Off-by-none: Issue #176

February 15, 2022

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A new generation of Google Cloud Functions ⚙️

Welcome to Issue #176 of Off-by-none. This issue is sponsored by our friends at Catalyst by Zoho.

Last week, Firecracker reached 1.0, Serverless Chats returned, and Netlify enabled scheduled functions. This week, Google Cloud Functions go next gen, Serverless Cloud makes Event-Driven apps a snap, and Dynatrace goes multi-cloud with serverless monitoring. Plus, there’s lots of amazing content from the serverless community.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Serverless, Inc. introduced Serverless Cloud Events last week, giving users a super easy way to build event-driven serverless applications.

Datadog added AWS fully managed services to their serverless monitoring capabilities, bringing the same level of visibility to the rest of the AWS managed services that interact with your Python and Node.js Lambda functions.

DataStax Astra DB added new security features to help protect sensitive PII data, Dynatrace goes multi-cloud with serverless monitoring, and Elastic announced the General Availability of Elastic 8.0.

AWS had some interesting announcements, including the General Availability of AWS CloudFormation Hooks, sub-millisecond read latencies for Amazon Elastic File System (more here), and AWS App Runner’s new support for Amazon VPC (more here).

Google Cloud launched their 2nd gen Cloud Functions that will “supercharge your event-driven architecture.” I’m glad to see Google is still investing in FaaS.

And for the other data geeks out there, Cloudflare’s analysis of Super Bowl Internet traffic during the game is a fun read.

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Serverless Concepts 🏗

Here are a few AWS Lambda pitfalls to steer clear of, plus Taavi Rehemägi breaks down AWS RDS from a serverless perspective.

Anna Lee Barber discusses Tableau’s philosophy for building serverless prototypes, Ashan Fernando explains how to keep serving your customers amidst cloud outages, and Ray Camden shares an early look at Netlify Scheduled Functions.

And Jones Zachariah Noel gives us some advice on whether or not your AWS Lambda functions should be in a VPC.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Speaking of VPCs, Mohammed Ali Chherawalla teaches you how to set up a Serverless NAT Gateway. As much as I loathe Managed NAT Gateways and their pricing model, they are necessary in a number of circumstances. This tutorial goes through everything from setting up the VPC, to mapping your functions correctly.

Subhasis Das shows you how to push messages from Amazon SQS to DynamoDB. Something we typically call the Storage First pattern.

Mete Atamel explains how to build APIs with Google Cloud Functions and API Gateway, Wojciech Matuszewski has some thoughts on testing AWS Step Functions flows, and Miles Bardon demonstrates how to get a Node-Canvas working in AWS Lambda.

Finally, Russ Schick shows the best of both worlds with Serverless Cloud and Next.js and Eslam Hefnawy explains how to add authentication to your Serverless Cloud apps.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Asim Aslam posits that the future of cloud is serverless, Akos Krivachy shares his team’s “magical” AWS serverless developer experience, and Taavi Rehemägi offers up a serverless SWOT analysis.

Erez Berkner is featured in this short article with some advice for entrepreneurs, Sabri Bolkar shares the pros and cons of serverless for deep network training, and Obumuneme Nwabude helps us understand serverless microservices backend architecture.

An expert explains why Edge Computing will overtake the Cloud, Guillaume Blaquiere proposes the ridiculous, yet brilliant, notion of running a serverless database on Cloud Run, and Rishi U recounts how he “scaled” his SaaS database and broke his app.

CNCF says that Kubernetes has ‘Crossed the Chasm’ to become mainstream and is approaching 100% usage. Color me skeptical.

And Kashif explains why they don’t use NoSQL databases for new projects. There are some good points in here, and as long as you have a good abstraction layer (not an ORM 🙄), then you should be okay to migrate later once you’ve figured out your access patterns.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #124: Self-Provisioning Runtimes, Rebecca and I chat with Shawn “swyx” Wang about workflows as code with Temporal, self-provisioning runtimes, the intersection of cloud and serverless, the need for developer experience roles, and so much more.

Marcia Villalba shows you how to unit test your Step Functions with mocked service integrations.

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

New from AWS 🆕

Some more notable AWS releases:

• Amazon S3 Batch Replication synchronizes existing data between buckets (more here)
• Amazon Rekognition Video supports 7 new languages and improves accuracy for text detection
• Amazon Redshift announces public preview of Streaming Ingestion for Kinesis Data Streams
• Amazon CloudFront now supports a managed prefix list
• Announcing a new AWS Billing console Home page experience
• AWS WAF introduces AWS WAF Fraud Control – Account Takeover Prevention for protecting your login page against credential stuffing attacks
• Introducing AWS Virtual Waiting Room

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

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

February 16, 2022 – Serverless Best Practices for Team Leads

March 1, 2022 – A Decade of Innovation with Amazon DynamoDB

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 Trevor Roberts Jr. (@TrevorRobertsJr). Trevor is a Sr. Specialist Solutions Architect, EC2 Nitro at AWS, and has worked in the tech industry for more than 20 years. He has a blog on his personal website called “Adventures in the Cloud,” that is served using a Rust-based static site generator called Zola and hosted with serverless technologies. His previous blog focused on on-premises data center computing. Trevor has also authored a book entitled, DevOps for VMware Administrators. Thanks, Trevor, for your commitment to sharing your knowledge on the cloud!

Final Thoughts 🤔

We’re always looking for newsletter sponsors, so please reach out if your organization might be interested in sharing your message with our readers and helping us support serverless content creators.

Don’t forget to join me, Alex DeBrie, Jeff Barr and others for A Decade of Innovation with Amazon DynamoDB on March 1st. And make sure you sign up for my upcoming DynamoDB modeling course. There’s some good stuff in there. 😉

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.