Off-by-none: Issue #155

September 14, 2021

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Mapping the inevitability of serverless 🗺

Welcome to Issue #155 of Off-by-none. This issue is sponsored by our friends at Lumigo.

Last week, we launched Serverless Cloud, Event-Source Mappings finally got their due, and we learned why infrastructure management is going extinct. This week, we map the inevitability of serverless, IBM dreams of serverless quantum computing, and Elastic gets what they asked for. Plus, we have lots of great content from the serverless community.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

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In this week’s episode of “You get what you ask for”, Amazon has renamed Amazon Elasticsearch Service to Amazon OpenSearch Service, likely ending the need to ever use Elastic again. More in depth information here.

Netlify now integrates with Datadog for management and analytics of Netlify Logs, which makes a ton of sense.

Palo Alto Networks announced some new Prisma Cloud features, as they tend to do quite often.

And HarperDB is “Collapsing the Stack” by introducing Custom Functions. This adds a distributed application development platform with integrated persistence to their existing distributed data platform.

Serverless Stories 📖

Jimmy Dahlqvist discusses serverless projects over the years.

Serverless Use Cases 🗺

Carter Rabasa shares how to build a virtual conference ticket system with Begin, AWS and Puppeteer.

Abdirahman Jama shows you how to set up a ChatOps notifications service within your AWS environment in 5 minutes using EventBridge, Lambda and Python.

And let’s not forget the classic serverless use case of processing web forms with AWS S3, Lambda, and API Gateway.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Soumya Ranjan Sahoo explains AWS Aurora Serverless, Yogesh Nile compares EC2 to Lambda, and Amir Mustafa gives you an introduction to the AWS S3 Service.

Julian Wood continues to help you build well-architected serverless applications, this time focusing on optimizing application costs. Taavi Rehemägi adds some tried and tested strategies reducing AWS Lambda costs as well.

Karan Pratap Singh shares a comparison of AWS SQS vs SNS vs EventBridge, plus Aaron Harris explains multithreading in Lambda.

And finally, Ivan Polovyi builds an AWS CodePipeline for Lambda, once again showing the endless CI/CD possibilities for serverless applications.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Graham Robertson shows you how to build a Discord webhook provider using Serverless Cloud. It really is that easy. 😉

Jones Zachariah Noel teaches you how to use Amazon SES, Leo Campanha deploys an AWS Lambda Function with AWS CLI, and Ankit Gupta has a helpful tutorial on deleting an S3 Bucket that contains many objects in multiple ways.

Ivan Borshchov created a practical guide to the Serverless Framework with AWS, Mohd Afzal shows you how to access Secrets-Manager values in a Serverless Framework script, and someone else created a beginner’s guide to Fauna.

And, Rodney Lab demonstrates using Netlify Functions with SvelteKit. He has his reasons.

Serverless Security 🔒

Okay, not serverless, but Microsoft warns of a cross-account takeover bug in Azure Container Instances. Come on, Microsoft, you don’t want your very good cloud service to be known for the “first cross-account container takeover in the public cloud.”

Serverless Reads 🤓

Emrah Samdan shares his thoughts on the future with Serverless Cloud.

This post dives into IBM Cloud’s serverless roadmap, and how it leads to serverless quantum computing.

Nimbella was acquired by Digital Ocean last week. Rodric Rabbah reflects on his journey and why they strived for serverless, but simple.

Mark Nunnikhoven attempts to explain how a new user can run just one container in the AWS Cloud. Spoiler alert: it isn’t very straightforward.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #110: Mapping the Inevitability of Serverless, Rebecca and I chat with Simon Wardley about the advantages of using maps to gain situational awareness, how the evolution of utilities lets us build things more quickly, why inertia is delaying the inevitable, and a lot more.

Eoin Shanaghy and Luciano Mammino started a new weekly show called AWS Bites. Episode 1 asks (and answers), when should I use serverless?

Marcia Villalba shows you how to monitor cloud applications with Amazon CloudWatch Alarms.

New from AWS 🆕

Here’s a few AWS announcements that caught my eye:

• AWS Gateway Load Balancer achieves PCI DSS Compliance
• Amazon Aurora Serverless v1 supports configurable autoscaling timeout
• Amazon MQ now supports RabbitMQ version 3.8.22
• Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service) now supports Index Transforms
• Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service) now supports Data Streams with OpenSearch 1.0 to simplify management of time-series data
• Amazon SES now supports emails with a message size of up to 40MB
• AWS Amplify announces command hooks to execute custom scripts when running Amplify CLI commands
• AWS CDK releases v1.117.0 – v1.120.0 with improved support for Amazon Kinesis Firehose, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Cognito, and more
• OpenSearch Dashboards Notebooks, a new visual reporting feature, now available on Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service)

Serverless Tools 🛠

From Gijs Nelissen, the lambda-circuitbreaker-node package is a prototype implementation of the circuit breaker pattern in Node/Lambda and can be used to limit the number of calls to a rate-limited 3rd party API.

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

“Show me that your cloud strategy is going to fail without telling me it’s going to fail” ~ Joe Emison

“Decided I wanted to prototype out an app idea tonight. An hour later and I haven’t even started writing because jfc why is dev so f**king complicated now” ~ Mike Julian

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

September 17, 2021 – ServerlessDays – Hamburg

September 28, 2021 – ServerlessDays – Paris

October 11 – 13, 2021 – Serverless Architecture Conference

October 21 & 22, 2021 – ServerlessDays Warsaw

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 Ivonne Roberts (@ivlo11). Ivonne was recently named an AWS Serverless Hero, and is currently a Senior Software Architect, Principal Engineer at Edelman Financial Engines. Since joining Edelman, Ivonne and her team have been critical in the company’s adoption of a serverless-first software development philosophy. Additionally, Ivonne has a goal to “demystify” serverless and pave the way for adoption through her blog and her YouTube channel called Serverless DevWidgets, which offers some great content to help newcomers build serverless web applications on AWS Cloud. The community truly appreciates your work, and feels your impact. Thank you, Ivonne!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Wow, and here I was thinking things couldn’t possibly get busier. I wanted to give a quick shout out to the organizers of ServerlessDays Nashville for putting on another fabulous conference (even though it had to be remote) and inviting me to speak. I miss in-person conferences and getting to meet all the amazing people in the serverless space. Let’s keep doing our part so that next year I can be listening to some Honky Tonk on Broadway.

Until 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.