Off-by-none: Issue #194

June 28, 2022

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What's next for Off-by-none? 🔮

Welcome to Issue #194 of Off-by-none! This issue is sponsored by our friends at Lumigo.

In our previous issue, more serverless databases got funded, we got a free master class on inconsistent database consistency, and we learned (again) why Serverless Aurora v2 isn’t serverless. This week, we talk about what’s next for Off-by-none, see what all the fuss about Deno is, and deep dive into Cloudflare Workers. Plus, we have lots of great serverless content from the community.

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What’s next for Off-by-none?

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been writing this newsletter for almost 4 years now! I’ve learned so much from this amazing community and I’ve made many wonderful friends along the way. Over these last several years, I’ve watched the serverless ecosystem grow beyond my wildest dreams, expanding well beyond Lambda functions and a few AWS Managed Services. I’ve read and shared countless tutorials, articles, videos, product announcements, and more. I’ve interviewed well over 100 serverless and cloud leaders on the podcast, spoken at dozens of conferences, and met with thousands of you to discuss this crazy thing we call “serverless.”

My goal when I first started this newsletter was to help others learn by sharing the discoveries and experiences (along with the successes and failures) of developers building serverless applications. I also wanted to recognize people and amplify voices in the community that were helping to make serverless better, thinking about things differently, and pushing the boundaries of what it could do. But even though the serverless ecosystem has grown and changed quite a bit, the goal of this newsletter is still fundamentally the same: share, learn, and recognize the contributions of the community.

Over the next two months, you’ll see some changes to the format of the newsletter, including a platform migration to Revue. Then, starting in September, I’ll be offering a new premium edition of the Off-by-none newsletter! It will include additional analysis and insights on the rapidly expanding serverless ecosystem, as well as a monthly meetup call to answer your questions, learn and discuss what challenges others in the community are facing, and to explore the evolving role of developers.

Like with most things in tech (and life), this is an experiment. There will still be a community edition of the Off-by-none newsletter for free, and it will still be chockfull of links, events, and community content. There are three of us that work to get this newsletter out every week, and while we love the support we get from sponsors, we want to spend more time focused on the community and our readers. If you’ve gotten value from this newsletter over the years, we’d love for you to support us by becoming a paid member today!

Sign up for the Premium Edition

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Bit of a slow serverless news week, but we did learn of a new platform called Fermyon that wants to reinvent the way programmers develop microservices.

Deno also raised $21M to launch its fully managed runtime service pointing to Cloudflare Workers as its closest competitor, followed by Vercel, Netlify and Fastly.

And Lawrence Hecht pointed out results of a DigitalOcean survey that found serverless usage was not popular in workplaces. Since the methodology states the survey was distributed primarily to “DigitalOcean email lists and open source groups,” I’m going to guess that these respondents don’t accurately represent the cloud developer landscape.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Alex DeBrie published another great post to help you understand when the CAP theorem applies and what it means.

Rahul Sharma gives you a quick, but interesting overview of Lambdas and Network Security.

Allen Helton’s excellent post on building serverless applications that scale the perfect amount is a great read, though it’d be nice if we didn’t have to think about scale with serverless applications.

JV Roig explains why load testing makes your DynamoDB Table better, Srinath S shares some tips to effectively design in DynamoDB, and Harsh Kulshrestha regales us with the curious case of zombie lambdas.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Emil Hein shares how to integrate AWS and Salesforce using EventBridge, Wojciech Matuszewski explains how to get better error messages for non-existing API resources with Amazon API Gateway, and Seda Atalay teaches you how to deploy python packages on AWS Lambda with EFS.

Nirav Shah shows us how to use the Serverless Framework to deploy Google Cloud Functions, yep, you can still do that.

Michael Fahim gives a lengthy introduction to Aurora Serverless V2.

And speaking of lengthy, Tomas Fernandez tutorial on AWS Serverless with Monorepos should keep you busy for awhile (but you’ll learn a lot too).

And finally, this post will show you how to deploy AWS Lambda functions as a container image using CodePipeline, if that’s something you want to do. 😉

Serverless Security 🔒

We don’t often get articles about serverless security, so I like to include them whenever I can. Erez Berkner recently wrote about securing serverless data from cryptomining malware like Denonia. I’ve given my thoughts on this before (AppSec is real), but serverless still has a much better security posture by default.

Also, Steve Wilson from Contrast Security wrote a piece about Government’s Move to Serverless: Rethinking Security Strategy. There are some good points in here, though I’m not sure I agree that the “attack surface increases in serverless.”

Serverless Reads 🤓

There were several articles lately about Zero Trust Architecture including how Cloudflare Security does Zero Trust, and I’m glad to see this model getting more attention. IMO, VPCs and trusted networks can no longer (or at least make it really difficult to) handle traffic in today’s world of globally distributed systems. I’m a big fan of the Zero Trust model and would like to see others embrace it as well.

David Anderson explains what high performing modern cloud team looks like, Vijay Karthik shares Lessons from Neiman Marcus Group on transforming retail with cloud-native architecture, and Fajrin Azis writes about embracing serverless.

Finally, Ruslan Gainutdinov explains how he DDoSed himself using AWS CloudFront and Lambda@Edge and got a $4.5k bill. 😬

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

On Serverless Chats Episode #142: Cloudflare Workers, Rebecca and I chat with Michael Hart about what’s new with Cloudflare Workers, how to add state with K/V, Durable Objects, R2, and more, how and why WinterCG is defining a new set of Web API standards, maintaining open source, and so much more.

Marcia Villalba show you the ServerlessLand.com Serverless Patterns site and how to use them to get started with an AWS serverless project.

New from AWS 🆕

Some interesting announcements from the teams at AWS this past week:

• AWS Fargate now fully supports multiline logging powered by AWS for Fluent Bit
• Announcing new Console Query Editor for Amazon QLDB
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) enables dynamic resizing for storage space
• Amazon Textract announces quality update to its Forms extraction feature
• AWS announces Amazon CodeWhisperer (Preview)
• Amazon MSK adds support for Apache Kafka version 3.1.1 and 3.2.0
• AWS WAF adds support for inspecting multiple request headers
• Amazon Aurora now supports PostgreSQL 14
• AWS Well-Architected Tool adds multiple enhancements to custom lenses
• Announcing Open Data on AWS Data Exchange
• AWS WAF Captcha is now generally available

Serverless Tools 🛠

simrankadept/serverless-ssm-version-tracker
A simple plugin that updates SSM Parameter Store with a new version that is semver compliant. The aim is to provide an automatic history log of serverless deployments and their versions.

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

Joe’s right about this. But why do caches lead to long outages? Let’s explore one reason with a small simulation, starting with a really simple two-tier system, and seeing what happens when a cache gets emptied. ~ Marc Brooker
A mini-master class on caching with Mark Brooker.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

June 30, 2022 – AWS Tech Conference – AWS User Group Ukraine

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 Anjana Vakil (@anjanavakil). Anjana was recently a Senior Developer Advocate at Hasura, and prior to that, a Developer Advocate at Observable and a Software Engineer at Mapbox. Her speaking engagements include Learn with Auth0, GOTO Unscripted 2021, JSUnconf, JSConf EU, Devs For Ukraine, and most recently, acting as MC at Serverless in the Park. She loves to share the joy of programming and advocate for a more diverse, equitable, and ethical tech industry, and is an alumna of the Recurse Center & Outreachy. Thank you, Anjana, for your enthusiasm and contributions to the community!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Thank you so much for being part of the community and reading this newsletter. Our new premium edition will be here before you know it, so if you’d like to support us, please become a member today!

We are on our bi-weekly summer schedule starting this week, so there will be no newsletter on July 5th & 19th and August 2nd, 16th, and 30th.

See you in two weeks,
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.