Off-by-none: Issue #190

May 31, 2022

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A DigitalOcean of Serverless 🌊

Welcome to Issue #190 of Off-by-none! This issue is sponsored by our friends at Lumigo.

In our previous issue, we got two new serverless platforms, a serverless debugger, and a type-safe serverless microservices framework. This week, DigitalOcean hops on the serverless train, serverless WebSockets get better, and talent shortages risk stalling innovation. Plus, there’s lots of amazing serverless content from the community.

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Serverless News & Announcements 📣

The big news from last week was that DigitalOcean launched a serverless product based on last year’s Nimbella acquisition. I was excited to see how this would materialize (Nimbella was pretty cool), but it seems as though DigitalOcean Functions are just another FaaS offering. I’m hoping there is more to come.

Also, data-sharing platform Vendia raised a $30M Series B to continue building out their platform. Super interesting (and practical) use of cross-cloud blockchain technology here.

And AWS AppSync introduced a new simplified console experience to deploy generic real-time Pub/Sub APIs. I’ve always liked AppSync’s WebSocket implementation better than API Gateway’s, so I’m glad to see them take efforts to make it more accessible outside of their GraphQL offering.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Rushikesh Tote shared an interesting finding that makes file uploads faster by proxying them through Cloudflare Workers close to the user and then taking advantage of Cloudflare’s network speeds.

Kelvin Xu writes about Adobe App Builder and how it scales. More interesting (to me anyway) is what’s happening with all these platform/SaaS specific serverless offerings for automating work alongside a 3rd party service. There were a lot of these popping up, but I haven’t been hearing much about them lately.

Allen Helton shares some quick optimizations you should make to your serverless applications. Lots of useful tips in here.

Kay Plößer shares 5 common Amazon Kinesis issues. Even though these are content marketing pieces, I actually find them quite useful, especially if they are linked to real-world data that Dashbird is collecting.

If you like reading about serverless use cases, this post will give you a few ideas, plus Pablo Iorio shares some thoughts on the serverless use cases of building voice apps. I really thought voice apps were going to be more popular, but haven’t seen that take hold yet.

And Austin Gil explains Edge Computing with picture of dogs in knit hats. There’s plenty to learn in here.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Always plenty of great tutorials to teach you something new. Emil Hein shows you how to authenticate users with Vue 3, Serverless & AWS Cognito. He also refers to it as the “dreaded AWS Amplify”, which made me laugh. But in all seriousness, it would be nice to have a frontend Cognito library that didn’t require Amplify.

Eoin Shanaghy has a great tutorial on how to use EventBridge as a cross-account event backbone, which is crucial if you’re following AWS’s best practices to account separation.

Arpad Toth shows you how to remove sensitive information from HTTP headers in Lambda functions, Haiko van der Schaaf explains how to use DynamoDB streams to feed an Algolia search (very useful), and Jennelle Cosby teaches you how to trigger Lambda to send messages to SQS.

David Brackin gets you started with the Storage First pattern showing you how to integrate AWS API Gateway with SQS with authentication, Nakul Kurane details how to deploy a Lambda Function as a Container Image using Docker, SAM and ECR, and Maurice Borgmeier gives you some code for getting a near-real-time view of a DynamoDB stream with Python.

Jérôme Van Der Linden walks you through local testing of a CDK-defined Step Functions state machine.

And finally, Ibrahim Cesar takes a fresh look at Kafka, and gives some thoughts on building event-driven applications with it.

Serverless Reads 🤓

In a sponsored piece, Tim Mackey makes the case that Low Code does not mean low risk. I agree with a lot of these assertions, and vetting any new platform is certainly a wise idea.

Mark Albertson posits that the acceptance of Knative into CNCF could drive enterprise interest in serverless solutions. I think interest is already there, but too many vendors and too much gravity with K8s to seek better alternatives.

There were several stories trying to analyze the results of the Rackspace Multicloud Annual Research Report 2022, like this one and this one. The major conclusion is that security concerns and talent shortages risk stalling innovation, which makes a lot of sense to me.

Paul Swail wrote a recent piece asserting that IaC is becoming table stakes for new cloud services. While I certainly agree that this is preferable over “console-ops”, there are a lot of companies innovating in this space to create reproducible deployments without the need for these provider specific control plane configurations. IaC was certainly a step in the right direction, but looking at what’s happening, it wouldn’t surprise me if this ends up as another footnote in the history of cloud computing.

Jillian Koskie shares how serverless computing is used by AstraZeneca, ZenDesk, Mosaic Life Care, Lucille Games, and Hemnet, and Heather Joslyn chats with Jim Walker about CockroachDB 22.1 and also sheds some light on Cloud Native’s future, i.e. more abstraction.

And finally, Jamstack pioneer Matt Biilmann shares some thoughts on Web 3, Deno, and why e-commerce needs the composable web.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #139: Tactical Serverless, Rebecca & I chat with Lee Gilmore about the complexities of productionizing serverless applications, what is Serverless Tactical DD(R), why serverless threat modeling is so important, how to think about your architecture layers, and a lot more.

Marcia Villalba hosts Sara Gerion for a discussion about AWS Lambda Powertools for Typescript and how you can easily adopt best practices in your apps.

The Serverless Craic team discusses how to start cloud computing, Serverless Office Hours tackles PowerShell on Lambda, and Dustin Goodman does some Serverless Training 101.

New from AWS 🆕

• Announcing JSON support for Amazon ElastiCache for Redis and Amazon MemoryDB for Redis
• Amazon ElastiCache now supports Memcached 1.6.12
• AWS Config supports Amazon CloudWatch metrics
• Two new storage locations available for AWS DataSync (with a helpful write up from Danilo Poccia)
• Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached now supports encryption of data in transit

Serverless Tools 🛠

Stepview — All your AWS Step Functions at a glance from Vincent Claes

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 7, 2022 – Serverless Office Hours | Live at 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 Ayesha Arshad (@aysharshad). Ayesha is a DevOps Engineer – Altron Systems Integration (Vodacom) for Visionet Systems Inc. In addition to her current role, she is an AWS Community Builder and has experience in AWS Cloud, application deployment, maintenance, security, and automations. Ayesha loves to share her knowledge with beginners through her blog that covers topics like: AWS, DevOps, cloud security, and coding and scripting. Thanks, Ayesha, for making it easy for others to get their start!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Shortly after publishing last week’s newsletter, I tested positive for COVID, then spent the week battling what felt like a really, really, really bad head cold. After some rest and well-wishes from the community, I think (after 8 days) I’m finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I’m fully vaxxed and boosted, but this was a sobering reminder that this thing isn’t over yet. Stay safe out there.

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.