Off-by-none: Issue #156

September 21, 2021

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Infrastructure as SQL? 😳

Welcome to Issue #156 of Off-by-none. This issue is sponsored by our friends at Lumigo.

Last week, we mapped the inevitability of serverless, IBM set the stage for serverless quantum computing, and AWS renamed ElasticSearch. This week, Cloudflare Workers turn 4, we get an ultimate guide to re:Invent, and someone thought Infrastructure as SQL was a good idea. Plus, we share plenty of amazing serverless content from the community.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Live event: How GetFlex scales its rent payments service using a serverless architecture
Join us for a discussion featuring Kevin O’Neill, GetFlex CTO, and Erez Berkner, co-founder and CEO of Lumigo, on how GetFlex scales using AWS Lambda and other serverless services. This is part of the DevOps track of the AWS Startup Showcase. Wed, Sep 22, 10:30 AM PT. Sponsored

It’s the end of a serverless era as Chris Munns is moving on from leading the Serverless DA team. His new role is Tech Lead/Advisor for the Startup Solution Architecture team at AWS. Thanks for all you’ve contributed to the serverless ecosystem!

In other AWS Startup news, they announce Build on AWS for Startups. It’s a collection of infrastructure templates and reference architectures covering a wide variety of solutions curated specifically for startups that’ll get you heading down the right path.

In other cloud news, you can now run more workloads on Google Cloud Run with new CPU allocation controls, Cloudflare Workers turn 4(ish), and Brytlyt unleashes serverless GPU-acceleration for analytics.

And if you’re looking for another serverless database service, Xata is trying to be just that.

Serverless Stories 📖

Ryan Cormack explains how his team used one Lambda, with many languages.

Igot Soraka shares some lessons learned after moving from CloudFormation to CDK.

David Ting gives us his solution for DynamoDB batchWriteItem incomplete upload with  unprocessed items.

Serverless Use Cases 🗺

Joakim Wånggren gives us an example of the ever-popular Slack bot with Serverless Framework use case.

Jean Baptiste Muscat published part 3 of his Detecting Locked Bicycle Stations: An AWS Serverless Story series.

Michael Hoffmann shares a straightforward use case for tracking Twitter follower growth over time using a serverless Node.js API on AWS Amplify.

Aaron Brighton explains the need for a pandemic-driven bubble tea availability monitoring solution using Amazon Pinpoint, Location Service, Lambda, EventBridge, Step Functions, and more.

And finally, Devin Fitzsimons collected some highlights from a Twitter question about DynamoDB Stream use cases.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Michael Wittig helps you learn about five different types of API Gateways offered by AWS.

If you’re only familiar with one cloud service, perhaps an exploration using OCI Functions (that’s Oracle) would be worth a look.

Talia Nassi has an awesome post on how to get started with testing serverless applications, Jaewoo Ahn explains HTTP Proxy in HTTP API, and Miguel Bebensee discusses scaling complex processes with AWS Step Functions.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

James Beswick adds to his ever-growing compendium of amazing serverless blog posts with part 2 of building a serverless GIF generator with AWS Lambda.

And speaking of Group-based auth with AppSync Lambda authorizer

Raj Durai teaches us how to build a serverless CRUD API using AWS in less than 30 minutes.

Ivan Borshchov offers up a Serverless framework life hack that could save you hundreds of hours. TLDR; search GitHub.

Serverless Security 🔒

Mark Nunnikhoven shares a presentation on how to build strong security guardrails in the AWS Cloud with minimal effort. You should really watch/read this.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Also from Mark Nunnikhoven is The Ultimate Guide to AWS re:Invent 2021. Is this really going to happen in person? 🤷‍♂️

Andrew Walker shares some thoughts on why serverless projects are 5x faster and 50% lower cost.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #111: Amplifying Serverless Developers, Rebecca and I chat with Ali Spittel about the ongoing evolution of AWS Amplify, why developers should be embracing low-code frameworks and platforms, why developers shouldn’t feel like they need to know everything, and so much more.

Marcia Villalba invited me on her show to talk about the role of a developer in the cloud, then she let me demo Serverless Cloud!

Tomasz Lakomy shares his talk from the recent Shift Conference about building a Serverless Compute Platform with AWS and TypeScript.

New from AWS 🆕

Just a few announcements from AWS this week, including the announcement of Amazon MSK Connect, which lets you run serverless Kafka Connect clusters in Amazon MSK.

Plus, Amazon Transcribe now supports redaction of personal identifiable information (PII) for streaming transcriptions, which is pretty cool.

And AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports Dynamic Instance Type Selection, now giving you the option to choose compatible instance types for your applications.

Serverless Tools 🛠

Anthony Campolo shares a first look at graphQL helix.

Maciej Winnicki and Tomasz Łakomy launched Cloudash, which they say is serverless monitoring simplified.

Somebody came up with the idea of Infrastructure as SQL. So many emotions. 😳

And new programming language called Clio (an extremely fast, multi-threaded code on the browser) is now a thing. Very interesting.

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

“Hypothetical: you have many AWS accounts, many Lambda functions, many API gateways, many subdomains and extremely productive colleagues. How do you go from seeing a URL in the browser devtools to finding the code that handles it on GitHub?” ~ Aidan W Steele
This isn’t a hypothetical. It’s literally what serverless devs go through every single day.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

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 Josh Proto (@ServerlessJosh). Josh is the Chief Operating Officer at Serverless Guru, a leader in serverless consulting, development, cloud computing services and more. In addition to this role, Josh is also an AWS Community Builder, and the co-host of both Talking Serverless and Serverless Economics. In addition to the many conversations he has on his podcasts with members of the serverless community, Josh has spoken at serverless community events, and is committed to helping those along every step of their serverless journey. Thank you, Josh!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Hard to believe that CloudFlare Workers are already 4 years old, Lambda is almost 7, and Google Cloud Run is continuing to innovate on what it means to be serverless. We also have Corey Quinn saying nice things about Oracle, Forrest Brazeal explaining why Google Cloud’s approach to identity is so good, and Chris Munns (a name inseparable from serverless) moving on to something new. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!

But this also shows the amazing and continued evolution of serverless. The ecosystem continues to expand with new technologies, new faces, and new approaches to building modern applications in the cloud. I remember the “early” days of serverless, the promise it showed, and the people that were passionate about it. There’s a time and place for nostalgia, but the future has never been so exciting, and now’s the time to continue to ask “why not?” and push the limits even further.

See you in the future,
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.