Off-by-none: Issue #181

March 22, 2022

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Is Serverless Infinitely Scalable? ♾

Welcome to Issue #181 of Off-by-none! This issue is sponsored by our friends at Courier, Conclave, and Lumigo.

Last week, Fauna introduced event streaming, Xata raised $30M to build the go-to serverless database, and Amazon S3 turned 16! This week, Upstash snags some funding, Cloudflare launches their own API Gateway, and we look at the future of cloud-native development. Plus, there’s plenty of great content from the serverless community.

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DynamoDB strategies for SaaS
SaaS applications commonly follow a multi-tenant architecture, which means every customer receives a single instance of the software. At scale, this can often lead to hotkey problems due to an uneven partitioning of data in Amazon DynamoDB, which can be resolved with two solutions that will allow the system to scale. Sponsored

And speaking of DynamoDB strategies, make sure you add yourself to the email list for my upcoming DynamoDB modeling course. 😉

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Congratulations to Upstash for snagging a $1.9M seed round to build out their serverless data platform for Redis and Kafka. And in other funding news, autonomous cloud management company Sedai raised $15M in Series A to focus on tools for SREs.

A company named Solodev launched a “Serverless Health Cloud” that will power Patient Portals on AWS. I know nothing about this company, but I find it really interesting that they are using “serverless” as a differentiator. Granted, this is a tech company, so the appeal to them makes sense, but I wonder how this will play out with CIOs in the health care vertical?

In other cloud news, Cloudflare announced the Cloudflare API Gateway, MongoDB signed a 6 year AWS partnership deal, and Google’s domain name registrar is out of beta after (only) seven years. That has nothing to do with serverless, but it still amazes me how long Google keeps things in “beta”.

AWS had a few interesting announcements last week, including AWS AppConfig Feature Flags reaching general availability and a useful feature with the AWS Lambda console now supporting the option to share test events between developers. Where has this feature been?

And AWS announced a new batch of AWS Heroes including Serverless Hero, Filip Pyrek. Congratulations, and welcome to you all!

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Daniele Frasca explains the benefits of moving from a Fat Lambda to AWS Step Functions. Step Functions are (rightfully) all the rage right now, so expect to see more of these types of recommendations.

Emin Bilgic ran some tests to find the fastest runtime for AWS Lambda Functions. Not sure we learning anything new here, but I always appreciate the occasional level set.

Alex Adamov explains why you should use Firebase as the backend for your first app. As we mentioned last week, there are a lot of companies competing in this space, but Firebase remains a strong contender.

I love patterns, and Roger Chi give us three serverless AND “Lambda-less” API patterns with AWS CDK. Integrating directly with EventBridge, S3, and (of course) Step Functions, can be very efficient for the right workloads.

Harinder Seera explains how performance influences Lambda cost. We’ve been talking about this for years, but it still amazes me how many people use the default memory setting.

Also, allocating more memory to your Lambda Functions can help with cold starts. In this post, Haiko van der Schaaf gives you five additional ways to deal with cold starts, though I still recommend against using the “Lambda Warmer”.

Access the benefits of confidential computing with serverless infrastructure
Conclave Cloud is coming soon – a new confidential computing platform which provides a serverless execution environment with built-in privacy-preserving features using Intel SGX. Allowing stateless functions to be hosted, executed, and scaled on demand whilst ensuring that data is always encrypted, even while processing. Interested in early access? Register here. Sponsored

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Steven Smiley shows you how to handle paginated API responses with AWS Step Functions.

Aravind V shares more installments of his AWS CDK 101 series, this time showing how to  build constructs and a simple counter store in DynamoDB.

Vachan Anand has an excellent introduction to data pipelines with serverless architecture, and Ramesh Vantaku gives you a really great set of examples for table operations using the AWS DynamoDB DocumentClient .

Jörn Kalz teaches you how to do fullstack serverless with AWS SAM, James White explains a few ways to solve the Lambda “Code storage limit exceeded” error, and Ramesh Vantaku shows two ways to handle DynamoDB pagination.

Vlad Lebedev has a full tutorial on building serverless APIs in Ruby with AWS Lambda, plus Lee James Gilmore has another great post on serverless streamed events.

Finally, Maciej Winnicki shows you how to report CloudWatch metrics without AWS SDK and shows you how the aws-embedded-metrics package can make using the Embedded Metric Format easier.

Serverless Reads 🤓

A really interesting article by Daniele Frasca that tests just how well AWS serverless handles unpredictable spiky workloads.

This piece by Piet van Dongen does an excellent job analyzing the evolution of AWS from a Cloud-Native development perspective. The future is serverless, event-driven, developer-friendly, and sustainable – couldn’t agree more!

Pekka Enberg explains how latency is driving edge and serverless computing infrastructure, and how serverless databases might be the missing piece.

Interested in building your brand as a Solutions Architect? This piece includes some great advice for those looking to excel.

Fernando Alvarez explains how a couple of simple steps improved their serverless CI/CD speeds by up to 60%.

Dmitry Kolomiets shares an in depth post on trace context propagation in event-driven architectures.

And finally, Marco Troisi explains why you should stop avoiding vendor lock-in, and what you should focus on instead.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #129: What To Do When the Servers Go Away, Rebecca and I chat with Tom McLaughlin about the challenges of adopting serverless, what happens when devs become responsible for new areas, the engineering rigor required for serverless team enablement, and much more.

Marcia Villalba show you how to add Feature Flags to Lambda using AWS AppConfig.

And the Serverless Craic team discusses digital product leader expectations of the “Modern Cloud”.

New from AWS 🆕

Just a few other announcements from AWS that caught my eye:

• Announcing two new HERE map styles for Amazon Location Service
• Experts on AWS IQ can now complete proposals with one click
• Amazon Route 53 launches Geolocation and Latency-Based Routing for Private DNS
• AWS announces AWS Billing Conductor

Serverless Tools 🛠

Have you ever wondered what’s on your Lambda’s mind? Try Lumigo for free and get instant visibility. Sponsored

A post about AWS Lambda vulnerability scanning with Open Source tools featuring Lambda Guard, Lambda Proxy, and others.

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

“Think about it: PHP has been serverless forever. Every page spins the PL and that’s it, nothing is shared across requests. When Node.JS arrived, one of the main advantages was to never need to bootstrap JS or modules each time, hence win in performance. Are we paying attention?” ~ Andrea Giammarchi
Where to begin? I get the surface-level performance arguments, but there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the reasons behind shared nothing architecture, including its scaling capabilities, cost benefits, and overall efficiency model. Folks will eventually get it, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

March 23, 2022 – Webiny Community Call

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 Andra Glavan (@AndraaSome). Andra is currently a DevOps Engineer at Vodafone. Previously, she was a Cloud Systems Consultant at Sentia Netherlands, where her main focus was on helping companies migrate their infrastructure and applications to Cloud with a DevOps mindset. Andra is also an AWS Community Builder, as well as a CDK Day volunteer and ServerlessDays Amsterdam event organizer and co-host. Thank you, Andra, for your work in making the cloud accessible to everyone.

Final Thoughts 🤔

Lots of really great articles this week! If you’re writing any thought-provoking pieces on serverless, cloud, developer experience, etc., please send them my way.

And don’t forget to take the Off-by-none Reader Survey!

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.