Off-by-none: Issue #19

January 8, 2019

Starting off the new year with a serverless bang… 💥

Welcome to Issue #19 of Off-by-none. I’m so glad you’re here to talk about serverless! 🙌

Last week we reminisced about 2018 and laid out some plans for the new year. This week we’ll sort through all the serverless content that people created over the holiday break. Plus we look at some serverless use cases, share some upcoming webinars, and give you links to plenty of great talks to keep you busy for awhile.

We’ve got a lot to get to today, but before we jump in, I wanted to share that Lambda API v0.10 was released. Lambda API is a lightweight web framework for your serverless applications. It’s open source, fast, free, and now supports seamless integration with ALBs. v0.10 also added support for multi-value headers and query string parameters, plus new method-based middleware and much more. I’d love for you to check it out and send me feedback.

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled program. Here we go! 🚀

When you’d rather just sit back and watch some serverless videos… 🍿

ServerlessDays Milan 2018 released videos of all the talks from their event in October of last year. Lots of really great talks in here from Yan Cui, Ian Massingham, Danilo Poccia, and many more.

Serverless Computing London has also released some additional videos including Mikhail Shilkov’s Performance Tales of Serverless, Nate Taggart’s Rethinking Testing For Serverless, and Guy Podjarny’s Serverless Security: What’s Left To Protect?

Heitor Lessa announced that the second season of Build on Serverless is going to be about “Building a Serverless Airline App from scratch + leading practices applied.” This is a fun (and educational) thing to watch. You can (and should) RSVP on Twitch.

Also, Marcia Villalba released the first video in her Serverless Interviews series which just so happens to feature yours truly. So if you want to see me ramble on about serverless for 15 minutes while admiring the view of the Mirage in the background, this video is for you.

When you want to learn more about serverless security… 🔒

The team over at Protego created a Damn Vulnerable Serverless Application and donated it to OWASP so that you can learn what not to do when building serverless application. You can read more about it here. Now we have this AND the Serverless GOAT project that PureSec donated last month. These are both great resources to see how easily serverless vulnerabilities can be exploited and what to do to protect your application.

If you’re interested in discussing the OWASP Top 10 and how they apply to serverless applications, Ory Segal and I are hosting a Foundations of Lambda Security webinar on January 24, 2019 at 11am ET. Lots on information to cover, plus an interactive Q&A session at the end. Should be fun. 😉

What to do when you’re ready to use Lambda Layers… 🍰

Injecting Chaos to AWS Lambda functions using Lambda Layers by Adrian Hornsby, introduces us to a great use case for Layers. Werner said it best, “Everything fails all the time.” Using Chaos Engineering to test the resiliency of your distributed cloud applications is a great way to ensure that when things do fail, that your application will handle those issues gracefully and minimize the blast radius.

Gojko Adzic and his team created some public layers so you can now use FFmpeg, SOX, Pandoc and RSVG with your AWS Lambda projects. One more thing you don’t have worry about.

And if you want to take a Deep Dive Into Lambda Layers and the Lambda Runtime API, sign up for this webinar hosted by Chris Munns, Principal Developer Advocate at AWS. It’s scheduled for January 31, 2019 at 2pm ET.

When you’re having trouble choosing the right database for your serverless app… ⚖️

Alex DeBrie posted a tweet mentioning Rick Houlihan’s Match Your Workload to the Right Database (DAT301) talk at re:Invent. If you thought his Advanced Design Patterns for DynamoDB (DAT401) talk was amazing, prepare for another mind-blowing experience watching this one. Lots of practical advice to help you choose the right backend for your workload. 🤯

Speaking of DynamoDB, Forrest Brazeal from Trek10 spent his holiday break resurrecting the Northwind database from the annals of MS Access and teaches us how to convert it to NoSQL. From relational DB to single DynamoDB table: a step-by-step exploration is a great guide that shows us both the pros and cons of attempting to move relational workflows to DynamoDB. If you’re thinking about moving to NoSQL, please take a few minutes to read this.

When you’re wondering what AWS has been up to… Δ

AWS announced the Amazon API Gateway Service Level Agreement, which may have you scratching your head thinking, don’t all AWS services have SLAs? Just ask Scott Piper from SummitRoute. He put together an AWS Service Support table that shows just how few AWS services actually have them. Something for the 2019 #AWSwishlist.

The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code project seems to be coming along nicely as well. Whether you just want to try it out, or contribute in some way, it’s pretty cool to see AWS developing more things like this out in the open.

They also keep making strides with Nested Applications. If you’d like to learn more, there is a Nested Applications: Accelerate Serverless Development Using AWS SAM and the AWS Serverless Application Repository webinar scheduled for January 31, 2019. It’s hosted by James Hood, Sr. Software Dev Engineer at AWS, so you know it’s going to be good.

When you’re looking for some sample serverless use cases… 🔍

I love finding people that are applying serverless to new and interesting use cases. Whether they are solving complex workflows, or just a simple function that accomplishes a single task that makes your life easier, seeing the broad application of serverless is quite fascinating. Here are a few I found this week.

Building a serverless data analytics pipeline by Rodrigo Reis shows us a simple, but effective way to capture a stream of web events. They use an SQS queue and reserved concurrency to help throttle requests to their Elasticsearch cluster, which is both simple, and a great approach at their stage. They’re also smartly using IOpipe for observability.

Blog URL to PDF to Amazon Kindle by Dhaval Nagar outlines a simple app for automatically sending blog posts to a Kindle. There are probably multiple ways that this type of workflow could be used.

Serverless Function to Sync Data from a Database to Google Spreadsheet is another simple workflow that would be perfect for marketing teams, sales, or your billing department. No need to build interfaces for reporting data when there are already tools that people are familiar with.

If you want to get a bit more complex, check out How to build a React chat app with AWS API Gateway WebSockets, Custom Lambda Authorizer. Lots to chew on here, but if you’re heading down the WebSockets path, this is a good resource for you.

When you just want some interesting serverless content… 🤓

Save time and money with AWS Lambda using asynchronous programming by James Beswick provides some great tips for handling synchronous calls in your serverless functions. Also be sure that you Don’t overpay when waiting on remote API calls either.

Mike Vizard predicts the Battle Over Serverless Computing Frameworks to Heat Up in 2019. There is a lot of discussion in this piece about other companies (read: NOT AWS) embracing Knative and other open source “serverless” middleware to power their FaaS solutions. I think this goes to show how popular serverless is becoming and the thrashing that’s going on to catch up with AWS. I’m not sure this is going to play out the way these companies think it will.

There’s a new serverless framework called BAM! I haven’t used it yet, but let’s just add this to the list.

Jerry Hargrove continues to create more Cloud Diagrams & Notes for our viewing pleasure. His AWS Lambda and Aurora Serverless ones are awesome.

Yan Cui shows us how to perform Error Handling in AWS Lambda With Wrappers. He talks about the need for middleware in our serverless applications and how we can use it to capture errors and help us debug our systems.

Speaking of debugging, Hamit Burak Emre over at Thundra shows us how to Debug Your Python Functions Locally. Step-by-step debugging in Lambda functions with breakpoints? Yes, please.

Finally, Slobodan Stojanović, author and serverless wizard, answers the question, “What do you use for scheduling AWS Lambdas?” His answer gives us cron jobs and delayed triggers, all without servers to manage or maintain. 👍

Serverless Star of the Week ⭐️

There is a very long list of people that 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 let me know.

This week’s star is Farrah Campbell (@FarrahC32). Farrah is the Ecosystems Manager at Stackery, a visual tool for building serverless applications. Farrah has become another positive voice in the serverless community, helping to organize ServerlessDays Portland and other workshops, and an ever present figure at conferences helping to spread the serverless word. She was also recently featured as a Serverless Superhero in How serverless is breaking down barriers in tech. Diversity in tech has always been a challenge, so it’s great to have people like Farrah as part of the serverless community working to make it more inclusive.

Final Thoughts 🤔

Week #1 of 2019 is in the books, and if this is any indication, it is going to be a banner year for the serverless community! There has already been a ton of great serverless content so far, plus Paul Johnston pointed out that there are EIGHT ServerlessDays conferences between now and April 11th. One of which is Boston, so be sure to buy your tickets soon! I know I’m excited.

I hope you enjoyed this issue of Off-by-none. Please send me your feedback and suggestions so I can continue to make this newsletter better. Feel free to contact me via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or email and let me know your thoughts, criticisms, or how you’d like to contribute to Off-by-none.

Take care,
Jeremy