on the serverless side of things. Here are some that are tangentially related.

• Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points accelerate access to replicated data sets by up to 60%
• Amazon Elastic File System introduces Intelligent-Tiering to automatically optimize storage costs
• Amazon EBS direct APIs now supports creating 64 TB EBS Snapshots
• AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry adds support for Amazon ECS in Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights and metrics support for AWS Lambda applications in Amazon Managed Prometheus (Preview)
• Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering further automates storage cost savings by removing the minimum storage duration and monitoring and automation charge for small objects
• AWS Transfer Family simplifies managed file transfer workflows with low code automation
• AWS Lambda now supports AWS PrivateLink in previously unsupported Availability Zones

Serverless Tools 🛠

Harinder Seera shares AWS SQS Workbench, a simple and non-technical way to access AWS SQS.

Farmin F. created a PasswordLess Authentication construct for the AWS CDK.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

September 14, 2021 – ServerlessDays – Nashville

September 17, 2021 – ServerlessDays – Hamburg

September 28, 2021 – ServerlessDays – Paris

October 11 – 13, 2021 – Serverless Architecture Conference

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 Alejandra Quetzalli (@QuetzalliAle). Alejandra is a Senior OSS Technical Writer at Postman focused solely on the OSS initiative AsyncAPI. She writes and speaks about tech on her website and is the Founder and CEO of sheCodesNow, where they share free programming classes to empower aspiring women in tech. Alejandra, we salute you for solving problems and making tech more accessible to everyone!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Another busy week for the serverless community. Lots of awesome announcements, new products and services, and plenty of content and tutorials to share. I love how much this community has grown and seeing all the new faces and ideas. If you know anyone in the space that I’m missing, please let me know who they are.

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.