Off-by-none: Issue #173

January 25, 2022

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Welcome to Issue #173 of Off-by-none. This issue is sponsored by our friends at Upstash.

Last week, DynamoDB turned 10, Eleventy 1.0 launched with a serverless plugin, and we looked at the future of low-code. This week, AWS adds more batching controls, containers and serverless get another comparison, and we learn how to unleash the power of serverless for solo developers. Plus, there’s plenty of amazing content from the serverless community. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get started!

Serverless Data for Redis and Kafka
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Serverless News & Announcements 📣

This past week, AWS introduced AWS Lambda batching controls for message broker services, Knative announced v1.1 and applied to become a CNCF Incubating Project, and Palo Alto Networks released their report on the State of Cloud Native Security.

Microsoft previews “Enterprise-Grade” Edge functionality for their Azure Static Web Apps, Dashbird now integrates with 5 new AWS services, and Aleph.im raised $10m to develop decentralized computing solutions (more on what that actually means here).

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Andrew JR shared some general design principles for serverless applications in AWS. There’s some pretty good advice in here.

Salvatore Cozzubo demonstrates how to use AWS S3 Select with Node.js. This is a super powerful feature that more people need to know about.

Charles Géry and Guillaume Lagrange tested the best serverless monitoring solutions so we don’t have to and shared their results. Diego Rojas explains what should be monitored.

Brian McNamara explains why Vendia combined GraphQL and a Serverless Distributed Ledger for their Vendia Share product.

Lee James Gilmore published Part 3 of his series on Serverless Caching Strategies, this one focusing on the Lambda Runtime.

Taavi Rehemägi discusses containers vs. serverless from a DevOps standpoint. I think there are a lot of interesting points in here, and much of it comes down to the operational complexity you’re willing to take on.

Sabin Adams explains what happens when serverless meets traditional relational databases and Lukas Fruntke shares some best practices for using AWS Step Functions.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

So many great tutorials this week. Jones Zachariah Noel shows you how to use Step Functions to make your text-based images searchable, Robert Sebescen shows web developers how to go serverless, and Suhyun Kim explains how to do Machine Learning serverlessly.

Martin Patino discusses why Architect is an easy way to jump into the serverless world. My second favorite framework, BTW! 😉

Matt Morgan shares a very helpful post on how to use Source Maps in TypeScript Lambda Functions (with benchmarks). Super important for debugging!

Rashida Haji walks you through the incredibly painful process of setting up a serverless NAT Gateway to get a static IP. Maybe not so painful to set up, but certainly when you get the bill.

Jerome Decoster builds out disaster recovery with multi region architecture, Norberto Santiago builds his first Cloudflare Worker, and Kay Plößer remixes serverless side rendering with Remix.

Serverless Security 🔒

It seems no one wants to write about Serverless Security anymore, but luckily Wojciech Matuszewski shared this excellent piece on enforcing compliance with AWS CDK Aspects.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Two great posts about Serverless Cloud this week from another two awesome folks on the Cloud team. Emrah Samdan explains how to unleash the power of serverless for solo developers, and Russ Schick explains how Serverless Cloud works (Part 1).

Sheen Brisals tells us to think sustainability while developing serverless applications. And we should listen to him.

Christoph Grotz talks about the pitfalls of scaling on serverless platforms.

Ashish Bhalgat and Surya Sreedevi Vedula presented a talk debating Serverless vs. Kubernetes when deploying microservices. I think this is one of the more balanced pieces I've read about this.

Paul Swail wants you to draw your serverless-first line in the sand.

AWS reflects on the work of Swami Sivasubramanian and Werner Vogels 10 years after the launch of Amazon DynamoDB.

Mark McCann asks, “Is it time to combine Serverless and SaaS?” Probably.

And not serverless related, but this piece by Sohale Andrus Mortazavi suggesting that cryptocurrency is a giant Ponzi scheme is well worth the read, and may change your thinking on investing in cryptocurrency.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Marcia Villalba shows you how to filter events before your Lambda function starts to save time and money!

And the Serverless Craic team shares their guide to the AWS Security Pillar.

New from AWS 🆕

Plenty of really cool launches from AWS recently. Here are some of my favorites.

• Amazon GuardDuty now detects EC2 instance credentials used from another AWS account
• Amazon Interactive Video Service adds thumbnail configuration
• Amazon MQ now supports RabbitMQ version 3.8.26
• AWS Security Hub integrates with AWS Health
• Amazon Rekognition improves accuracy of Content Moderation for Video
• Announcing matrix routing for Amazon Location Service
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now offers a free trial
• AWS Lambda now supports Max Batching Window for Amazon MSK, Apache Kafka, Amazon MQ for Apache Active MQ and RabbitMQ as event sources
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) adds support for $mergeObjects and $reduce
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) adds additional Geospatial query capabilities
• Amazon Location Service enables request-based pricing for all customer use cases

Serverless Tools 🛠

IAM Legend – AWS IAM actions autocomplete, documentation and wildcard resolution for Visual Studio Code. Supports Serverless Framework, AWS SAM, CloudFormation and Terraform.

Serverless Rust Starter by Arseny Yankovsky – A simple starter project with Rust and the Serverless Framework.

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

Compression, i.e. minimizing redundancy, is a poor heuristic to follow to generate good programming abstractions. Good abstractions don’t make your code shorter, they make it easy to grasp (matching intuitive mental models), easy to read, easy to maintain and extend over time. ~ François Chollet

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

January 26, 2022 – AWS Startup Showcase Season 2 Episode 1 | Open Cloud Innovations

February 7, 2022 – Ask all your CDK related questions to the authors of the CDK Book!

April 4–6, 2022 – Serverless Architecture Conference

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 Kristi Perrault (@kperreault95). Kristi is a Senior Software Engineer at Liberty Mutual Insurance, and a Women Who Code member and advocate. Her background is in multiple disciplines of engineering, with a preference to cloud and Serverless technologies, and has recently published posts on Medium on topics such as supporting women in tech, serverless, robotics, and VR. Thanks for joining us in the serverless community, Kristi!

Final Thoughts 🤔

This was another really long one, but there were just so many great articles and tutorials to share. Don't forget to sign up for my upcoming DynamoDB modeling course, and check out the new Serverless Cloud Medium publication (maybe even give it a follow 🤷‍♂️). Lots more serverless is coming this year, so stay tuned.

Cheers,
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.