Off-by-none: Issue #174

February 1, 2022

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Serverless Framework v3! 🙌

Welcome to Issue #174 of Off-by-none. This issue is sponsored by our friends at Upstash.

Last week, AWS added more batching controls, containers and serverless got compared again, and we learned how to unleash the power of serverless for solo developers. This week, Serverless Framework v3 goes live, Kinesis points the Data Firehose at Honeycomb, and we enter the Golden Age of full-stack JavaScript. Plus, there’s lots of great serverless content from the community.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

A lot has happened with serverless (including this great newsletter post by Jones Zachariah Noel N). Let’s jump right in!

Serverless Framework v3 is now Live, and it truly is amazing. Congrats to the team and the community for getting to this milestone. Julia Schmidt has a good post on the release as well.

Google is expanding support for early-stage startups on Google Cloud.

Sync Computing emerged from stealth with $6.1M in funding and is apparently competing with AWS Lambda and other FaaS providers. Plus, Tilo raised a seed round to tackle unstructured data sets with a serverless platform.

Nhost v2 launched with some updated features including built in authentication and serverless functions.

And Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose now delivers to Honeycomb, which is absolutely amazing. I’d like to see more integrations like this from AWS in the future (and apparently it works with Datadog, too).

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Alex Ellis takes a look at the architecture of OpenFaaS and explains why you no longer need to worry about coldstarts.

Part 4 of Lee James Gilmore’s Serverless Caching Strategies  series focuses on AppSync.

John Gilbert explains why you should focus on Actors and their Activities when designing serverless microservices.

Taavi Rehemägi answers your biggest AWS Lambda questions.

And Sebastian Kubiak gives a rundown comparing Amazon DynamoDB vs Azure CosmosDB.

Serverless Data for Redis and Kafka
Upstash gives you Serverless Redis and Kafka with per request pricing. Thanks to Global replication and built-in REST API, you can use Upstash in AWS Lambda and Cloudflare Workers with low latency and zero pain. No credit card required to start with the free tier. Sponsored

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

So many amazing tutorials this week, including some excellent ones from the Serverless Cloud team. Eslam Hefnawy shows you how to use MongoDB with Serverless Cloud and Ben Miner teaches you how to build a Spotify Playlist Slackbot with Serverless Cloud.

And for regular Serverless Framework users, Gareth McCumskey has a great getting started post and video to check out. Also, Frédéric Barthelet has an excellent post on using the Serverless Framework with the AWS CDK.

There was a really good DynamoDB tutorial from Sarit Pinhas on  everything you need to know about Single Table Design. Plus, Haiko van der Schaaf explains how to do Single Table Design in his recent post as well.

Wojciech Matuszewski explains Amazon SQS to AWS Lambda error handling, Davide de Paolis teaches you how to filter Lambda events from a DynamoDB Stream (with the CDK), and Connor McCrory sets up hosting for a serverless web app using AWS Amplify (the hosting service, not the framework).

Wordle is all the rage, but apparently it was easy to reverse engineer and figure out the next day’s word. Haider Ali Punjabi shows you how to create a secure Wordle using Serverless functions, we’ll see if the NYTimes heeds the advice.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Stu Miniman chats with Deepak Singh about why today’s cloud is built on containers (but also serverless).

Mike Melanson has a great post that asks will 2022 be a Golden Age for full-stack JavaScript? This basically describes what we’re doing at Serverless Cloud.

Charles Chen wrote a piece contending that Thoughtworks missed the mark in their article about Serverless vs. Kubernetes. I don’t entirely disagree, but I do think that Fargate and Google Cloud Run are like Hybrid cars. You’re just delaying the inevitable. 😉

Mark Faiers continues his series on building a fake Serverless Bank, Yonatan Korem finds the limitations of AWS Amplify, and AWS shares a post on how Codacy measures developer productivity using AWS Serverless.

Finally, Ismail Egilmez explains why you should treat your main branch as production.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Marcia Villalba shows you the new DynamoDB table class and gives a nice demo with TTLs and Streams.

The Serverless Craic team shares their guide to the AWS Reliability Pillar.

And here are some recent episodes of Serverless Office Hours: AWS Lambda – Event source filtering, AWS Lambda – Lambda Powertools, and AWS AppSync – New features!

New from AWS 🆕

Plenty of interesting updates from the teams at AWS this week:

• Amazon MSK now offers the ability to scale storage throughput up to 1000 MiB/s per broker
• Lightsail CDN now supports Lightsail Container Services as origins
• Amazon Textract adds synchronous support for single page PDF documents and support for PDF documents containing JPEG 2000 encoded images
• AWS Step Functions adds mocking support for testing workflows locally
• Amazon Lex launches multiple transcripts and confidence scores support for speech input
• AWS Lambda auto scaling improvements for Amazon MSK and self-managed Apache Kafka as event sources
• Announcing Amazon Elastic File System Replication
• Improved progress updates for blue/green deployments in Amazon OpenSearch Service

Serverless Tools 🛠

The team at BubblyDoo created the Serverless Externals Plugin and explain how they use it to keep their Serverless deploy times short and avoid headaches.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

February 3, 2022 – Community Call: Framework V3 & Joot – Python, Machine Learning, Serverless Framework

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

February 16, 2022 – The Serverless Mindset with Matt Morgan #vBrownBag

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 Luke Hedger (@level_out). Luke is a Lead Engineer within the Payment Service squad at the LEGO Group, where he has been working with serverless building payments platforms. A serverless enthusiast and avid follower of new tech trends, Luke writes about technology and serverless topics on his blog Matcha Latte and has spoken at various meet-ups. Thank you, Luke, for all your work!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Another crazy week in the serverless community. I love the direction that Nhost is taking to simplify the dev experience, and self-optimizing serverless compute with Sync Computing? Yes, please! Lots going on, and a lot more to come.

Also, don’t forget to sign up for my upcoming DynamoDB modeling course! I’m excited to start sharing this with folks. I think you’re going to like it.

Take care,
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.