Off-by-none: Issue #178

March 1, 2022

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TypeScript + Serverless = 🚀

Welcome to Issue #178 of Off-by-none. This issue is sponsored by our friends at Catalyst by Zoho.

Last week, Elastic and Amazon played nice, we learned about “ice cold starts”, and Netlify Graph was introduced. This week, TypeScript gets some love from the serverless community, we learn how to prototype faster, and we ask if serverless is just a stopover for EDA. Plus, there is plenty of great content from the community.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

TypeScript got quite a bit of love from the Serverless community this past week. AWS announced TypeScript native support in the AWS SAM CLI using esbuild (currently in public preview), sls-test-tools now supports Typescript (with help from Stan Hannebelle), and Sam Goodwin released Functionless λ, a TypeScript plugin that transforms TypeScript code into Service-to-Service integrations for AppSync Resolvers (and soon to include AWS Step Functions). And if you were concerned about TypeScript build times, see how Arseny Yankovski sped up their TypeScript serverless builds by a factor of 10 using serverless-esbuild.

AWS had a few notable launches, including their new Carbon Footprint Tool. This lets customers view their “historical carbon emissions, evaluate emission trends as their use of AWS evolves, approximate the estimated carbon emissions they have avoided by using AWS instead of an on-premises data center, and review forecasted emissions based on current use.” I absolutely love this level of transparency and (hopefully) soon to be accountability.

They also added .NET 6 support to AWS Lambda. I’m sure there are a few folks out there that will be excited by this. 😉

Cloudflare is acquiring Area 1, because that’s what Cloudflare seems to be doing lately. And Redpanda raised $50M to “modernize stream processing.” It bills itself as a “drop-in replacement for Apache Kafka that unifies historical and real-time data,” and works seamlessly with AWS Lambda. Sounds pretty interesting.

And finally, Serverless Architectures on AWS, Second Edition by Peter Sbarski, Yan Cui, and Ajay Nair is now available. Anything by those three gentlemen is 100% worth checking out.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Kyle Higginson takes a pass at analyzing Cold Starts on Node Lambda Functions, Aly Ragab does an excellent Amazon DynamoDB deep dive, and Mohit Kumar teaches us about AWS Step Functions Map State and Parallel State features.

Emrah Şamdan shared a great piece on prototyping faster than ever before with Serverless Cloud. Regardless of whether or not you use Serverless Cloud, prototyping with serverless tech should be the de facto standard nowadays.

Harris Geo gives a high level overview of Hexagonal Architecture and how it allows interfacing your AWS serverless applications with third-party services. There is so much value and flexibility with Hexagonal Architectures, and it has become my standard approach to app development.

Luca Mezzalira, Laura Hyatt, Vittorio Denti, and Zamira Jaupaj share some thoughts on architecting for security on AWS, Gernot Glawe asks if “you do Lambda Spaghetti?”, and Dashbird shared a great Infographic on AWS SNS from a serverless perspective.

Mohit Aggarwal shares a post busting some myths about using AWS Lambda. I always appreciate posts that continue to dispel inaccurate information about serverless, but I think he missed the mark a bit on point #2. I’d argue that containers shouldn’t be used to make “multiple transactions or an orchestrator” either. First of all, Lambda wasn’t designed to do that because it doesn’t need to. I’d use AWS Step Functions in both cases instead of attempting to manage any of that complexity in my own brittle code running on a distributed compute resource that doesn’t have the built in recovery and retries.

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Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

If you’re a Golang fan, Saeed Moqadam shows you how to trigger a Lambda Function through API Gateway, Lizzie Siegle shares a fun tutorial on how to make a Wordle solver with Twilio Serverless, Studio, and SMS (I just use my own brain 😉), and Arsen Ali teaches you how to build an offer notification service on AWS (serverlessly, of course).

Rushi Donga demonstrates a blue/green deployment of an API using AWS Lambda and API Gateway, Daniel Voigt uses Netlify Graph to create a simple ‘Now Playing’ widget for his Gatsby site, and Subrahmanyam Madduru et al show you how to use DevOps automation to deploy Lambda APIs across accounts and environments.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Sven Degroote explains how serverless technology can give a start-up superpowers (even if you use Google Cloud 😀) and Denny Sam explains how his team built a serverless application on AWS.

There’s also this case study that demonstrates the process and cost of integrating APIs using serverless, as well as this one from AWS about how QsrSoft launched a digital huddle board in 3 months with AWS serverless and Fire devices.

Paul Swail has a great (short) article about how serverless fosters small autonomous teams. Couldn’t agree more.

V Maharajh discusses massive serverless parallelization and what his team at Tableau was able to achieve, and Juliette Fournier tries to convince you why you should deploy your next serverless application with Chalice and CDK.

Finally Mark Hinkle has a post that asks if serverless is just a stopover for Event-Driven Architecture? There are a lot of compelling points in here, and if you’ve been paying attention, AWS is starting to use the EDA language quite a bit. I think from the beginning, “serverless” services were designed to be event-driven, and better systems like EventBridge and TriggerMesh have only made it easier. So, I’m not sure I’d call it a “stopover”, but rather a language correction that likely would have confused fewer folks.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #126: Teaching What You Learn, Rebecca and I chat with Tomasz Łakomy about his work at Cloudash and Stedi, why continuous learning is such an important part of your continued growth as an engineer, how teaching to your former self can help others on their journeys, and so much more.

Marcia Villalba shares some MUST HAVE Visual Studio Code Extensions for serverless developers.

And the Serverless Craic team shows you how to pick your favorite AWS Well Architected Pillar.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some additional AWS announcements:

• Amazon CloudWatch Agent adds support for Configurable Log Group Retention
• Amazon CloudWatch Agent adds Support for Log Filter Expressions
• AWS AppSync adds support for custom response headers
• Announcing the first iteration of the new unified AWS Health Dashboard
• AWS App Runner adds a Java platform
• Amazon S3 accelerates integrity checking of requests by up to 90%
• AWS Amplify announces the general availability of The Authenticator UI Library for Flutter

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

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 Vanessa Santos (@colors4ideas). Vanessa is Segment Marketing Manager at Equinix and an AWS Community Hero. Though Vanessa started from a non-traditional technical background, she quickly immersed herself in the serverless community, first joining the AWS User Group, São Paulo, and later, gaining recognition as an AWS Community Leader, in part through the AWS re:Invent We Power Tech Grant. She is a co-organizer of the AWS UG São Paulo, an MBA Lecturer, and a council volunteer for Brazilian health tech. She has also worked at Brazilian AWS Consulting Partners. Thank you, Vanessa, for empowering people through tech!

Final Thoughts 🤔

That’s it for this week! I’m currently participating in the Decade of Innovation with Amazon DynamoDB event, and will be giving a talk later today about DynamoDB and Serverless! Lots of super informative information about DynamoDB being shared at this event. Also, if you’re interested in learning how to model data with DynamoDB, make sure you sign up for my upcoming DynamoDB modeling course.

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.