Off-by-none: Issue #195

July 12, 2022

Only have a few minutes? Check out this week's MOST POPULAR links as chosen by our email subscribers.

Accelerate your Serverless App Development 🚀

Welcome to Issue #195 of Off-by-none! I hope you’re all enjoying your summer.

In our previous issue, we talked about what’s next for Off-by-none, learned what all the fuss was about with Deno, and took a deep dive into Cloudflare Workers. This week, SAM Accelerate goes GA, Vercel Edge Functions go Beta, and Cloudflare introduces WASI at the edge. Plus, we have two weeks of amazing content from the serverless community for you.

Don’t forget that the Off-by-none Premium Edition will be starting soon, so please be sure to become a member to help support what we do! The Community Edition will continue to be free to everyone.

Become a Member

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

I forgot just how much news piles up when you skip a week! Let’s start with the 2022 Serverless Community Survey. If you haven’t filled this out yet, please do. The only way to make serverless better is if we have input from people like you! 😉

AWS had a few big serverless announcements, including the general availability of AWS SAM Accelerate, which helps you iterate on serverless applications in the cloud (which is totally the way you should do it.) They also announced the general availability of Amplify UI for React and introduced the new AWS Step Functions Workflows Collection. They also published their quarterly ICYMI: Serverless Q2 2022 post to help you catch up on all things AWS Serverless.

Not serverless, but interesting nonetheless, is AWS Identity and Access Management introducing IAM Roles Anywhere for workloads outside of AWS. I kind of like this idea, as anything that reduces the use of long lived credentials makes things a bit more secure.

In other cloud news, Vercel Edge Functions are now in public beta, DataStax’s Astra Streaming service went GA, and Google Cloud’s PostgreSQL interface for Cloud Spanner is now generally available, underscoring the fact that people still love a good SQL interface.

And last but not least, Cloudflare announced support for WASI on Cloudflare Workers, firing off yet another proverbial stone at a dominant AWS.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Lee James Gilmore shared some tips on Serverless Internationalization, which seems strange to an American like me, because clearly we just assume everyone speaks English. 🙄

Kam Lasater explains how to fail at serverless, especially when you have too many file descriptors.

Marko Djakovic takes a look at AWS Lambda Cold Starts, and what happens with NestJS Mono-Lambda API. I’m not sure the term “chubby” Lambda will stick, but his point is well taken.

Borislav Stoilov shares what he’s learned from using AWS DynamoDB in production for more than 3 years, which actually reads like an immensely helpful guide for anyone interested in learning the service.

Enrico Portolan points out five key metrics you should alert on in your serverless applications, Awedis Keofteian gives you an in-depth overview of AWS Step Functions, and Matthew Wilson shares lessons learned from AppSync and DynamoDB.

And finally, for a bit of fun (and because I like patterns), David Boyne shares a possible idea for replaying Amazon EventBridge events with AWS Step Functions. I’m not sure I understand the use case, but it’s an interesting approach.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Stephen Siegert has a great tutorial that shows you how to do serverless authentication with Amplify Auth, Amplify UI, and Next.js.

Valentin Beggi teaches two ways to implement serverless API versioning, Ilana Polonsky explains a method for URL redirection in serverless, Sebastian Bille shows you how to separate stateful infrastructure with Serverless Compose.

Gabriel Torres implements a use case of orchestrating a credit check using AWS StepFunctions, the CallBack Pattern, SQS, and a TaskToken.

Matt Martz has a really interesting series on Event Driven Step Functions, with part one describing how to orchestrate choreography with event driven step functions and part two explaining how to Infer Architecture and Asynchronous Workflows using EventBridge Events. They’re a bit to get through, but super cool implementations.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Lee Priest shares his serverless journey in Serverless introspection is not just for machines.

Jessica Wachtel explains how MongoDB brought its serverless database service to the Cloud. It’s a sponsored post, but an interesting read.

Emily Omier shares some insight into what Authentication and Authorization mean in Zero Trust. I’m a big fan of zero trust, and I might sound like a broken record, but to me, it’s the only way for distributed systems.

Loraine Lawson writes about Deno’s new Fresh framework, Daniele Frasca shares the state of AWS Serverless Development, and Sheen Brisals shares another post in his series on Sustainability Patterns For Serverless Development , this time about  Data And Storage.

Sanjay Bisht writes about why his team migrated from AWS Lambda to ECS at BIJAK. I think there are some valid arguments in here, even though there may have been some additional workarounds. But at the end of the day, here is a team that ran up against limitations in serverless that made them rethink their whole approach. Perception is reality, and while there are, of course, several other factors to consider, stories likes these aren’t a good look.

With that being said, according to this article on modernizing businesses in a serverless environment, “the serverless model is here to dominate.” I still wholeheartedly agree with that statement.

Maciej Radzikowski writes about why he stopped being a CDK skeptic. He makes a lot of great arguments, many of which I agree with. But I’m still a CDK skeptic, not just because I think it’ll lead to long term maintenance headaches and massive technical debt, but also because I think there’s an evolution beyond IaC.

Allen Helton has a great post on what is Serverless Enablement and why it is important. Selling a new paradigm to an organization is hard, but building a team of champions and experts internally that can help with a slow transition seems to be the model that works best. I still think there needs to be a better way.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Marcia Villalba has two great videos for you, including how to migrate your ReactJS app to Serverless by “Lift and shifting” your frontend, and how to use Amazon Cognito to add authentication and authorization to your web apps.

The Serverless Craic also has two episodes for you, Episode 23 discusses the top 8 Principles for Cloud Software Engineers, and Episode 24 explains how to find “Clarity of Purpose” with the North Star Framework.

Serverless Office Hours has an episode on the AWS SAM Accelerate GA and one with special guest Mathieu Napoli to discuss what’s new with the Serverless Framework.

And finally, iLyas Bakouch has a great video on implementing the Ambassador pattern with serverless.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are a few other AWS announcements that grabbed my attention:

• Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) adds console access for the BillableTableSizeInBytes CloudWatch metric
• Amazon WorkMail now supports invoking Lambdas to fetch availability (free/busy)
• AWS Security Hub launches 36 new security best practice controls
• AWS CloudFormation StackSets announces support for account level targeting in an Organizational Unit
• Integration of AWS Well-Architected Tool with AWS Organizations
• Amazon WorkMail now supports invoking Lambda to fetch availability (free/busy)
• Announcing quota management for Amazon Location Service
• Announcing general availability of Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances for macOS

Thoughts from Social Media 🐦

From Reddit: When does FaaS stop making sense from a cost perspective?
This is a valid question in my opinion, and while there is still a very good TCO argument to be had, providers need to price sustained serverless workloads better. There is a happy medium between on-demand and provisioned capacity.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

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 Prashanth HN (@prashanth). Prashanth is co-founder and CTO at Antstack.io, a fullstack serverless company, an AWS Serverless Hero, and one of the community leaders of the AWS Users Group, Bengaluru. He mentors and consults other startups to embrace a serverless approach, frequently blogs about serverless topics for all skill levels and Amplify-related topics on the AWS Amplify Community Blog, and delivers talks about building using microservices and serverless. Prashanth maintains the open-source project Lanyard, a serverless agenda app for event organizers and attendees. Thank you for your commitment to serverless, Prashanth!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I hope I didn’t overwhelm you with two weeks worth of amazing serverlessness! Don’t forget that we have our new premium edition starting soon, so if you’d like to support us and want to receive extended commentary and in-depth analysis of the serverless ecosystem, become a member today!

Another reminder that we are on our bi-weekly summer schedule, so there will be no newsletter on July 19th, August 2nd, August 16th, and August 30th.

See you in another 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.