Off-by-none: Issue #189

May 24, 2022

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Serverless PaaS 🚀

Welcome to Issue #189 of Off-by-none! This issue is sponsored by our friends at Lumigo.

In our previous issue, Cloudflare got serious about infrastructure services, the Serverless Framework turned 7, and we learned about “superclouds”. This week, we get two new serverless platforms, a serverless debugger, and a type-safe serverless microservices framework. Plus, there’s plenty of great content from the serverless community.

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Serverless News & Announcements 📣

So much serverless news this week! Let’s start with some interesting funding/acquisition news. Pipedream lands $20M to connect disparate apps, Supabase raised an $80M Series B for its open source Firebase alternative, and Fastly acquired cloud-based software development platform Glitch to help it enter the developer tooling market.

There were a few notable service launches, including Koyeb, which is a serverless platform that integrates with your GitHub repository, Kalix, from Akka Serverless, which lets you build serverless, Cloud Native applications without databases, and ServerlessQ, a serverless queuing system that lets you reuse your existing Vercel, Netlify, or similar APIs and they’ll queue and retry your requests. Pretty cool stuff!

Thundra launched ServerlessDebugger to make debugging serverless apps easier, Swarmion, a type-safe serverless microservices framework, was launched, and Appwrite introduced four new Cloud Function runtimes.

Elastic announced expanded collaboration with AWS, which is just another huge win for the cloud giant. Elastic Cloud runs on top of AWS anyway, so regardless of which “cloud” you choose, AWS is still getting paid.

And since I’ve been neck deep in research over the last few weeks, I’ve been finding a number of stories that point to the growing complexity of cloud. This report finds that devs believe the current model of data observability is broken, plus Virtana Research found that more than 80% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy (more insights here). This is all part of a larger story that points to the fact that there are not enough “Cloud Native” developers to help companies make these cloud transformations.

Another recent report from SlashData found that there are now more than 7 million cloud native developers worldwide, but companies like Telia are taking the approach of trying to upskill 2,000 of their employees on AWS and Cloud technologies. Last year Gartner predicted that 50% of companies in 2022 would fail to meet their cloud adoption goals due to a lack of in-house skills and experience.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Enrico Portolan explains 5 ways to speed up your Lambda function, Allen Helton shares some solutions architect tips on how to build your first architecture diagram, and Saar Tochner describes the hidden magic of Lambda Extensions.

Dashsoumyaranjan highlights a few AWS Serverless services and their use-cases , Cintia Del Rio gives a biased (but fair) comparison of DynamoDB and Fauna for multi-region data stores, and Arthur Knoepflin compares CloudFront Functions and. Lambda@Edge and helps you choose the right one for your use case.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

There were several interesting tutorials that highlighted a number of great use cases. Willian Antunes shows you how to query compressed logs that are stored in S3 using AWS Athena, Anand Menon teaches you how to deploy a PyTorch Model as a serverless service, Eslam Hefnawy explains how to use Upstash with Serverless Cloud.

For the DynamoDB fans out there, Elizabeth Choi shares some thoughts on building a simple, reusable, function to query DynamoDB, Michael Cassidy uses Python to create a DynamoDB Table, Wong Xin Wei explains using AWS Step Functions to delete records from DynamoDB with manual approval. I really like that last use case, but I definitely wouldn’t use a SCAN operation here.

Also, Rob Scott teaches you how to use DynamoDB Streams and Event Mappings with Lambda and Maurice Borgmeier explains how to get started with testing DynamoDB code in Python.

Aravind VadamalaiMuthu continues with another post in his AWS CDK 101 series, Abhishek Gupta shows you how to build a Twitter Leaderboard app with Redis and AWS Lambda, and Anil Augustine Chalissery explains how to store & rotate DB credentials with AWS Secrets Manager.

Serverless Security 🔒

This unattributed post boldly states that serverless applications are not as secure as you might think! I’m always skeptical of these types of articles, but I typically like to address them head on. I would disagree with the statement that “there’s a misunderstanding that Serverless applications are more secure.” AppSec is going to continue to fall into the hands of most developers, regardless of what services you use, but the shared security model in serverless puts a lot more responsibility on the cloud provider.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Jordan Tingling discusses what it means to truly be Server-Less.

Ramakant Joshi shares a modernization pathway for a legacy .NET Framework monolithic application on AWS. I included this because all you need to do is 1) break down the monolith, 2) containerize your application, 3) refactor to .NET 6, and 4) migrate to a purpose-built, lower-cost database engine. Easy peasy. 🙄

Tomasz Łakomy opines on the benefits of multi-account strategy on AWS, Mark Albertson gives you three insights you might have missed from DockerCon 2022– including something interesting that Google is doing with CloudRun- and Sheen Brisals shares his experience with Amazon EventBridge Archive-Replay.

Kristi Perreault talks about her recent experience on the serverless conference circuit and shares some time for giving an effective talk “in person.”

Matt Domo writes about why a cloud-native approach is critical to digital transformation. Lots of good bits in here including the mindset shift to “prove it should not be in the cloud” and his point about hyperautomation.

Finally, Luca Mezzalira shares Amazon’s approach to building resilient architecture.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #138: The Best of Serverless Chats (Part 2), Rebecca and I continue our trip down memory lane and look at our favorite moments from episodes with Corey Quinn, Dorian Smiley, Shawn “swyx” Wang, Kristi Perreault, Eric Johnson, and Charity Majors.

Marcia Villalba shows you how to write your Lambda functions using Typescript with the AWS CDK.

And, the ServerlessCraic team discusses how to become an awesome software architect with these 12 books.

New from AWS 🆕

No earth-shattering announcements from AWS this week, but here are a few that caught my eye.

• AWS Control Tower now supports concurrent operations for preventive guardrails
• Amazon CloudFront now provides TLS version and cipher suite in CloudFront-Viewer-TLS-header
• Announcing Amplify Android library (Developer Preview), designed for Kotlin
• AWS Glue now provides APIs to create and manage AWS Glue Studio visual jobs
• Amazon MQ now supports RabbitMQ version 3.9.16
• AWS Secrets Manager now publishes secrets usage metrics to Amazon CloudWatch
• Amazon CloudWatch announces improved console experience

Serverless Tools 🛠

Accumulus is an easy, free-to-use, open-source tool for developers that need a way to assess and compare their AWS Lambda functions.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

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 Swizec Teller (@swizec). Swizec is a Senior Software Engineer at Tia and author of the Serverless Handbook for Frontend Engineers. He also pens the Senior Mindset Series, and has created a course on React for Data Visualization. Swizec also has a YouTube channel with even more educational content for engineers and has been a recent guest on Serverless Chats. We appreciate your prolific work in the community, Swizec! Thank you!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Somehow I figured out a way to make myself even busier 😉, but I am incredibly excited for what the future holds for serverless. The launch of Kalix and Koyeb (and obviously Serverless Cloud) are exactly the type of advancements we need to make the cloud easier to use. Lots of exciting things happening, and a lot more to share in the coming months!

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.