Off-by-none: Issue #158

October 5, 2021

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Wait, how much are your egress fees? 💰

Welcome to Issue #158 of Off-by-none. This issue is sponsored by our friends at Lumigo and Courier.

Last week, AWS proposed to Stackery, Lambda got an ML team, and we had our first case of #ServerlessConferenceFOMO since before the pandemic. This week, Lambda supports Graviton2, Step Functions makes friends with everyone, and Cloudflare kicks S3 in the shins. Plus, we have a bunch of great serverless content from the community.

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Serverless News & Announcements 📣

It seems like pre:Invent is already here! For those of you who missed it, AWS Lambda Functions now support Graviton2 processors. Danilo Poccia explains how running your functions on Graviton2 can get you up to 34% better price performance. Oğuzhan Özdemir dives deeper into performance and Yan Cui explains what it means for you. And in case you’re wondering, both AWS SAM and the Serverless Framework have support for it.

In other crazy AWS news, AWS Step Functions added support for over 200 AWS Services with AWS SDK Integration. Marcia Villalba tells you how it enables easier workflow automation, but most importantly for me, this gets us closer to a #functionless future.

Another exciting announcement, AWS Lambda now supports triggering Lambda functions from an Amazon SQS queue in a different account. This might not seem like a big deal, but I shared some thoughts on why it’s hugely important.

And if you want to see all the amazing things AWS did with serverless over the last quarter, check out James Beswick’s ICYMI: Serverless Q3 2021.

In other cloud news, AntStack earned the Advanced Consulting Partner Status (congrats to them), plus Lyrid.io announced a seed investment to keep building out their multi-cloud infrastructure platform provider service.

In some not-so-great news, the Ladybug Podcast is going on an indefinite hiatus. There is a huge archive of amazing content for you to listen to, so definitely check that out. But hopefully this isn’t the end. 🐞

Another huge announcement this week, was the introduction of Cloudflare R2 Storage. It’s self described as “Rapid and Reliable Object Storage, minus the egress fees.” No egress fees?!? Corey Quinn does some math for you.

And while that news was hugely disruptive, how about Cloudflare announcing their Distributed Web Gateways Private Beta that will “unlock the Web3 Metaverse and Decentralized Finance for everyone.” I’m not sure I fully understand what that means, but Cloudflare attempts to outline their vision for a decentralized web.

Still not sure what Web3 is? Maybe this post by Nader Dabit will help explain this Decentralized Internet of the Future. Or read up about the Blockchain on AWS, which claims that 25% of Ethereum nodes in the world run on their cloud.

Still confused? Maybe the cast of SNL can help by explaining NFTs?

Serverless Use Cases 🗺

Couple of interesting use cases this week, including sending PR alerts to Slack using AWS Serverless and AWS CDK, and Zhen Kai sharing how to create a simple serverless Telegram Bot with AWS Lambda.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

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Paolo Fusari shares part 6 of his Practical Guide to Surviving AWS SAM.

Wesley Chun explores serverless with a nebulous app, which you can deploy to App Engine, Cloud Functions, or Cloud Run. Really interesting intersection of these three services in which all can support the exact same application code.

Markus Freericks shares the case of the missing path in a Lambda event. The mystery was caused by some misunderstandings that are probably all too common when working with serverless applications.

And Enes Akar has some thoughts on the best databases for serverless.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Mahesh Samudra gives you a starter on going serverless (in 2 parts).

Anthony Campolo shows you three ways to deploy a serverless graphQL API.

Klee Thomas walks you through building your first Cloudflare worker.

Ben Force gives you some (much needed) guidance on connecting event busses across AWS accounts.

Siarhei Kazhura helps you build an API poller with AWS Step Functions and AWS Lambda.

Lee James Gilmore teaches you how to use serverless synthetic canaries.

Subbusainath Rengasamy show you how to deploy an s3 Bucket using AWS CDK Typescript with a Limited Bucket Policy.

If you want more cross account stuff, Lotfi Mouhib shows you how to use Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight in a cross-account environment.

And finally, Yuri Gomes gives you some tips for optimizing serverless Cold Starts. Thank you for not pushing “warming” hacks.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Isaac Sacolick discusses how cloud-native apps and microservices impact the development process.

Shreya Gupta explains the hype around serverless and why student engineers should buy-in. +100 to this advice.

Raja Rao (the Head of Growth Marketing at Redis) pushes the reasons why you should consider a Databaseless architecture. A bit biased, sure, but he’s not wrong.

Jack Ellis explains why his team ditched DynamoDB. At the end of the day, it might have been a case of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole (i.e. OLAP vs OLTP), but nothing is ever a silver bullet.

Speaking of DynamoDB, Remi suggests that the DERN stack is the perfect alternative to a MERN stack with serverless.

And last but not least, Nader Dabit says that “the Cloud is your development environment.” He demos Gitpod in here, but this is where things are going. Even SAM Accelerate is trying to get you to develop in the cloud so you have high fidelity testing environments.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #113: Serverless for Startups, Rebecca and I chat with Chris Munns about the evolution of serverless over the last few years, how the learning curve affects adoption, what goes into building an effective developer advocacy team, and advice for startups looking to get started with the cloud.

Marcia Villalba show you how to do Structured Logging and Custom Metrics in your serverless applications.

I spoke at ServerlessDays Nashville the other week and gave a talk on Optimizing Serverless Development Workflows.

And Luc van Donkersgoed gave a great talk recently on Event-Driven Architecture at PostNL scale.

New from AWS 🆕

Some other interesting AWS announcements:

• Announcing General Availability of Amplify Geo for AWS Amplify
• Now programmatically manage alternate contacts on AWS accounts
• AWS announces the general availability of AWS Cloud Control API
• Amazon Redshift announces the next generation of Amazon Redshift Query Editor

Serverless Tools 🛠

Tristan Rigaut shares how to do secure serverless file uploads and downloads on AWS with various Access Control Lists using a Serverless Framework stack called S4.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

October 11 – 13, 2021 – Serverless Architecture Conference

October 21 & 22, 2021 – ServerlessDays Warsaw

October 26 – 28, 2021 – Monitoring Kubernetes vs. Serverless-based Applications at Microservices World

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 Daniel Kim (​​@learnwdaniel). Daniel is a Senior Developer Advocate at New Relic, working in Developer Relations and Product Marketing. He’s also the founder of Bit Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to making tech accessible to underserved communities through inclusive developer education. Daniel is also slated to speak at Jamstack Conf in October, and had made an appearance on Serverless Chats. Thank you, Daniel, for empowering students in tech and ensuring equal access to developer education!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Lots of really important announcements this week. I’m not 100% sure how Cloudflare’s R2 pricing is sustainable, but you can bet your bottom dollar that I’ll be looking at integrating it into my serverless solutions. Maybe it’ll be a forcing function for AWS to reevaluate its egress pricing, but that might also cut their profits in half. 😬

I’m also excited about Graviton2 support and the Step Functions announcement. We’re just at the beginning of pre:Invent, and I have a feeling that the firehose is about to be opened.

Until next time,
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.