Off-by-none: Issue #177

February 22, 2022

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Ice Cold Starts and S3 Backups 🥶

Welcome to Issue #177 of Off-by-none. This issue is sponsored by our friends at Catalyst by Zoho.

Last week, Google Cloud launched 2nd generation Functions, Serverless Cloud released Serverless Cloud Events, and Dynatrace went multi-cloud with serverless monitoring. This week, Elastic and Amazon play nice, we learn about “ice cold starts”, and Netlify Graph is introduced. Plus, there’s a whole bunch of serverless content from the community.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Couple of interesting bits of news from last week. Netlify Graph was introduced, promising a faster way for teams to develop web apps with APIs. Sergio De Simone spoke with Netlify’s head of ecosystem Den Delimarsky to discuss how it aims to simplify external API integrations.

Akamai acquired IaaS provider Linode for $900m, furthering their expansion into the edge computing space. Lots to pay attention to here.

In AWS news, Elastic and Amazon reached an agreement on their trademark infringement lawsuit, with Amazon agreeing to no longer use the name ElasticSearch to refer to any of its hosted versions. They also seem to be playing nice in the AWS Marketplace now, which I think is a good sign and perhaps a roadmap for future AWS use of open source products.

AWS also announced the general availability of AWS Backup for Amazon S3. You probably don’t need it from a simple durability standpoint (11 9s is probably enough), but makes a lot of sense for creating immutable backups to protect against malice (or the dumb mistakes we all make) as well as providing a point-in-time restore.

And while DynamoDB’s 10th birthday was technically in January, Sébastien Stormacq has a great Happy 10th Birthday, DynamoDB post that shares some history, mentions some resources (including my DynamoDB modeling course 😉), and encourages you to register for the Decade of Innovation with Amazon DynamoDB virtual event on March 1. I’ll be speaking and doing a roundtable with Jeff Barr and Alex DeBrie.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

I recently signed up for Paul Swail’s daily email, and the one about Serverless ≠ Microservices really piqued my interest. I’ve been thinking about this for years now, and totally agree. Need to find some time to share more thoughts.

AJ Stuyvenberg wrote a great post about “Ice Cold Starts“, or what most of us would have just called “cold starts”. However, AJ points out a slight distinction when it comes to recovering from OOM errors and timeouts. Definitely worth understanding the effect they have on global variable hydration.

Atulpriya Sharma’s post helps you choose between single or monolithic serverless functions. We've discussed this a number of times, and I agree with Atulpriya’s conclusion: use single-purpose if possible, but neither of those patterns are “wrong”.

Allen Helton shares the 5-Step Checklist for Serverless Load Testing, Dustin Goodman explains why you should upgrade to Serverless Framework v3, and Cesar Augusto Rayo Zapata posits whether or not you should use Step Functions as test automation framework.

Nagarjoon B gives us a rundown on how to choose Kubernetes versus Serverless . I do appreciate these types of articles, but I also feel like they can be misleading when K8s is billed as being more “flexible”.

Sheen Brisals published part 2 in his series on how to build sustainable serverless applications. There is a lot of great thinking in here that not only reinforces the benefits of serverless on the planet, but also how it leads to sustainable applications longterm.

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Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Eslam Hefnawy shared how to use SendGrid with Serverless Cloud, showing how easy third-party API integration is.

Jones Zachariah Noel teaches you how to handle errors with StepFunctions SNS SDK integration, Akash Bagade helps you build a serverless web application on AWS using Lambda and API Gateway, and Wojciech Matuszewski shares an interesting idea on how to save on AWS Lambda Amazon CloudWatch Logs costs

Bartosz Drozd has an interesting use case/tutorial for building a serverless virus scanning solution with automated database updates, Salma Alam-Naylor has a fun post that shows you how to deploy your Netlify site with an Elgato Stream Deck, JP Caparas demos accessing secrets from AWS Secrets Manager inside a Lambda function handler. Probably not the best option, but it’s good to understand these things.

And finally, Lee James Gilmore has a new series on building a Serverless DocumentDB Connection Caching Service with Fargate. I think he might be taking the “most prolific serverless writer” award away from James Beswick.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Scott Carey wrote a piece talking about Vercel, Netlify, and the new era of serverless PaaS. There is a lot to chew on in this article, but this takeaway from Bucky Moore sums it up. He’s “bullish on serverless infrastructure solutions that differentiate on design and end-user ergonomics. It’s clear that developers will be interfacing with them more, and cloud providers less, over the coming years.”

Jean Yang has an excellent piece on building for the 99% Developers, or basically, anyone who's not part of FAANG or a developer influencer touting the latest shiny new tool. The point made is that all but a small percentage of developers are facing a much different reality than the aspirational ones that dominate social media. Really interesting point in here about how we choose products, and it’s a bit scary.

Javier Mendoza has a helpful post about becoming a detective with AWS CloudTrail, Taavi Rehemägi says, “You’ve been thinking of Serverless all wrong!“, and Siddharth Ram shares some thoughts on why he prefers serverless.

Finally, Pierre Milliotte digs into Functionless to see if we can do without Lambda Functions. This has been an ongoing discussion in the serverless community, and there are a lot of upsides to it. I think Pierre finds the practice a bit more promising than overly practical at the moment.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #125: Configuration over Code, Rebecca and I chat with Eric Johnson about the emergence of Step Functions within our serverless applications, bringing the developer to the cloud versus the cloud to the developer, the importance of serverless advocacy and teaching, and so much more.

Marcia Villalba hosts James Beswick for a Serverlesspresso demo, built using EventBridge, Step Functions and more!

The Serverless Craic teams shares their guide to the AWS Sustainability Pillar on a recent episode.

And today’s Serverless Office Hours featured Eric Johnson and Talia Nassi showing you how to get started with Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda.

New from AWS 🆕

• Announcing Amazon Redshift Cross-region data sharing
• Introducing auto-adjusting budgets
• Amazon Redshift announces support for unloading data to JSON files
• Announcing Automatic Workload Management for Amazon Redshift Concurrency Scaling

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

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 Manisha Sule (@tweetDataS). Manisha is the Director of Software Engineering at SAP Concur, and currently an ​​Advisory Board Member at Southern Methodist University for Continuing and Professional Education. She has held previous roles with CapitolOne and LinuxAcademy.com where she was Senior Manager of Software and Data Engineering and Director of Big Data Analytics, respectively. She’s been a speaker and mentor at “Grace Hopper Conference,” speaker at Capital One’s “Beyond Summit 2019”, a guest on the Women in Tech show, and was Dallas Business Journal’s “Women In Technology” Award winner for 2017. Thank you, Manisha, for your impressive work!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Join me, Alex DeBrie, Jeff Barr, and other AWS experts for A Decade of Innovation with Amazon DynamoDB on March 1st. And if you’re interested in learning how to model data with DynamoDB, make sure you sign up for my upcoming DynamoDB modeling course.

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.