Off-by-none: Issue #192

June 14, 2022

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A new pricing model for Serverless? 💰

Welcome to Issue #192 of Off-by-none! This issue is sponsored by our friends at Lumigo.

In our previous issue, we looked at the state of serverless, we got more “serverless” containers, and we met some new heroes. This week, MongoDB Atlas Serverless goes GA, Honeycomb becomes the leader we always knew they were, and we discover a serverless unicorn. Plus, we’ve got some amazing serverless content from the community.

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Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Last week, at MongoDB World 22, they announced Atlas Serverless instances are now GA, letting you take your workloads from zero to scale in a completely managed service. There were some other announcements and analysis, but the thing that really stood out to me was the discounted pricing structure as it scales. This might be the new model for serverless pricing.

Common Room launched a 5-minute Developer Relations Compensation Survey with the goal to empower Developer Relations and Developer Advocacy professionals with more informed expectations when having compensation conversations. I like transparency.

Honeycomb cemented its position as a Leader in 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™, breaking out of the parent category of Application Performance Monitoring and being recognized as a leader in “observability.”

With the recent release of their Functions, DigitalOcean has launched a Functions Challenge that rewards you with serverless know-how, and maybe even a T-shirt.

And, in other interesting news, Branch (the serverless insurance company) just became a unicorn by raising a $147M Series C. Congrats to Joe Emison and the team over there.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Shawn Adams gives you a MongoDB vs DynamoDB Head-to-Head to help you choose your next NoSQL database.

Pubudu Jayawardana answers a very important question about AWS Step Functions: are active executions affected when your State Machine gets updated? The answer depends, but there are some strategies in here to have more flexibility.

Wojciech Matuszewski gives some details about Amazon EventBridge archive and the ordered replay of events.

Tim Anderson writes about Deno’s Fresh framework and the cool things they are doing with that, Emil Hein shares a bunch of Serverless Puppeteer use cases, and Aviad Mor gives an overview of monitoring Cloud Native microservices.

Kevin van Ingen talks about flipping business rules in serverless by using Step Functions as your “glue” instead of Lambda, Allen Helton explains three ways to retry failures in your serverless application, and Lee James Gilmore shares Part 2 of his Serverless B2B Authentication series.

Ryan Token shows us a great way to use serverless compute with dynamic ephemeral storage. It is kind of a bummer that you can’t set the tmp directory size per execution. It makes sense, but I think Ryan’s solution is quite clever.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Speaking of clever solutions, Joel Seeger has a way (albeit an unnecessarily complex one) for updating an existing DynamoDB Table resource to be a GlobalTable resource. Would be nice if AWS would just support this natively.

Beulah Mercy shows you how to design a GraphQL API using AWS AppSync via SAM template, Sandun Isuru Niraj gives some tips for handling failed messages in AWS Simple Queue Service (SQS), and Eliran Wolf explains a solution for sending MongoDB Atlas logs to Logz.io.

Adèle Gauvrit show you a serverless solution for just-in-time scheduling, and Tobin Chew takes scheduling even further by showing you a number of ways to set short periodic and absolute timeouts in AWS and serverless.

Matt Martz will help you create a cross-account IAM authorized API Gateway with CDK, Dan Stanhope shows you how to create and upload PDF to S3 using AWS Lambda and Puppeteer, and Chirag explains how to whitelist IP addresses in Amazon HTTP API. It’d be nice if some of these features were added directly to the service.

Finally, Mike Rudge explains his company’s solution for handling repeated tasks using Amazon EventBridge and AWS Lambda. This is another really clever solution that could be used for a number of applications, including scheduling automation workflows.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Haiko van der Schaaf has a piece on Serverless for Startups that does some calculations on the cost of a serverless versus serverful solution. It’s hard to compare apples to oranges, but even though his math seems right, your workload profile, cache hit rates, log ingestion costs, etc., can quickly change the dynamics here. TCO will still be the guiding factor here, so even if your serverless workloads are more expensive, the person-hours saved should more than make up for it (most of the time).

Jacob Martin details  a serverless migration gone well, Matthew Tyson articulates where software development is headed in 2022, and here are 9 reasons to read the first excerpt of The Value Flywheel Effect book.

Paul Johnston has a new post arguing that serverless systems aren’t software systems, but instead a collection of small, independent services connected by events. I would agree with this, except that new way of thinking doesn’t seem to be getting through, which leaves us with so many developers falling back to a comfortable stop gap in containers.

And speaking of containers, Jason Wadsworth had a few gripes with Datadog’s State of Serverless report, specifically the whole “serverless containers” thing. I’ve suffered cognitive dissonance over this for quite some time, so I certainly appreciate Jason’s point of view. But billion dollar cloud giants are a powerful force, and I might just suggest that he focus his energy elsewhere, because I think this battle has been long lost.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

In Serverless Chats Episode #140: From Zero to Cloud Engineer, Rebecca and I chat with Gwyn Pena-Siguenza about why everyone in tech should start out at a help desk, how flexibility versus simplicity affects a developer’s cognitive load, how Azure differs from GCP and AWS, the state of serverless, and so much more!

Marcia Villalba tests if a lift and shift migration to Lambda is possible, Cockroach Labs’ Jim Walker talks about Serverless databases, and Guillermo Rauch talks about Vercel’s integration with MongoDB and how it enables fast web experiences.

New from AWS 🆕

Some additional noteworthy AWS announcements:

• Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL supports LO module
• Amazon AppFlow now supports Salesforce Marketing Cloud as a source
• Announcing AWS Cost Allocation Tag API
• AWS Mainframe Modernization is now generally available
• New Amplify Flutter supports customizable authentication flows
• Amazon CloudFront now supports TLS 1.3 session resumption for viewer connections
• Announcing support for cross-region search in Amazon OpenSearch Service

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

I have been preparing a talk about “Best practices with Event Design” and been diving deep over the past week…. Here are some insights and thoughts I had along the way ~ David Boyne
Great thread by David on how companies should be thinking about building event-driven systems. There is definitely an art to a lot of this.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

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 Pawel Zubkiewicz (@pzubkiewicz). Pawel is the founder of CloudPouch, a desktop application that helps you understand and reduce your AWS billing costs. He’s also an AWS Cloud Architect for PTC.com at Transition Technologies PSC, and an AWS Community Builder. Pawel proactively grows and supports the Polish serverless community through his work on the Serverless Polska website, participating in Serverless Wrocław meetups and various conferences. He also created an online course “Serverless – from zero to Hero”. Thank you, Pawel, for supporting the serverless community!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I was only able to hang out for a few hours, but I had a lot of fun at MongoDB World last week. It was awesome to see in-person conferences back in full force, and also super exciting to see just how much MongoDB has embraced serverless and using it as a means to increase developer productivity. We are at an inflection point with the cloud and what is possible. This is going to be a very exciting year!

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.