Off-by-none: Issue #180

March 15, 2022

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Where are the Serverless Databases? 💾

Welcome to Issue #180 of Off-by-none!

Last week, the CNCF accepted Knative, Cloudflare took on a sensible Ukraine strategy, and we learned about Functional and Lean Web Apps. This week, Fauna introduces event streaming, Xata hopes to build the go-to serverless database, and Amazon S3 turns 16! Plus, there’s lots of awesome serverless content from the community.

Before we get started, if you’re interested in learning how to model data with DynamoDB, make sure you sign up for my upcoming DynamoDB modeling course. Lots of great patterns and strategies in there to help you master your NoSQL database designs!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Today was kind of a big day for Serverless Chats, so stay tuned for this episode in the next couple of weeks. 😉

Fauna now lets you create secure, real-time applications with event streaming, and this article shows you how to integrate event streaming into your applications.

Limelight acquired Yahoo’s EdgeCast CDN service for about $300 million and will be rebranding it as Edgio. In other money news, Xata raised $30M to launch a serverless database with the usability of a spreadsheet. And if you’re thinking there might be some interest in this, check out their list of investors to confirm your suspicions.

Elastic 8.1 launched with the ability to defend against novel attacks. I’m going to be really interested in watching how Elastic tries to differentiate itself from AWS’s OpenSearch and that entire ecosystem. Should be fun to watch. 🍿

And yesterday was Pi Day, which just so happened to also be Amazon S3’s 16th Birthday! I have a daughter turning sixteen next month, but I don’t know which birthday makes me feel older.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Mehmet Özkaya has a post on AWS Lambda Event Sources and Destination Trigger services, plus about 100 more posts all about serverless that he just published.

Lee James Gilmore strikes again, this time explaining serverless DynamoDB integration tests with Jest. I’m not a huge fan of using DynamoDB local, but it’s always nice to have these things as options.

Kay Plößer shares an HTTP API Gateway from a serverless perspective infographic along with some helpful information about them.

Allen Helton discusses the importance of proper serverless API design (or any type of Rest API for that matter), as well as gives some thoughts on structuring your entities in DynamoDB for more efficient retrieval of data.

David Boyne shared his thoughts on event payload standards for Amazon EventBridge. I’m a big proponent of the data/metadata split in the detail property.

Matt Pieper recently rediscovered Salesforce Functions and what you can do with them. These platform specific serverless compute services have been around for awhile, and I really think that they are a powerful way to let users extend their SaaS integrations. I thought we’d be seeing more of these pop up, but so far it’s been a bit quiet. Except for Lizzie Siegle’s post on celebrating St Patrick’s Day translating English to Irish with Twilio Serverless and SMS.

Great post by Ran Ribenzaft on how to implement Circuit Breaker patterns, a very important thing to understand in distributed systems.

Atulpriya Sharma explains 8 serverless terms developers must know. You probably already know these if you’re reading this newsletter, just in case you need a refresher.

And, Martin Heller explains what is a serverless database? I really like how he called out that “Elegance of relational SQL” as a core principle was a bit biased. #NoSQL

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Haiko van der Schaaf walks you through building a serverless REST API with NestJS and DynamoDB.

Harsh Singh teaches you how to build a serverless application with Next.js and CockroachDB, Yogesh Nile explains how to use EFS in AWS Lambda, and Oleksii Kosynskyi shows you how to create thumbnails with Lambda.

Kyle Krupp explains how to bootstrap ideas into reality with a proof of concept using AWS AppSync and then using the “cherry pick” pattern to build out fully realized applications.

Jones Zachariah Noel shares part 5 in his Step Functions series, this one showing you how to check if you have public S3 buckets.

And Andy Blackledge explains how to add Lambda Custom Metrics the easy way.

Serverless Reads 🤓

It was International Women’s Day last week and AWS featured a few blog posts highlighting women at AWS. I completely agree that diverse backgrounds make great solutions architects (and better teams in general), plus there was a great post highlighting women at AWS Developer Relations. And finally, despite the awkward title (of course women write blogs), Women write blogs: a selection of posts from AWS Solutions Architects.

Something not so serverless related, but perhaps interesting to you anyway, was Daniel Rosenwasser’s Proposal For Type Syntax in JavaScript. Yeah, there can be a lot of build time added to TypeScript projects, and I think this makes sense.

Finally, Paul Swail shares why monolithic deployments make sense for small serverless teams.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #128: Serverless-First Engineers and the Flywheel Effect, Rebecca and I chat with David Anderson about the importance of being Well-Architected, what companies must do to embrace a serverless transformation, the evolution of Serverless-First engineers, how to accelerate your organization to the “modern cloud” with his new book “The Flywheel Effect”, and much more.

Alex DeBrie joined the AWS Insiders podcast to give an inside look at the planet-scale architecture of DynamoDB and don’t miss Part Two.

The Serverless Craic team discussed the “modern CEO” and how to lead in cloud.

Julian Wood hosts Ali Spittel on Serverless Office Hours to discuss AWS Amplify Studio.

Marcia Villalba shows you how to centralize all your event-driven application events with Amazon EventBridge.

New from AWS 🆕

• Amazon Comprehend launches entity-based sentiment analysis
• Amazon EventBridge launches enhanced Rule Filtering and Event Transformation capabilities in the Management Console
• Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall significantly reduces service cost
• AWS Lambda announces support for PrincipalOrgID in resource-based policies
• AWS Glue DataBrew now supports cross-account Glue Data Catalog S3 access
• Amazon Cognito launches support for in-region integration with Amazon SES and Amazon SNS
• Amazon DynamoDB now supports the limit request option for PartiQL operations
• Amazon DynamoDB increases default service quotas to simplify use of large numbers of tables

Serverless Tools 🛠

Luca Mezzalira, Laura Hyatt, Vittorio Denti, and Zamira Jaupaj share a bunch of tools for Cloud Architects.

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

June 22, 2022 – ServerlessDays Paris 2022

June 24, 2022 – ServerlessDays New York 2022

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 Talia Nassi (@talia_nassi). Talia is a Senior Developer Advocate at AWS Serverless who speaks at conferences, meetups, and AWS events globally to teach serverless best practices. She started her career as a QA engineer, working for such companies as Visa, Forbes, and WeWork, before transitioning into developer advocate roles. You can find Talia writing blogs and sample applications that highlight serverless technologies, helping improve the developer experience by relaying feedback to product teams, and delivering serverless re:Invent talks. Thanks, Talia, for helping others learn how to build awesome serverless applications!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Lots of interesting serverless database options out there, and they are only getting better. It’s a fun space to watch as I’m sure we’ll be hearing about more exciting innovations and offerings soon!

See you next time,
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.