Off-by-none: Issue #187

May 10, 2022

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A more programmable Internet 🧑‍💻

Welcome to Issue #187 of Off-by-none! This issue is sponsored by our friends at Lumigo.

In our previous issue, the Data API got an update, Infrastructure as SQL went open source, and AWS made progress on multi-account security management. This week, Cloudflare tries to make the Internet more programmable, Node 16 comes to Lambda, and we talk about the future of Jamstack and serverless. And as always, we have some awesome content from the serverless community.

Be sure to check out Lumigo | AWS Lambda Monitoring Platform | Get set up in minutes Sponsored

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

I spoke at Serverless in the Park last week and outlined my thoughts on the “State of Serverless” in 2022, and then joined a panel about the future of Jamstack and serverless with Matt Biilman from Netlify and Brian Leroux from Begin. It was a really interesting discussion moderated by Rob Sutter from Fauna, and definitely worth giving it a watch (I won’t be offended if you 2x it 😉).

In slightly bigger cloud news, Cloudflare is on a tear again, dropping a whole bunch of announcements on us all at once. I’m sure there are plenty more to come, but some of the big ones include Cloudflare Workers going open source, the introduction of a community group for web-interoperable JavaScript runtimes, enabling wildcard proxies for everyone, Logpush for Worker’s Trace Events, and the StackBlitz partnership.

Another interesting announcement from Cloudflare is that they want to make JavaScript environments interoperable, letting you transfer apps between Workers, Deno and Node.js without needing to rewrite them. And, the announcement of Workers for Platforms to make every application on the Internet more programmable is also a bit mind blowing.

In other cloud news, Elastic announced smarter tail-based sampling for APM in modern Cloud-Native environments, Pulumi introduced CrossCode as a universal way to build cloud apps, and we learned about the horribly named Ecstasy, which is supposedly a language designed for the cloud. 😬

We also got a new release of Firecracker and heard rumblings that Node 16 is now available in Lambda.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

This post by Luca Mezzalira, Laura Hyatt, Vittorio Denti, and Zamira Jaupaj is a nice overview of how AWS is currently thinking about (or reimagining) how to build serverless applications.

Yan Cui share his testing strategy for serverless applications. Clearly, I agree that testing against cloud resources (as opposed to local emulation) is the way to go.

Fatih Baltaci shares a comparison of cold starts on AWS Lambda, AWS CloudFront Functions, and Cloudflare Workers. Looks like CloudFront Functions have a slight edge (no pun intended), but with all the recent Cloudflare announcements, I wouldn’t be surprised if this changes soon enough.

Emil Hein shows you just how good esbuild is at serverless bundling. Plus, Lee James Gilmore shares part 2 of his Serverless Threat Modeling series.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Paul Swail shares some great ideas on how to prevent concurrent deployments of serverless stacks in GitHub Actions, Pubudu Jayawardana shows you how to create a simple Leave Management System with AWS serverless, and Markus Toivakka explains how to use Athena to query multi-account Cloudwatch Logs.

Arpad Toth gives us a great rundown on controlling access to the API with Lambda authorizers, Alexander Seifert shares a way to deploy sentence transformer models with Lambda, and Walid Karray shows you how to configure a custom domain for AWS Lambda Function URLs (using CloudFront to route to the origin).

Jobin Basani shows you how to build a website to PDF converter using AWS Lambda Function URLs and Puppeteer and Swapnil Mane helps you learn how to use Lambda Layers by building an image resize function using Sharp.

Finally, Nick Choi has a great 2 part tutorial on throttling a tiered, multi-tenant REST API at scale using API Gateway (here’s part 2).

Serverless Security 🔒

We don’t often see a lot on serverless security, but this post that does a walkthrough of vulnerable Lambda Functions using CloudGoat is definitely educational.

Also, according to Forrester, 96% of businesses have had cloud security problems. And my guess is that the other 4% of them have, but just don’t realize it.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Paul Swail has some more great thoughts on moving from one to two developers on your AWS serverless project. Not unique to serverless, but perhaps more easily solved if you have the ability to easily spin up and tear down isolated environments.

Krishan Babbar shares the story of migrating from PostgreSQL to DynamoDB, with some helpful tips in there.

Onel Harrison gives 6 tips for working with AWS Lambda, though I’d say the suggestion not to use Lambda isn’t very well reasoned.

Allen Helton introduces a new cross-cutting architecture diagram that he calls “The Critical Path”. Totally agree that most complex architecture diagrams become difficult to reason about.

Daniele Frasca has a great piece that outlines some resources for getting started with AWS Serverless. I appreciate the mentions in there.

Sheen Brisals explains why sustainability of the cloud is important to serverless, and David Anderson shares The Serverless Edge’s top 20 sustainable technology examples to get you started.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #136: Serverless Transformation, Rebecca and I chat with Sarah Hamilton about moving from MVPs to massively scalable serverless teams, the ideal ways of working versus the reality, integration testing strategy for EventBridge, serverless community building, and a lot more.

Marcia Villalba shows you how to build an event-driven application with AWS CDK and Amazon EventBridge.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are a few announcements from AWS this week that grabbed my attention.

• Amazon Kinesis Video Streams announces managed support for image extraction
• AWS Serverless Application Model CLI now supports enabling AWS X-Ray tracing
• Announcing new workflow observability features for AWS Step Functions
• AWS AppConfig Feature Flag Lambda Extension announces support for Arm/Graviton2 processors
• Amazon Rekognition launches Face APIs version 6 for improved accuracy

Serverless Tools 🛠

Nx Serverless is billed as the “Ultimate Monorepo Starter for Node.js Serverless Applications.”

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

May 17, 2022 – SST 1.0 Conf

May 23 & 24, 2022 – Headless Commerce Summit

June 7-9, 2022 – MongoDB World

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 Tomasz Łakomy (@tlakomy). Tomasz is a Frontend Engineer at Stedi, co-founder of Cloudash, and an egghead.io instructor. Since 2018, he’s been diving into the world of AWS and at the same time sharing what he’s learned with others. After passing the AWS Certified Solutions Architect: Associate exam in 2019, he recorded multiple courses on serverless technologies, including Build an App with the AWS Cloud Development Kit, and Learn AWS Lambda from scratch. He’s been a guest on Serverless Chats, and posts articles on career advice, testing, and AWS on both his blog, as well as The Practical Dev community. Thank you Tomasz for your prolific work in the community!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I’m a bit overwhelmed by all the news coming out of Cloudflare, and it’s going to take me a few days to digest all of it. But my initial reaction is that Cloudflare is certainly pushing the limits and challenging the status quo. For those that remember the browser wars back in the day, I feel like we’re at a similar point again, but this time with runtimes and execution environments. Interoperability is hugely important and whether that requires new abstractions or better collaboration on standards, the direction that Cloudflare is taking seems promising.

Have you signed up for email updates on my upcoming DynamoDB modeling course yet?

See you next week,
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.