Off-by-none: Issue #193

June 21, 2022

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Serverless Aurora v2 still isn’t serverless 🤷‍♂️

Welcome to Issue #193 of Off-by-none! This issue is sponsored by our friends at Lumigo.

In our previous issue, MongoDB Atlas Serverless and the Data API went GA, Honeycomb became a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, and Branch became a serverless unicorn. This week, serverless databases get another thumbs up from VCs, we get a free master class on inconsistent database consistency, and we learn why Serverless Aurora v2 isn’t serverless. Plus, we have lots of awesome content from the serverless community.

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Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Despite all the recent tech layoffs and doom and gloom VC warnings from Y Combinator, it seems DataStax has proven it’s still possible to raise nine-figures at higher valuation in 2022. It raised $115M to grow its super-scalable, real-time Astra DB database, another indication that “serverless database” innovation is continuing to heat up.

And speaking of serverless databases, Neon just came out of invite-only to deliver their serverless PostgreSQL offering. I don’t know if there is a project that’s tracking all of these companies, but there should be. 👀

In other cloud news, Lumigo announced the expansion of its serverless observability platform to support any modern cloud application (i.e. containers), Cloudflare is apparently rebuilding its CDN service on its Workers serverless API, and The State of WebAssembly 2022 dropped, with a key finding that “JavaScript has become a viable WebAssembly language.” Sorry to all the haters out there, but JS is here to stay. Forever. 😉

And finally, Renato Losio wrote a wrap up about the recent MongoDB Atlas Serverless Instances and Data API GA announcement. There are some conflicting opinions, but hey, serverless databases are becoming a crowded market, so you’re going to have a lot of choices.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Alex DeBrie has some inconsistent thoughts on database consistency, which is essentially a master class on the subject. You should definitely read this.

Dennis Persson explains serverless hosting in 2022 using a fictitious back-and-forth with Professor Prolog, while Sam Gibbons gives a great overview of AWS Aurora Serverless V2 and what’s new from V1.

Abirami Sukumaran put together a decision tree for your serverless needs, leading you to either Google Cloud Run or Google Cloud Functions.

Kealan Parr put together some serverless patterns reference architectures for Fauna and Donnie Prakoso gives you five great reasons to build serverless apps.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Always a ton of great serverless tutorials every week, which makes it really hard to pick just a few. I’ve whittled them down as much as I could.

Quick tutorial from Derek Lawless that shows you how to download Lambda layer versions using the AWS CLI. Handy for cross account inspection.

Arpad Toth explains how to sign requests with the AWS SDK in Lambda functions. You’d be surprised how often you might need to do this.

Jones Zachariah Noel continues his series on Step Functions, this time showing you how to do Cloud9 environment status monitoring.

Allen Helton gives you several tips for designing around serverless service limits. These little gotchas can be a pain, so having a plan to work around them is helpful.

Orr Weinstein shares how to monitor and troubleshoot containerized applications with Lumigo. Smart move to embrace containers.

Sarah Hamilton shares part 2 of her excellent post on resolving bottlenecks of Lambda triggered by Kinesis.

Mohammed Misyaath teaches you how to use AWS CloudFormation macros, Esteban Sastre shows you how to send emails asynchronously with Sendgrid, Node.js, AWS SQS, and AWS Lambda, and Muhammad Shakeel explains Lambda Function URLs, but more importantly, how to deactivate them.

There’s also this tutorial that shows you how to build a fully serverless AWS-based URL shortener using just a few services. It’s not particularly interesting, except for the fact that something so simple requires stitching together five AWS services, with a significant amount of knowledge required for each service.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Paul Swail explains why he switched from AWS CodePipeline to GitHub Actions. I think it was a wise decision.

Viljami Kuosmanen shares his experience during his first year as Head of Engineering @epilot and the process the team went through to move to serverless and kill the legacy monolith.

Not about serverless, but I appreciated Ashish Ansurkar’s thoughts on why he chooses full courses over crash courses when learning something new.

Atila Fassina is joining the Xata team and he shared a piece about The Xata Experience. If you haven’t heard of Xata yet, you will soon. It’s yet another competitor in the serverless database space.

Matt Asay shares thoughts on how serverless changes the way developers build and test based on some recent writings.

Interesting piece by Shawn “swyx” Wang about identifying your “dark matter strategy,” referring to the developers you can’t reach through traditional means.

Extremely interesting read by Steef-Jan Wiggers and Matt Campbell that summarizes the DevOps and Cloud InfoQ Trends Report from June 2022. “Serverless databases and ‘serverless as a baseline expectation’ are becoming table stakes for cloud services being used by developers.” 😉

And finally, Maciej Radzikowski writes, “No, AWS, Aurora Serverless v2 Is Not Serverless.” And he is not wrong.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #141: MongoDB Atlas Serverless, Rebecca and I chat with Kevin Jernigan about MongoDB’s road to serverless, how it enables developer productivity, why it’s so hard to build serverless databases, what a new serverless pricing model could look like, and so much more.

Marcia Villalba shows you the new AWS Step Function console to help you debug and analyze your workflows.

Marek Kuczynski from Stedi shares a number of serverless learnings and best practices.

Julian Wood and Ben Smith chat with Serverless Hero Slobodan Stojanović about using serverless for startups.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are a few AWS announcements that looked interesting to me:

• Announcing a new AWS Bills page experience
• Easily customize your notifications while using Amazon Lookout for Metrics
• Amazon Aurora Serverless v1 supports in-place upgrade from MySQL 5.6 to 5.7
• Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports tag-based authorization for data read and write operations
• Announcing enhanced integration with Service Quotas for Amazon DynamoDB
• Amazon Keyspaces now helps you monitor table storage costs through Amazon CloudWatch
• Amazon Lex Automated Chatbot Designer is now generally available

Thoughts from Social Media 🐦

A user on reddit asked if, “serverless has matured enough for creating user facing APIs?” As an early adopter, I found this question a bit absurd, but reading the responses makes me think we still have a long way to go.

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 Merritt Baer (@MerrittBaer). Merritt Baer is an emerging tech and infosec expert and currently a Principal Security Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS) where she provides technical cloud security guidance to organizations like the Fortune 100,and advises the leadership of AWS’ largest customers. Recently, Merritt served as the Lead Cyber Advisor to the Federal Communications Commission. A double Harvard graduate with experience in all three branches of government, she also wrote and implemented civilian cybersecurity strategy at the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Cybersecurity and Communications, the nation’s cyber firehouse. Thank you, Merritt, for your impressive contributions to the community!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Seeing FaaS and “serverless databases” cross the chasm into the “early majority” in the DevOps and Cloud InfoQ Trends Report is pretty exciting. There has been so much innovation and expansion over the last few years, that it’s probably really hard (if not impossible) to build an app now that doesn’t use one of these serverless offerings. So for those of you waiting in the “late majority,” resistance is futile.

Oh, yeah, and I’ll be speaking at ServerlessDays NYC on Friday, so be sure to swing by if you’re in the area.

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.