Off-by-none: Issue #186

May 3, 2022

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Making Multi-Account Easier? 🧐

Welcome to Issue #186 of Off-by-none! This issue is sponsored by our friends at Lumigo.

In our previous issue, Aurora Serverless v2 missed the serverless mark, Deno powered the edge, and we learned how to “Compose” serverless applications. This week, the Data API gets an update, Infrastructure as SQL goes open source, and AWS puts multi-account where their mouth is. Plus, we have lots of awesome serverless content from the community.

And don’t forget to check out Lumigo | AWS Lambda Monitoring Platform | Get set up in minutes Sponsored

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

I’m both pleasantly surprised and utterly confused by the announcement that Amazon RDS Data API now supports returning SQL results as a simplified JSON string. First of all, the old format was unwieldy (read: terrible), which is one of the major reasons why I built the Data API Client. I’m hoping this new format will minimize the need for (or at least the complexity of) these types of libraries. What confuses me is that the Data API is still only for Aurora Serverless v1, a service that has been made obsolete by the release of Aurora Serverless v2. There are plenty of good thing to say about it (despite my quoted criticisms 😉), but I hope this means that the lack of Data API support in v2 was simply a victim of targeting a deadline for the San Francisco Summit, and not an indication that v1 and v2 will continue to exist as separate, incompatible products.

And speaking of using “SQL”, IaSQL (or Infrastructure as SQL) is now open source and SaaS. Yes, you can now write SQL statements to manage your infrastructure on AWS. Maybe this is a good idea, but I think the semantics of INSERT INTO aws_ec2 as opposed to defining the state of your infrastructure seems a bit off.

In other AWS news, Amazon MSK Serverless is now generally available, giving those that need or prefer Apache Kafka a much easier way to manage it. Marcia Villalba explains more details here.

AWS also introduced the .NET Annotations Lambda Framework in preview a couple of weeks ago, which I totally ignored (because, you know, .NET 😬.) But giving it another look, this is a quite interesting approach. Even though the other supported languages don’t require a specialized framework like this, it makes me wonder if certain languages could benefit from more native Lambda integrations. I haven’t thought this through at all or if it even makes sense, but Node 18 has experimental test runners, so 🤷‍♂️.

Another really interesting announcement from AWS is that you can now use IAM to control access to a resource based on the account, OU or organization that contains the resource. I’ve complained a number of times about how AWS’s multi-account recommendations often conflict with efficient ways to apply them in practice. This is a good step.

This article about GCP outperforming Microsoft in Q1 and their CEO promising a “long-run view” makes me think that Google Cloud might actually have a chance of not ending up in the Google Graveyard.

And finally, the Cloudflare network now spans 275 cities, plus they claim they blocked a 15M rps HTTPS DDoS attack. It’s notable because it was an HTTPS attack, not your typical HTTP one. I hope your APIs are protected.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Salma Alam-Naylor says, “we’re all living on The Edge”, and explains what it is and what you can do with serverless functions on it.

Surya Prakash Pandey takes a look at AWS’s partial batch processing with SQS and how to report Batch Item failures, Elif Apaydın dives into the fine details of the AWS Lambda Function URL feature, and Enrico Portolan explains how AWS Lambda Retry really works.

Peter Morlion shares an excellent solution for cleaning up old tenants by adding a mock integration to API Gateway.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

As always, there were a ton of tutorials this week, so here’s a sampling.

Abhishek Gupta uses AWS Lambda Function URLs to build a serverless backend for Slack, Davide de Paolis invokes AWS Services Cross Account from Lambda (with AWS CDK and AWS SDK v3), and Ran Isenberg shows you how to do input validation on your Lambda functions.

This is a great tutorial from Ed Lima that shows you how to implement multi-region serverless (and functionless) WebSocket Pub/Sub APIs with AWS AppSync and Amazon EventBridge.

Aiden Walton explains how they did serverless image object detection at a social media startup, Lindsey Tam shows you how to attach a WAF to API Gateway using the Serverless Framework, and Thayane Santana teaches you how to automatically trigger a SageMaker Pipeline using EventBridge.

Ahsan Butt demonstrates a custom OTP implementation via AWS Lambda, SES, and DynamoDB, though every time I see dynamodb:* IAM permissions I die a little inside.

Danila Loginov explains how to do Static Site Generation in Lambda with React Static, but there’s some more to using Lambda as your build tool, especially now that you have up to 10GB of tmp space.

Andres Solorzano helps you use Single Table designs on AWS DynamoDB, Allen Helton shows you how to load test your apps for free by going serverless, and Wojciech Matuszewski walks you through processing large payloads with Amazon API Gateway asynchronously.

And finally, Russ Schick shows you how to use Next.js ISR with Serverless Cloud.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Ishtiaque Zafar opines on why he doesn’t like API frameworks together with serverless. The single-purpose function debate rages on.

Brandon Vigliarolo wrote an analysis of Google Cloud’s recent post about 7 trends to watch in API economy. There’s a lot to take away from this, including the need to embrace zero trust APIs (and leveraging them for internal data access), the resurgence of EDA, and where they think GraphQL fits into all of this.

AWS sponsored their own puff piece about how Aurora Serverless made the database server obsolete, but there’s still quite a bit of useful background in here.

Lee James Gilmore uses Serverless Taxis to explain serverless, Matt Asay shares the key to getting multicloud right, and Evan Weaver explains how the database takes the wheel in driving developer productivity.

Danny Reed discovered the idea of Self-Provisioning Runtimes and Serverless DX, then wrote about it. And Poulomi Chatterjee asks if AWS SageMaker’s serverless inference is worth exploring?

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #135: Serverless for Frontend Engineers, Rebecca and I chat with Swizec Teller about how to approach serverless as a frontend engineer, why if you can JavaScript you can backend, why tech tutorials are turning you into a mediocre engineer, and so much more.

Marco Troisi interviewed Paul Swail about how to navigate serverless best practices on his new Serverless Mindset podcast.

Marcia Villalba explains HTTPS endpoints for your AWS Lambda functions with Function URLs.

And Sarbjeet Johal explains why incremental changes add up to major disruptions in cloud culture. Like massive amounts of technical debt caused by the ever-changing complexity of IaC solutions.

New from AWS 🆕

• Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler now supports random sampling and stratified sampling
• Amazon SES V2 now supports email size of up to 40MB for inbound and outbound emails by default
• Amazon Rekognition introduces Streaming Video Events to provide real-time alerts on live video streams

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

Have consulted for dozens of companies at this point. Most struggled to ship even basic features, switching what cloud they use would require a miracle. People worry about vendor lock-in when they’re more likely to get locked in by their own codebase. ~Dax Raad
Exactly. As Swizec Teller said in the latest Serverless Chats episode, “It’s much more likely that you’re going to build the wrong thing than it is that you’re going to build the right thing wrong.” And if you build the right thing quickly using serverless, you’ll be in a much better position than if you just wasted months building a “portable” solution that nobody wants.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

May 4, 2022 – Serverless Community Call: Framework Compose, Console & WAIR: Serverless Story

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 Karolina Boboli (@KarolinaBoboli). Karolina is an AWS Cloud Architect and Consultant, and recent AWS Community Hero. She’s a technical leader and mentor involved in building and guiding cloud teams, and created an online course called “AWS in practice – your first project” about infrastructure as code. Karolina is also the founder of swiatchmury.pl, a Slack community for cloud professionals focused on AWS. She has participated in AWS User Group Poland and self-hosted webinars. Thanks, Karolina, for helping teams grow in their knowledge of the cloud!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I’m currently on my way to San Francisco to speak at the Serverless in the Park conference this coming Thursday. Follow me on Twitter for the livestream links to see a pretty great lineup of serverless speakers!

Remember to sign up for email updates on my upcoming DynamoDB modeling course and look for some news very soon.

Take care,
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.