Off-by-none: Issue #191

June 7, 2022

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The State(fullness) of Serverless 💾

Welcome to Issue #191 of Off-by-none! This issue is sponsored by our friends at Lumigo.

In our previous issue, DigitalOcean launched serverless functions, AppSync made serverless WebSockets better, and talent shortages risked stalling innovation. This week, we look at the state of serverless, we get more “serverless” containers, and we meet a new batch of heroes. Plus, we have plenty of awesome content from the serverless community.

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Serverless Containers everywhere!

Datadog released their State of Serverless report last week, and I was a bit surprised by the broader adoption of “serverless” containers such as Google Cloud Run, AWS App Runner, Fargate, and the like. David Linthicum opined that it’s a serverless and containerized world, and I think I have to agree.

The continued sophistication and scaling capabilities of serverless container offerings like Cloud Run, App Runner, and now Azure Container Apps, is quite impressive and makes scaling (and routing to) a containerized app fairly simple. There are, of course, tradeoffs, but for sustained workloads (mostly HTTP), and a willingness to pay a nominal fee to keep container instances warm, I think “serverless” containers can help round out your modern cloud application infrastructure.

There’s a world where serverless and containers not only live in harmony, but work together to provide cloud users with the best of both worlds. Let’s hope that day comes sooner rather than later.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

In other cloud news, AWS Introduced a new batch of Heroes, including Serverless Hero Kristi Perreault and DevTools Hero Adam Elmore. Congratulations to them all!

Also, Amazon EMR Serverless is now generally available (Channy Yun writes more here) to run your petabyte-scale, on-demand data analytics in the cloud.

Contrast Security announced a free code scanning tool, Lumigo received a Tech Innovation Leadership Award, Deno Deploy moves toward GA and added a paid plan, and Evan Weaver is stepping back from Fauna.

Speaking of “serverless” containers, Microsoft released Azure Container Apps to compete with the Cloud Runs and App Runners of the world.

And finally, Cloudflare published a Platform Week wrap-up to help you get your head around everything new they’ve launched recently.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Nwachukwu Chibuike asks what the fuss is all about with DynamoDB Single Table Design, then gives you some pretty helpful tips about when and why to use it.

Kabilesh PR explores Aurora Serverless V2 for MySQL in this in-depth post and Raphael Bottino discusses how to hit AWS Step Functions limitations, and how to overcome them.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Brian Rinaldi shows you handling data at the edge with Cloudflare Workers by breaking down the different options and methods available. Bryce Dorn then explains how to use Workers KV to build an edge cached blog. Very cool stuff.

Akifumi Niida shares some tips for exposing SPAs and APIs with Cloudfront + S3 + API Gateway. This is a common use case and a good solution for it.

Jakub Juszko explains how to build a serverless Discord Bot on AWS in 5 steps.

Wojciech Matuszewski tackles how to ensure cross-region data integrity with Amazon DynamoDB global tables.

And Lee James Gilmore gives us a rundown of serverless B2B authentication.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Anna Geller shares 7 reasons why serverless encourages useful engineering practices, Daniele Frasca shares his experience with Rust, six months in, and Allen Helton asks, “Are you really API-First or do you just think it?”

Haresh Nandwani helps you understand resiliency patterns and trade-offs to architect efficiently in the cloud.

Yonatan Korem says that if you use Amplify and Git branches, you are going to have a bad time.

Corey Quinn asks some important product strategy questions in The Aurora Serverless Road Not Taken.

And finally, Sylvain Kerkour opines on when Serverless really shines (and when to avoid it). There’s a lot to agree with in here, because I do think that many PaaS providers are starting to solve the problem better than serverless does (even though many of them are, or are moving to, serverless behind the scenes). I’m less concerned about denial of wallet attacks, but there are times when properly managed and scaled stateful workloads solve the problem better, and more cost-efficiently. However, there are a lot more use cases for serverless that the author suggests, but you have to understand how that fits into your overall budget and cloud strategy.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

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

Using a very strange analogy, Corey Quinn rips on Amazon Cognito in his Strange and Too-Familiar Tale of Uncle Suitcase.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some more interesting AWS announcements:

• Amazon RDS adds support for publishing events to encrypted Amazon SNS topics
• Shared account customization now available for AWS Control Tower Account Factory for Terraform
• AWS AppSync simplifies GraphQL API development with expanded GraphQL Utility Helper Library
• Announcing Geofence Management in Amplify Geo (JavaScript), powered by Amazon Location Service
• AWS Step Functions launches an interactive workshop for building and deploying application workflows
• Amazon Route 53 announces IP-Based Routing for DNS Queries
• NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB adds support for CreateTable, UpdateTable, and DeleteTable operations
• Announcing Metered Billing for AWS Data Exchange for APIs
• AWS Proton introduces service components
• Amazon Cognito improves risk evaluation for Advanced Security Features

Serverless Tools 🛠

Neon – The serverless open source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres.

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

August 11, 2022 – Moar Serverless!! 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 Gift Egwuenu (@lauragift_). Gift is a Developer Advocate at Cloudflare. She’s been named a Cloudinary Media Developer Expert, Microsoft MVP, Auth0 Ambassador, GitHub Star, Polynuat Advisor, and Nuxt.js Ambassador. Gift also has a blog and a YouTube channel that covers everything from cloud tech to mental health. She has spoken at the Codeland Conference 2021, the JSWorld USA Conference and is slated to speak at ServerlessDays Paris later this month. Thank you, Gift, for all that you do!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I think I’m finally done with Covid and these horrible headaches are a thing of the past. It even forced me to skip an episode of Serverless Chats. Not that you need this advice, but take care of yourself.

I’m heading down to NYC to give a talk on “Serverless: The Future of Application Development” at MongoDB World tomorrow morning. If you’re around, come by and say, “hi!”

Until 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.