Off-by-none: Issue #198

August 23, 2022

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Serverless Snippets ✂️

Welcome to Issue #198 of Off-by-none!

In our previous issue, we looked at Lambda’s new tiered pricing model, said goodbye to a podcasting legend, and looked at the future of serverless. This week, we get serverless snippets, more progress towards making webhooks obsolete, and a new driver for making your data-backed JavaScript apps planetscale. Plus, we have another two weeks of awesome serverless content from the community.

DON’T FORGET! 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 📣

AWS had a few super useful serverless announcements, including the new AWS Serverless Snippets Collection on ServerlessLand.com for those of you that love copypasta. Plus, Amazon DynamoDB now supports bulk imports from Amazon S3 to new DynamoDB tables, which is a super handy feature that does not consume your table’s write capacity!

And, Amazon EventBridge now supports receiving events from GitHub, Stripe, and Twilio using Webhooks, which is also amazingly cool.

Renato Losio wrote a roundup on AWS adding CodeWhisperer to the Lambda Console. I sort of have to agree with Ben and Corey, I’m not sure of the value here. If you use the Lambda console to write code (people still do that?), it could be handy for quick suggestions. I just hope people take the time to understand what that code is doing.

Forbes launched The Cloud 100 2022 list, and there are a few familiar names on there, including Netlify.

PlanetScale didn’t make the list, but they just introduced a serverless driver for JavaScript allowing any environment that supports the Fetch API to interact with their service. More of this please!

Serverless Concepts 🏗

This excellent post from AWS discusses various architecture patterns and their tradeoffs, and then shows you how to gracefully mitigate failures.

Yan Cui shares seven tools to help you become a better serverless developer, Zac Charles does a deep dive on Lambda’s response payload size limit, and Allen Helton explains the three things to know before building a multi-tenant serverless app.

Speaking of multi-tenant, this AWS post on extending your SaaS platform with AWS Lambda shows a pattern for creating tenant queues using a Lambda dispatcher. Plus, Yossi Ittach shares his take on Serverless Security.

Finally, there’s a post by Arpit Jain on Event Driven Architecture anti-patterns that’s got some useful tips. If definitely seems like a rehash of Ben Morris’ 2018 post, but both are worth a read.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

So many interesting tutorials, so hopefully this will keep your mind engaged for a bit.

JV Roig shares some DynamoDB modeling tips for infinite scaling, Ed Miller shows how he built his first Lambda for his Bearcam Companion project, and Yan Cui explains how to setup geofencing and an IP allow-list for Cognito user pools.

Ed Reinoso shares a quick tutorial for configuring CloudTrail with EventBridge, which is great for making your infrastructure automation event-driven, Tshepo Makhubela has a tip for unzipping large files from S3 with Lambda, and Cesar Pérez shows you how to improve serverless deployment times with just 4 lines of code.

Salma Alam-Naylor shows you how to add personalization to static HTML with Netlify Edge Functions, with no browser JavaScript required, Kay Plößer teaches you how to build an email scheduler with Vercel Functions and qStash, and Noah Fischer explains rate limiting at the Edge with Cloudflare Workers and Serverless Redis.

David De has a great tutorial on building a white-boarding app using realtime updates with Websockets and the Serverless Framework.

Eduardo Rabelo shares a repository that demonstrates how to do top-level await in AWS Lambda with TypeScript.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Sik Rhee and Marianna Tessel explain why “supercloud” offers a consistent developer experience across clouds.

This post suggests that serverless is the new timeshare in a piece that extolls the virtues of Java over other languages like “Node and python” that are missing “basic things,” as well as comments on how serverless use cases other than webhooks leave him “absolutely baffled.” There is, of course, plenty to learn from the old ways of doing things. Unfortunately, as I’ve learned over my career, they don’t always adapt to globally distributed cloud systems.

Here’s a great story of serverless success from Airtime Rewards Engineering on how they did event-sourced hyper-personalization in AWS Lambda.

Karind Ori explains the rise of the cloud developer, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols purports that big clouds aren’t always the right fit for small businesses, and Valerie Tremblay introduces the “No-Pizza Team” for startups.

Allen Helton has a great post on his Serverless Adventure.

And finally, Ben Ellerby describes how to enable the optimal serverless platform team with the  CDK and team topologies.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Sam Williams shows you how to optimize your Lambda function memory, plus he shares 7 practical projects to help you become a serverless wizard.

The Serverless Craic team walks you through the phases of the Flywheel Effect with Phase 1: Clarity of Purpose and Phase 2: Challenge.

Marcia Villalba shows you how to build Amazon CloudWatch dashboards with AWS CDK, and Part 1 of how to do a Lift and Shift migration to Serverless.

And, a RedMonk conversation on why the future of serverless databases is distributed document-relational.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some other AWS announcements that grabbed my attention.

• Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels now offers the ability to copy trained computer vision models across AWS accounts
• Amazon Aurora Serverless v1 now supports PostgreSQL 11 and In-Place upgrade from PostgreSQL 10
• Amazon Location Service now supports circular geofences
• Amazon MSK Serverless is now integrated with AWS CloudFormation and Terraform
• AWS Cost Anomaly Detection gets a simplified interface for anomaly exploration
• AWS Lambda now supports custom Consumer Group IDs for Amazon MSK and Self-Managed Kafka as event sources
• Amazon OpenSearch Service now provides improved visibility into validation errors during blue/green deployments
• Amazon CloudFront now supports HTTP/3 powered by QUIC
• Amazon Redshift announces federated SSO support with ease of use and security capabilities enhancements for Query Editor V2.
• Amazon Cognito enables native support for AWS WAF

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

August 30, 2022 – Serverless Office Hours – Alex DeBrie: DynamoDB Misconceptions

September 1st, 2022 – GOTO EDA Day 2022

September 6, 2022 – Serverless Office Hours – AWS Lambda Cost Optimization

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 Rosius Ndimofor (@atehrosius). Rosius is a software developer at Serverless Guru and an AWS Serverless Hero. Rosius has been building desktop, web, and mobile apps for various customers for 8 years but it wasn’t until 2020 that Rosius’ friend introduced him to a local AWS User Group. Since then, Rosius has shared his learnings about AWS serverless applications on his blog and is now a speaker at those local AWS meetup events. He also participates in AWS Community Voices video shows and at company webinars. Thank you, Rosius, for doing so much since becoming a part of this community!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I hope you enjoyed this week’s newsletter. My team and I have been working hard to get the new premium edition ready to go for our September 6th launch. If you’d like to support us and want to receive extended commentary and in-depth analysis of the serverless ecosystem, be sure to become a member today!

One more week of our summer schedule (which means summer is almost over), and then we’ll be back on September 6th!

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.