Off-by-none: Issue #197

August 9, 2022

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Lambda Tiered Pricing 💰

Welcome to Issue #197 of Off-by-none!

In our previous issue, RedShift Serverless went GA, Lambda got some better Powertools, and we got a new glue for serverless runtimes. This week, we look at Lambda’s new tiered pricing model, say goodbye to a podcasting legend, and look at the future of serverless. Plus, we have two weeks of amazing content from the serverless community.

Our first Off-by-none Premium Edition will launch on September 6th, so become a member today to help support what we do and get even more great serverless insights! The Community Edition will continue to be free to everyone.

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Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Starting off with some sad news, Jeff Meyerson, creator and host of the Software Engineering Daily podcast, passed away on July 1, 2022. Jeff was a conduit for knowledge that helped educate so many engineers. It was such an honor to be a guest on his show, as I’m sure it was for the many other guests that he helped amplify. I don’t know all the details or the extent of the issues he dealt with over the last year, but it’s a sober reminder of just how important our mental health is.

In other news, Amazon bought Ben Kehoe, or more specifically, iRobot. So between Blink, Alexa, and iRobot, Amazon can now see and hear you, plus have an incredibly accurate map of your house’s floor plan.

Also, GitHub Security confirmed that GitHub repositories weren’t hacked, so that’s good news.

A few interesting product launches include AWS AppSync’s launch of a new API command to test GraphQL resolvers, Google Cloud’s new capability that lets you write directly from Cloud Pub/Sub to BigQuery with BigQuery Subscriptions, Dashbird’s new AppSync monitoring capability, and Hazelcast’s launch of Viridian Serverless to “Simplify Real-Time Application Development.”

In funding news, ChiselStrike raised $7M to build their backend development platform and Neon raised another $30M to build a scalable cloud service for Postgres databases. Looks like serverless databases are still the hot thing.

Let’s talk about AWS Lambda Tiered Pricing…

Another bit of news recently was AWS Lambda’s announcement of tiered pricing. Dan Robinson has a good summary that’s worth looking at, but I wanted to take a minute to share my thoughts. I don’t know exactly, but my guess is that MongoDB’s recently announced Atlas Serverless pricing has something to do with it. Serverless is near and dear to my heart, and I’m a huge believer that it will become the dominant computing paradigm, but the pricing model still needs work.

There are plenty of examples of people dramatically reducing costs by switching to serverless, and in many of these cases, total cost of ownership (TOC) plays a huge role. But there is a threshold that makes high-usage, consistent workloads much less cost effective, and even where, dare I say, containerization is the cheaper, more performant choice. There are, of course, tradeoffs to all of these choices. And for many a workload, optimizing costs actually costs more in developer time that any savings one would hope to gain.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the smarter, faster, and cheaper way to build scalable modern cloud apps is with serverless. However, I also believe that the unknown volume of dynamic provisioning is the primary linear cost driver. But like MongoDB has rightfully chosen to bend the pricing curve as the usage patterns grow and become more consistent, so must AWS if they expect savvy users modeling out future costs to choose serverless over alternatives. I appreciate the effort, but this still isn’t good enough.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

If you’re interested in how Amazon DynamoDB operates at massive scale, give this paper a read.

Enrico Portolan shares a modern look at the Lambda Circuit Breaker Pattern, Joey Yi Zhao explains how to choose between EventBridge and SQS in Event Driven Architecture, and Awedis Keofteian gives us an intro to Amazon EventBridge.

Lee James Gilmore has an excellent post that outlines a number of Storage-First serverless solutions. This is one of my favorite serverless patterns.

Ian Binder explains why he’s NOT using Aurora Serverless v2 today, Phong Nguyen gives a quick overview of Serverless at the Edge, and Renato Losio adds some more context to Forrest Brazeal’s contention that recursive serverless functions are the biggest billing risk in the Cloud.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

There were some really great tutorials this week. Jimmy Nicolacopoulos teaches you about Mapping Templates and how to transform your payloads within AWS API Gateway, Muhammad Shakeel shows you how to validate a request body with Amazon API Gateway, and Caleb Wilson explains how to pause a Step Function while waiting on a response from a third party API.

Mrudhula Balasubramanyan from AWS has an in-depth post on coordinating large messages across accounts and Regions with Amazon SNS and SQS.

Rawad Haber shares five specific ways to level up your serverless CI/CD pipelines, Max Rohde discusses the pros and cons of compression for AWS HTTP API Gateway, and Jones Zachariah Noel explains how to allow only what your Lambda code needs.

Emrah Samdan shared a post on how to send transactional emails with Sendinblue and Serverless Cloud, Wojciech Matuszewski gives us some strategies to test AWS AppSync VTL templates, and Jamie McDonald gives us a thorough walkthrough of Serverless ETL with AWS Step Functions.

Serverless Security 🔒

David Thompson says Serverless is a Security Nightmare.
:eyeroll: :eyeroll: :eyeroll:

Serverless Reads 🤓

Muhammad Abutahir shares his journey through Data Modeling with DynamoDB, Valerie Tremblay explains why you should care about Serverless, as a startup founder, and Mark Hinkle asks, “is Kubernetes adoption slowing?” Let’s hope so.

Donna Goodison interviewed Werner Vogels, who explained that enterprises are more daring than you might think when it comes to serverless adoption. He also talks about how CodeWhisperer is getting us closer to just writing “business logic,” but we’re not there yet.

But speaking of “just writing code,” Allen Helton shared an excellent piece on the future of serverless, pointing out the benefits of Infrastructure from Code, a term coined by Doug Moscrop, and something we at Serverless Cloud have been working on implementing for almost two years. The idea is gaining traction, others are following suit, and there might just be an AWS re:Invent talk about it this year. 😉

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Serverless Craic gives us all an intro to the Value Flywheel Effect.

Corey Quinn sings “Never Gonna Shut Me Up!”

And Marcia Villalba shows us how to add AWS S3 storage and use a CDN in an existing application and how to test serverless applications locally.

New from AWS 🆕

• Amazon CloudWatch metrics increases throughput by 150x
• AWS Step Functions continues to expand its AWS SDK integrations with support for 3 additional AWS Services and 195 more API Actions
• AWS Amplify Flutter announces web and desktop support (Developer Preview) for Authentication
• Announcing Amazon Neptune Global Database
• Amazon OpenSearch Service now includes advanced log and application analytics

Just for Fun 🕹

Daniel Stori’s ‘Serverless Economic Impact’ shows what happens to all those poor servers when everyone switches to FaaS.

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

November 28 – December 2, 2022 – AWS re:Invent

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 David Boyne (@boyney123). David is a Developer Advocate at AWS focusing on EDA and Serverless. Previously he was a Senior Software Engineer at Postman where he worked on open source projects, helped people understand AsyncAPI, and worked with the community to build a better future for Async APIs. He was also a Technical Lead at DeadHappy, where he helped the team move away from monolithic applications into small micro-services and event-driven architecture hosted in AWS. Dave’s love of experimenting with technology to solve problems has led him to create tools like cdk-eventbridge-socket, EventBridge Canon, EventBridge Atlas, and many more. He also blogs about serverless, and other topics, such as leadership, testing, and more on his website. Thanks, David, for your great work!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Thank you so much for reading. I hope you got enough serverless fill to hold you over for another two weeks while we’re still on our bi-weekly summer schedule. No newsletter next week, but we’ll be back on August 23rd with more amazing serverless.

And don’t forget! Our new premium edition launches on September 6th, 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!

See you soon,
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.