Off-by-none: Issue #182

March 29, 2022

Only have a few minutes? Check out this week's MOST POPULAR links as chosen by our email subscribers.

10GB of Ephemeral Storage for Lambda 💾

Welcome to Issue #182 of Off-by-none! This issue is sponsored by our friends at Courier, Conclave, and Lumigo.

In our previous issue, Upstash snagged some funding, Cloudflare launched their own API Gateway, and we looked at the future of cloud-native development. This week, Lambda gets a storage upgrade, Serverless Cloud goes Full Stack, and PlanetScale gets a Rewind. Plus, we have a bunch of awesome content from the serverless community.

LAST CHANCE to take the Off-by-none Reader Survey! The feedback so far has been really insightful and I’m excited to implement your suggestions. If you haven’t filled out the survey, please do so. It only takes a few minutes and your feedback is critical in helping me shape the future of the newsletter. 🚀

Scale transactional notification infrastructure reliably
Centralize all of your channel’s templates in one place and call one API with Courier. Observe all channel behavior under each recipient profile. Quickly add or change providers by simply changing the API key. Go from zero to a connected email and in-app (courier push) in minutes with seamless documentation. Sponsored

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

The big news from last week was that AWS Lambda now allows customers to configure up to 10 GB of ephemeral storage for Lambda functions, which is a welcome feature. This opens up a lot of use cases for Lambda without needing to use EFS and run it in a VPC (which is both slow and a pain). There are several good posts about the feature and its use cases, including the AWS official post, this one from Yan Cui, and this one as well. And, of course, the feature is now supported in the Serverless Framework.

Also big news was the new Serverless Cloud Full Stack Experience that launched last week. You all know how much I love building with serverless and making it accessible to others. This is a huge step towards that goal, and I’m incredibly proud of my team for accomplishing so much.

PlanetScale introduced a new “Rewind” feature that lets devs undo bad schema migrations. This looks really cool, and is the kind of modern feature that developers are beginning to expect.

In other serverless database news, Astra DB released a Change Data Capture feature for reacting to streams in realtime. Again, if you’re a database provider and you’re not drifting into the world of event-driven architecture, you might as well start looking for something else to do. 🤷‍♂️

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Roger Chi shares a great trick for sampling EventBridge events. This never even crossed my mind, but seems to be a fairly reliable way to accomplish this.

Corentin Doue explains how to do blazing fast CI for serverless integration tests with a little help from the test-stack-orchestrator he built. And there are definitely efficiencies to be gained by reusing existing stacks.

Dalibor Plavcic gives you a run down of AWS Lambda Versions and Aliases. If you’re using a framework, you probably never even noticed these. However, if you really understand them, they enable some really powerful workflows.

Allen Helton discusses how to build better serverless APIs by using the “Storage First” pattern originally coined by Eric Johnson. I’m a huge fan of this pattern, regardless of whether it’s backed by DynamoDB, SQS, or some other service that captures input without a Lambda Function involved.

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

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Robert Bulmer teaches you how to implement the Simple Web Service pattern using AWS AppSync.

Nutchanon Leelapornudom walks you through the relatively lengthy journey of visualizing your Amazon DynamoDB data with Amazon QuickSight. It might take awhile to get there, but for the right use cases, this can be a very handy skill.

Jones Zachariah Noel gives you a quick lesson on how to share events for your Lambda functions using AWS’s recently released feature. I’m glad this feature is there, though I still question (or maybe am concerned by) how many people use the AWS console for debugging. 🤨

I really like this tutorial by Hardik Vasa and Pratik Jain that shows you how to run cross-account workflows with AWS Step Functions and Amazon API Gateway. AWS has been pushing the account-per-service recommendation for a long time, but we don’t always see practical content on how to implement it.

Ilana Polonsky also has a great post that outlines how to collect, parse and store SSO events from CloudTrail using Lambda and S3 bucket . Nothing wrong with being a security nerd!

Serverless Reads 🤓

If you’re looking for a lot of reading material, check out David Anderson’s post about the Cloud books you need on your shelf.

I appreciate posts that attempt to fairly evaluate the pros and cons of serverless. Delivering value to the end user with a serverless cloud by Alex Tuck does a fairly good job looking at it from different angles and touches on a number of important factors to consider.

Shaun Ganley wrote a review of Serverless Cloud (the one I’m working on 😉) that gives a great summary and highlights some of the other pain points that need to be addressed.

Lee Atchison gives some insight into managing the complexity of cloud strategies and how polycloud compares to sky computing. It’s not specifically about serverless, but you should be able to draw a line here. Serverless services aren’t very generic, and if your company has a serverless multi-cloud strategy, specialization (and the cost of doing that) is something that needs to be considered.

And even before you consider multi-cloud, you’ll likely need to consider multi-region. Joe Chapman and Seth Eliot have a great series on creating a multi-region application with AWS Services, and this most recent part on Application Management and Monitoring should keep you busy implementing for awhile.

Enjoy the benefits of confidential computing with serverless infrastructure
Conclave Cloud is 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 in use. Sign up for early access. Sponsored

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #130: Serverless Framework v3, Rebecca and I chat with Matthieu Napoli and Mariusz Nowak about the latest major release of the Serverless Framework, how they streamlined the CLI developer experience, the new params feature, the future of the Serverless Framework, and much more.

Marcia Villalba has a great interview with Mai-Lan Tomsen Bokovec that discusses innovation and leadership at AWS. A little different from her regular videos, but super interesting with lots of great learnings.

Matt Coulter gave a great talk recently about embracing Well-Architected, Serverless-First Development with AWS CDK.

The Serverless Craic team explained how to do “modern cloud architecture” for developers, Julian Wood chats with Lia Vader about serverless security best practices, and Corey Quinn throws Houlihans at MongoDB with Rick Houlihan in a recent Screaming in the Cloud episode (and who knows, maybe a Cloud Access Layer will be a thing?)

New from AWS 🆕

Beyond increased ephemeral storage for Lambda, there were a few more notable AWS announcements.

• AWS Cost Anomaly Detection now supports resource and tag based access management
• AWS Amplify announces the new @mapsTo directive to iterate on GraphQL APIs without manual data migrations
• Amazon EventBridge Schema Registry extends support to Go language

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

March 31, 2022 – Serverless Panel: The Future of IaC, ROI of Serverless, & More!

April 4–6, 2022 – Serverless Architecture Conference

May 3–5, 2022 – Reactathon 2022 & Serverless in the Park

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 Jones Zachariah Noel (@zachjonesnoel). Jones is currently a Serverless Cloud Architect at Mobil80 Solutions and Services Pvt. Ltd. He’s responsible for building robust, scalable applications with the AWS Serverless tech stack. Additionally, he is an AWS Community Builder, and ½ of the ​​The Zacs’ Show Talking AWS on YouTube. Jones frequently writes about serverless topics and new features from AWS via Dev.to, and has a newsletter entitled “Everything AWS, Serverless, and Architectures.” Thank you, Jones, for your continued contributions to the serverless community!

Final Thoughts 🤔

And that’s it for this week. I want to thank everyone who took the Off-by-none Reader Survey. I’ve learned so much from it and am super excited about what comes next with the newsletter. Also, don’t forget to add yourself to the email list for my upcoming DynamoDB modeling course. It’s going to be launching soon. And, if you haven’t looked at Serverless Cloud lately, I’d love for you to take a look and give me some feedback. The dream of #serverlessforeveryone might be a bit lofty, but we’re making progress.

Thanks,
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.