Off-by-none: Issue #169

December 21, 2021

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Wrapping up 2021! 🎁

Welcome to Issue #169 of Off-by-none. This issue is sponsored by our friends at Lumigo.

Last week, we gave some straight talk about the AWS outage, we got some new serverless storage, and we took a hard look at AWS DX. This week, we wrap up 2021 with some thoughts on DynamoDB data integrity, look at what’s next for serverless databases, and share plenty of tutorials and reading for the holiday break.

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Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Not a ton of serverless news heading into the end of the year, but Cockroach Labs raised a $278M Series F on a $5B valuation, so there’s that.

Also, Limelight announced General Availability of GraphQL caching and serverless hosting for builders of headless websites. Looks like they’re doing something magical with caching POST request.

BaishanCloud launched their new function@edge serverless product, adding to the long list of edge compute providers.

If you missed all the buzz around re:Invent, Taavi Rehemägi shares 22 serverless updates from re:Invent 2021 you need to know.

And not really news, but Sandro Volpicella shares a list of the best AWS Twitter accounts you should follow in 2022.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

I wrote a post about ensuring data integrity with DynamoDB that shares some tips and tricks to help you keep your data consistent.

Davide de Paolis discusses AWS SDK v2 and v3, and which one you should use, Ravi shares some lessons learnt from using SQS and Lambda, and Mark McCann shares the questions you need to ask for Well-Architected Sustainability.

Shahaf Mezin has some thoughts on getting the most of microservices design with AWS Lambda infrastructure, plus Janakiram MSV explores Amazon SageMaker Serverless Inference for deploying ML models.

Warren Parad wrote this post about some advanced techniques for using AWS Step Functions. I’m not sure about all the advice in here, like reusing the same Lambda or never using Choice states, but there’s a lot of info.

And Scott Wainner and Harpreet Virk share the architecture for modernized database queuing using Amazon SQS and AWS Services.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Peter Grman has a great tutorial on serverless scheduling with Amazon EventBridge, AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB.

Taavi Rehemägi shows you how to 10x development speed with local serverless debugging. It’s vendor-focused, but lots of good details in here for the type of questions you should be asking.

Pubudu Jayawardana shares a pattern for managing webhooks at scale with AWS Serverless, Lee James Gilmore shows you how to create Serverless Private APIs in  2 parts, and Nadir Saghar shares part 1 of how to build a concurrency limiting job scheduler using AWS Step Functions and Lambda.

Speaking of scheduling, Frédéric Barthelet shows you how to develop a serverless scheduler using DynamoDB TTL and Filtered Streams, plus Enes Akar shows you how to use Serverless Kafka as an event source For AWS Lambda.

And finally, Eslam Hefnawy demonstrates how to setup a custom URL shortener in 2 minutes with Serverless Cloud.

Serverless Reads 🤓

James G. Kobielus shares an interesting look back at Data Management in 2021, Guy Harrison asks, “Is serverless the next step for cloud databases?” (Um, yes?), and Rahul Pathak says most AWS analytics customers will go serverless. So there you have it.

Sheen Brisals opines on the significance of Solution Design in serverless developments, Seesaw Learning shares how they use DynamoDB as the foundation of their platform, and Corey Quinn discusses lessons in trust from us-east-1.

And finally, Dr. Werner Vogels shares his tech predictions for 2022 and beyond.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

The Serverless Craic team shares their thoughts on the North Star framework and how to find your org’s purpose. TLDR; Find your path, ignore competition, and don’t play catch up.

In an interview at re:Invent, Paul Duffy explains how startups are taking advantage of AWS at a whole new level.

New from AWS 🆕

Not much new from AWS on the serverless front other than this ?$#@$ announcement about Amazon Translate now providing profanity masking.

Serverless Tools 🛠

Connor Gillis shared Shepherd, an easy-to-use open-source tool for developers to monitor their AWS Lambda functions at a glance.

And while I’m not a huge fan of local emulation, the sls-plugin-sqs-offline just released v2.0.

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 Michael Liendo (@mtliendo). Michael is a Senior Developer Advocate at AWS, and an AWS Community Builder. He’s written for A Cloud Guru, as well as his own personal blog, Focus Otter, and has a YouTube channel of the same name where he dives into topics related to AWS Amplify with guests. Michael has been a guest on podcasts such as Talking Serverless and Serverless Office Hours, and has hosted a variety of meetups. Thank you, Michael, for your commitment to sharing your knowledge with the community!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Wow, what another crazy year for serverless! I hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter as much as I’ve enjoyed collecting and sharing all this amazing content with you.

We’re off next week for the holidays, but we’ll be back with new weekly issues on Tuesday, January 4, 2022. I hope you all get some time to enjoy the holiday season and have a happy and healthy new year.

See you next year,
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.