Off-by-none: Issue #196

July 26, 2022

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Simplifying Serverless Best Practices 🧑‍🏫

Welcome to Issue #196 of Off-by-none!

In our previous issue, SAM Accelerate went GA, Vercel Edge Functions launched into Beta, and Cloudflare introduced WASI at the edge. In this issue, RedShift Serverless goes GA, Lambda gets some better Powertools, and we get a new glue for serverless runtimes. Plus, we have another two weeks of awesome serverless content from the community.

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.

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Serverless News & Announcements 📣

It was a busy two weeks for serverless and cloud, so let’s jump right in.

AWS had a number of big announcements, including the general availability of Amazon Redshift Serverless along with some new capabilities. AWS Lambda Powertools for TypeScript is also now generally available (accompanied by a helpful overview by Matt Morgan as well as a great post on how it can simplify serverless best practices by Sara Gerion). AWS Lambda also got some upgrades announcing support for a new IAM condition key, lambda:SourceFunctionArn and support for Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC).

Azure Static Web Apps introduced API backend options, plus UpStash launched qStash, a messaging service for serverless applications, and CloudZero announced AnyCost, a cost intelligence tool for a multi-service world.

In funding news, Boris Tane and Baselime raised £1.5M in pre-seed funding to unlock serverless developer productivity, DeltaStream secured $10M to build real-time streaming databases, and Netlify announced its first investments for the Jamstack Innovation Fund.

It also seems that AWS CodeWhisperer has entered the preview stage, but early testers encountered snags, like other people’s S3 buckets showing up and questions about generated code ownership. 😬 I have mixed feelings about these tools. I had to turn off Copilot because it kept suggesting a lot of extraneous code, but then again, it’s probably smarter than me! 🤖

Serverless Concepts 🏗

There was an extremely popular article from Julian Wood on understanding AWS Lambda scaling and throughput, which you don’t want to miss.

Alex DeBrie helps us understand Eventual Consistency in DynamoDB, Jérôme Van Der Linden shares his serverless testing strategy, and Jader Dias explains why S3 isn’t more expensive than DynamoDB (if you can afford the extra latency).

Lee James Gilmore explains serverless authorization, Kay Plößer discusses why to use AWS AppSync as a gateway to your cloud infrastructure, and Avik Kundu shares an approachable introduction to AWS Step Functions.

Wojciech Matuszewski explains the two ways to directly integrate AWS Lambda functions with Amazon API Gateway, Daniele Frasca has an ask for the AWS Serverless teams as he exposes the hidden serverless latency, Lakindu Hewawasam gives some pretty good reasons to use DynamoDB for your next application.

Finally, Yan Cui shares the best ways to save money on Lambda.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

I am constantly amazed by how many people are writing serverless tutorials now. More work for me to pick and choose, but I’m happy to do it. Here are several that piqued my interest.

Piero Bozzolo shows you how to allow API Gateway to upload objects in S3 directly, this post explains how to whitelist IP addresses to access a static site hosted on S3, and Ajay Karthik teaches you how to generate PDFs using Playwright and AWS Lambda.

Elias Brange has a great post on how to separate your serverless infrastructure, Wong Xin Wei explains Serverless Framework canary deployments, and Eyal Roth shows you how to tame serverless batch processing with AWS Step Functions.

Jeroen Reijn shared a method for invoking an AWS Lambda function during CDK deployment, which is pretty cool. And Pierin Sako goes quite in-depth to explain how to provide on-demand, temporary, time-based, attribute-based, and Least Privilege Access to AWS accounts.

Serverless Security 🔒

Allen Smith shares 5 challenges of serverless security protection in the cloud. Alas, this is nothing new, but always good to keep security top of mind. Not sure I’d agree that “serverless applications are a recent development”, but I guess that depends on your definition of “recent.”

Serverless Reads 🤓

Lijoy George wrote a lengthy piece on the creation of a full stack serverless application with vendor lock-in prevention. It has a lot of likes on Medium, and there are certainly some smart choices in there, but time-to-market still seems like the more important metric to me when getting a new project off the ground.

Rostislav Markov has an interesting post suggesting that you can save time and effort in assessing your teams’ architectures with pattern-based architecture reviews. I do love patterns.

Guillaume Blaquiere explains why he definitively switched from Cloud Functions to Cloud Run, Marc Brooker shares a preview of his talk on The DynamoDB paper, and Catherine Leal reports on a study that shows more and more companies spreading their data over public clouds.

Allen Helton asks and answers the very important question of what is data gravity and is it important with serverless?

And last but not least, Yan Cui shares his lessons learned from running serverless in production for 5 years.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Marcia Villalba gives us an introduction to Amazon CloudFront and how to add a CDN to your applications, as well as how to add Amazon Cognito to an existing application.

Serverless Office Hours has two great episodes, one on AWS Lambda Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) and one on the AWS Step Functions Workflows Collection.

New from AWS 🆕

Lots of AWS announcements these past two weeks worth looking at:

• Amazon Timestream announces improved cost-effectiveness with updates to metadata metering
• Announcing Cloudscape Design System, an open source solution for building intuitive web applications
• Announcing general availability (GA) of Automated Materialized View for Amazon Redshift
• Amazon Athena adds visual query analysis and tuning tools
• Amazon CloudFront supports header names of up to 1024 characters in CloudFront policies
• AWS CloudFormation event notifications with Amazon EventBridge help you create event-driven applications
• Amazon Redshift announces support for Row-Level Security (RLS)
• Amazon Redshift announces open source ODBC driver with binary protocol support and enhanced performance
• Amazon Redshift improves cluster resize performance and flexibility of cluster restore
• AWS re:Post introduces community-generated articles
• Amazon Athena enhances console and API support for parameterized queries
• AWS announces AWS AppConfig Extensions
• Announcing the general availability of AWS Cloud WAN
• AWS Fault Injection Simulator now supports ChaosMesh and Litmus experiments
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now supports fast database cloning

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

August 3, 2022 – Build an Enterprise-ready Blockchain with Serverless (webinar)

August 6, 2022 – Serverless Office Hours – AWS Lambda Powertools for TypeScript/Node.js

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 Hiro Nishimura (@hirokonishimura). Hiro is an AWS Community Hero and founder of awsnewbies.com, cloudnewbies.com, and introtoaws.com. A special education teacher turned IT professional, she started her career in tech with no formal technical education, progressing from work in help desk, to a sysadmin, before working as a Freelance Technical Writer, Consultant, and Instructor. Hiro teaches “Introduction to AWS for Non-Engineers” courses at LinkedIn Learning, introductory coding lessons at egghead, and is an upcoming speaker at Moar Serverless 2022. Thank you, Hiro, for helping others get their start in tech (and serverless!)

Final Thoughts 🤔

That’s it for this issue. We’re on our bi-weekly summer schedule, so there will be no newsletter on August 2nd, August 16th, and August 30th. But with so much happening in the serverless space, there will be plenty of tweets and announcements to keep your brains overloaded! 😉

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!

Until August 9th,
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.