Off-by-none: Issue #162

November 2, 2021

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Accelerating Serverless Development 👩‍💻

Welcome to Issue #162 of Off-by-none. This issue is sponsored by our friends at Lumigo, Courier, and Cockroach Labs.

Last week, a new serverless database launched, we did a deep dive on serverless workflows with Step Functions, and we asked if serverless needs to get opinionated. This week, Lumigo gets an investment, AWS accelerates serverless development, and Next.js is the next big thing, again. Plus, we have lots of amazing content from the serverless community.

Webinar: Overcoming common serverless challenges in production apps
Join Serverless Guru founder Ryan Jones and AWS Serverless Hero and Lumigo Developer Advocate Yan Cui, as they dive into some common challenges in production serverless applications they have seen and how they’ve built solutions to overcome them. Save your spot! Fri, Nov 19, 10:00 AM PT Sponsored

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Lots of exciting announcements this week, including today’s announcement that Lumigo raised $29 million in new funding and will extend their monitoring capabilities to support containers and Kubernetes.

AWS announced AWS SAM Accelerate to quickly test code changes against the cloud. This is a great feature that will help move us towards a world were we test our code against real infrastructure. Eric Johnson explains the capabilities in more depth.

AWS also announced that Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL is now generally available. This is a really cool service that should enable MSSQL users to migrate to Postgres without having to change any code. And, they’re open-sourcing it.

A few people also shared that Cisco is sunsetting Epsagon and giving users 30 days to find an alternative. This apparently came in the form of an email to their customer. 🙁

And finally, Next.js Conf was last week and announced Next.js 12 as the SDK for the web – enabling dynamic web sites at the speed of static. This includes the introduction of edge functions as well as several other very cool features.

Serverless Stories 📖

Ryan Cormack recounts how his team optimized for the customer when building out a serverless application.

Martin Pllu share how unwaste.io built a digital platform to tackle the global plastic waste crisis. Using a serverless backend, of course.

Meet the world’s most evolved SQL database.
You don’t even know it’s there…CockroachDB Serverless automatically scales, survives, and thrives so you can focus on building your application. Never worry about your database again. Sponsored

Serverless Use Cases 🗺

Ben Johnson shows you how to build serverless email notifications in AWS.

Joakim Wånggren has a cool use case for adding call routing to your on-call rotation with Twilio and Lambda.

And Cristian Gherghinescu shares a serverless solution to offload polling for asynchronous operation status using Amazon S3. This is quite ingenious.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Eetu Tuomala share a serverless architecture pattern library that you might be interested in, Ran Isenberg details some AWS Lambda Environment variable best practices, and Guillaume Blaquiere asks (and answers) whether or not the region affects the performance of Cloud Run and Cloud Functions?

Paweł Piwosz explains how to enable API Gateway logs and shows you how to make AWS CloudWatch Contributor Insights useful.

Christian Bonzelet cleverly benchmarks AWS Step function versus AWS Lambda performance.

And Lee James Gilmore walks us through a serverless threat modeling exercise.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

As always, this week wasn’t short on serverless tutorials.

Sheen Brisals shares a great post on Amazon EventBridge and how to manage API connection credentials with AWS Secrets Manager.

Paul Garnier explains AWS Lambda and shared layers for Python, Lukonde Mwila shows you how to use Terraform to deploy Lambda serverless functions, and Lashan Faliq walks you through creating your first simple serverless app with AWS CDK.

Ajay Raj Nelapudi teaches you how to do request signing with IAM Roles for unsupported Amazon OpenSearch Service clients.

Ankan Bag explains how to extract zip files from an S3 bucket using Node.js.

And Michael Liendo has a very lengthy post showing you how to combine NextJS, AWS Amplify and Stripe to build a catering app. And this is just part one.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Esther Shein breaks down an IBM study suggesting that a single-vendor approach to cloud is dead. Only 2% of respondents are using a single cloud provider.

There was also this post asking whether or not traditional software patterns are still needed in serverless functions.

The Developer’s Guide To Notification Systems
Are you building/re-vamping your notification system? You should know the requirements for your fellow developers and non-technical teammates who will be creating the notifications for your end users. Understanding these personas will help you scale more reliably. Sponsored

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #117: Serverless Cloud, Rebecca and I chatted with Doug Moscrop, Eslam Hefnawy, and Ben Miner from Serverless, Inc. about the launch of Serverless Cloud, how serverless shifts developer responsibility, the limitations and advantages of abstractions, the importance of developer experience, and so much more.

Marcia Villalba shows you how to create a personal development environment using CDK Pipelines.

Peter Elger and Eóin Shanaghy show you how to build a serverless “Cat Detector” system interactively.

And Patrick Flor and Alex Pearson gave a great talk at the Strange Loop Conference about Branchstack, a method for branching infra for better development. Very interesting stuff, especially since it’s the exact type of thing I’ve been working on with my team.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are a few announcements from AWS this week that caught my eye.

• AWS Fargate now supports Amazon ECS Windows containers
• Improved celebrity recognition is now available for Amazon Rekognition Video
• Amazon MemoryDB for Redis now supports AWS CloudFormation
• Disable default reverse DNS rules with Route 53 Resolver
• Amazon Lightsail now supports AWS CloudFormation for instances, disks and databases
• Amazon Textract launches TIFF support and adds asynchronous support for receipts and invoices processing
• Amazon Connect Chat adds real-time message streaming APIs
• Amazon Simple Email Service now offers a new console experience

Serverless Tools 🛠

SenseDeep DynamoDB Studio – a complete DynamoDB developer studio to support your DynamoDB designs and single-table development.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

November 3 & 4, 2021 – CascadiaJS 2021

November 17 & 18, 2021 – Serverless Summit 21

November 29, 2021 – Help Make BugBusting History at AWS re:Invent 2021

November 29 – December 3, 2021 – AWS re:Invent

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 Leon Stitger (@retgits). Leon is a Principal Product Manager for Serverless at Lightbend. As part of his role, Leon helps developers accelerate their serverless journey, leveraging both open source and commercial tools. Before Lightbend, Leon was a Cloud Developer Advocate, and later a Product Manager – App Toolkit for VMWare. With several blog posts and presentations under his belt, Leon is helping to grow the knowledge base of the community. Thank you, Leon, for your continued support of and participation in serverless!

Final Thoughts 🤔

More exciting serverless times as we count down to re:Invent. Congrats to the team at Lumigo (a great friend of the newsletter and podcast) on their latest funding round. It’s always exciting to see what startups can do (especially serverless ones) with a nice capital infusion. Also, if you missed Next.js conf, definitely check out some of the really interesting things they are doing with frontend (and serverless edge functions). The progress all around is amazing.

See you 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.