Off-by-none: Issue #188

May 17, 2022

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Truly Serverless SQL? 😮

Welcome to Issue #188 of Off-by-none! This issue is sponsored by our friends at Lumigo.

In our previous issue, Cloudflare tried to make the Internet more programmable, Node 16 came to Lambda, and we talked about the future of Jamstack and serverless. This week, Cloudflare gets serious about infrastructure services, the Serverless Framework turns 7, and we learn about “superclouds”. Plus, we’ve got awesome content from the serverless community.

Please support our sponsor and check out Lumigo | AWS Lambda Monitoring Platform | Get set up in minutes Sponsored

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Cloudflare launched a ton of new services and features during “Platform Week”, showing their continued commitment to becoming a major player in the public cloud market. Some of the really interesting announcements include Custom Domains for Workers, Cache Reserve, the Cloudflare Images Sourcing Kit, Pages Plugins, Pub/Sub, Workers Analytics Engine, Magic NAT, Logs on R2, and R2’s open beta.

But the biggest announcement was the introduction of D1, their first SQL database. I haven’t had the chance to test this out, but from what I read, this looks really amazing. There is a growing list of competitors in the “Serverless SQL” space, and this should be another driver to finally get us there. There is some more analysis in this TechCrunch article.

In other cloud news, TriggerMesh launched a Kubeless to Knative migration service, Google Cloud introduced Media CDN for Content Delivery to make it easier to automatically insert ads (thanks Google), and the Serverless Framework turned 7 years old!

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Sarah Hamilton explains how to resolve bottlenecks of a Lambda Function triggered By Kinesis, Segun Saka-Aiyedun gives us an introduction to serverless databases (even if it’s a bit biased 😉), and Seth Orell explains how NOT to test with DynamoDB.

We generally focus on a lot of AWS services, but Adhish Panta explains how you can now do more with Second Generation Cloud Functions.

Allen Helton shares 3 pitfalls of AWS Step Functions and how you can avoid them. I love how he breaks down the advice into beginner, intermediate, and advanced users.

Jones Zachariah Noel explains why IaC should be the direction for serverless apps. Though, I’d argue that as long as we can get the same benefits of IaC without all that extra code and tethering to specific control planes, it would be even better.

Michael Walmsley helps with understanding Lambda execution models.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Pawel Zubkiewicz shows you how to implement a simple serverless scheduler, Jerome Van Der Linden explains the benefits of using direct service integrations to optimize your architecture, and Vijay Reddy explains a method for executing a single AWS lambda from multiple accounts.

Lee James Gilmore shows you how to create and use serverless custom resources and shares part 3 of his Serverless Threat Modeling series.

This post shows you how to use EventBridge rules to invoke Lambda and StepFunctions, Aravind VadamalaiMuthu shares more posts in his AWS CDK 101 series, and Emil Hein explains how to set up serverless WebSockets.

Yan Cui has a great post on how to work around CloudFormation circular dependencies, and Noah Fischer shared how to get started with Serverless Cloud, Next.js and Upstash Redis.

Serverless Security 🔒

We don’t spend nearly enough time talking about security (or when we do people seem to stop listening.) Anunay Bhatt shared a security reference architecture for a serverless application, which covers quite a bit.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Great post by Paul Swail that asks, “Why are so few funded startups using serverless?” There are a lot of reasons listed, but I still think it just boils down to complexity and knowledge gaps.

I love to read how other people think about serverless and what their mental model is. Rob Morris wrote a short piece on the benefits of going AWS Serverless.

Muthu Venkatachalam talks about Serverless then & now and, I will say, he is 100% right about the cloud-nativeness of services like EKS.

Betsy Amy-Vogt’s piece welcomes us to the AI-powered, serverless, supercloud world, recapping three things we might have missed from the AWS Summit SF event. I’m not sure I like the term “supercloud,” but there is something about abstractions over cloud providers.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #137: The Best of Serverless Chats (Part 1), Rebecca and I take a trip down memory lane and discuss some of our favorite moments from the last 30 episodes co-hosting the show together.

Marcia Villalba shows you how to set up event logs and how to use API Destinations with a DLQ using EventBridge and AWS CDK.

There are some great episodes of Serverless Office Hours waiting for you including Ben Ellerby – EventBridge Storming and Minimal Viable Migrations, Serverless CI/CD, and Debugging AWS Step Functions executions with the new console experience.

And, for those of you who love Stripe’s documentation website, they’ve open-sourced Markdoc.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are a few interesting AWS announcements:

• Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics adds support for canary resources deletion when a canary is deleted
• AWS Control Tower can now use customer provided core accounts
• Amazon Lex launches support for phrase hints
• Amazon VPC Traffic Mirroring now supports sending mirrored traffic to Gateway Load Balancer backed monitoring appliances
• AWS Lambda adds support for Node.js 16

Serverless Tools 🛠

A Simple TypeScript Class to query information from DynamoDB by Luis Martínez

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

First time I’ve seen a visual security maturity model from AWS. The more colours the better! 😁 ~ Rowan Udell
There’s a lot to think about with cloud security, so this is a helpful way to see where you are on this spectrum.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

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 Thorsten Hoeger (​​@hoegertn). Thorsten is CEO & Cloud Consultant at Taimos, where he advises customers on how to use AWS. He also co-authored The CDK Book: A Comprehensive Guide to the AWS Cloud Development Kit. Thorsten hosted 2021’s CDK Day, has spoken at events like the “Serverless Panel: The Future of IaC, ROI of Serverless, & More,” and has written blog posts and hosted webinars for companies like Thundra and Instana. Thank you, Thorsten, for getting the serverless word out there!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Busy week last week for Cloudflare, but super exciting to see all the new things they are releasing. It didn’t seem to help their stock at all, but it’ll be interesting to see if this is a bet that will pay off. I plan on spending some time with D1 this week, so I’ll share additional insights as soon as I can.

Until 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.