Off-by-none: Issue #199

September 6, 2022

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Intrinsic Functions 🧘‍♂️

Welcome to Issue #199 of Off-by-none (Community Edition)! This issue is sponsored by our friends at Momento and Fauna.

In our previous issue, we got serverless snippets, more progress towards making webhooks obsolete, and a new driver for making your data-backed JavaScript apps "planetscale". This week, we introduce our new Premium Edition, StepFunctions get more intrinsic functions, and Google Cloud Functions second gen go GA. Plus, we have two weeks full of amazing content from the serverless community.

You can help support Off-by-none by signing up for our new Premium Edition and get $4 off per month for the next 4 months or sign up for our annual subscription and get two months free!

A word from our sponsor:

Serverless caching lab: Thu, Sept 15, 11:30am-1pm PT

Join Momento’s Founding Engineer, Ellery Addington-White, for a hands-on session where you’ll build a fully serverless social network with API Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDB. We’ll cover challenges when designing your cache for the highest availability, caching principles, designing for scaling, and common gotchas that cause outages. Register here! SPONSORED

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

There was a lot of cloud and serverless news over the past few weeks, so let's jump right in. AWS announced the latest batch of AWS Heroes, including Allen Helton, who explains how he became an AWS Serverless Hero.

AWS had some other exciting announcements, like the news that AWS Step Functions added 14 new intrinsic functions so you can process data more efficiently in your workflows, which is pretty cool. Jones Zachariah Noel does a great job breaking them down for you. Also, AWS SAM CLI esbuild support is now generally available.

AWS also opened a new region in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), bringing their total up to 27!

In other cloud news, Google Cloud Functions 2nd gen is now GA, Netlify added edge transformation to Next.js apps, and Azure is kicking off its 30DaysOfServerless for #ServerlessSeptember.

Bun, the "fast all-in-one JavaScript runtime", announced Oven (along with some funding) and promised its first bake in six months. The (now deleted) tweet about a lack of work-life balance for new engineers certainly wasn't a good look, but hopefully they'll figure out that you can still be ultra-productive without burning out all your devs.

Rafal Wilinski announced the release of Dynobase 2.0 with a bunch of really great features. Looking forward to trying that out!

Cloudflare (finally) decided to block Kiwifarms. I wasn't buying the whole utility argument. Private companies, of course, have every right to choose who they do business with, but so do consumers. This won't be the last we hear on this topic, but at least for now, they've made the right move.

And finally, Anyscale raised $99M to build out its distributed AI computing platform. If you're not familiar with Ray, it's worth checking out. We're just barely scratching the surface of what's possible in the cloud.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Lee James Gilmore explains Serverless Domain Driven Design using real world examples as tangible serverless equivalent architecture.

Allen Helton outlines a number of best practices for building serverless microservices, Zac Charles does a part 2 deep dive into Lambda’s Request Payload size limit, and Walid Lezzar explains 5 things that will change the way you use AWS Lambda.

Bit of a vendor pitch, but Eric Kedrosky gives some good pointers for avoiding AWS Lambda Function URL risks.

For all you DynamoDB fans, Elias Tazartes shows you the one configuration line that is costing you hundreds of dollars (well, maybe), plus JV Roig discusses the power of sparse indexing.

Finally, Luc van Donkersgoed compares latency of serverless messaging services in this excellent post.

A word from our sponsor:

⚠️ Exclusive offer: Sign up for a free Fauna account and activate one month of Off-by-none's premium newsletter subscription 

In partnership with Off-by-none, subscribers who create a free Fauna account will activate one month of paid access to the Premium Edition of the Off-by-none newsletter. More than 3,500 development teams in over 180 countries use Fauna as their serverless database of choice to increase their execution speed and remove much of the operational overhead required with traditional databases. (Limited to 100 individuals) SPONSORED

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

There are always so many good #serverless tutorials every week. I've chosen some that have really interesting use cases.

Jo Stichbury shows you how to build a serverless WebSockets platform, Leeroy Hannigan explains how to use CloudFormation to import your DynamoDB Table from S3, and Awedis Keofteian teaches you how to decouple application components using Amazon SQS.

Davide de Paolis tortures himself with VTL and shows how to create a Lambdaless API Gateway and DynamoDB integration (with the CDK), Aravind V (a freshly crowned  AWS Community Builder), launched another series on AWS CDK 101 projects, and Salma Alam-Naylor shows you how to rewrite HTML and transform page props in Next.js with Next.js advanced middleware.

Chiamaka Ibeme has a great post that explains how provisioning an AWS Aurora Serverless v2 Database cluster differs from v1. And it differs.

Benjamin Smith has a helpful post on building cost-effective AWS Step Functions workflows, and John Green shares The Simple Web Service in AWS CDK. I do not believe I coined this term, but I appreciate the shoutout. 😉

Serverless Reads 🤓

Alex DeBrie explains why he (Still) likes the Serverless Framework over the CDK. This is a must read. Yes, I also have ties to Serverless, Inc., but his reasons are sound and worth considering.

Neal Davis shares the 10 Best AWS Lambda Use Cases. I'm not sure they're the best, but there are certainly some good ones in there.

Forbes wrote an article on IBM Research innovating on a “Serverless” approach to quantum computing. Just imagine how many Tom Cruise deepfakes you could do with that.

Sylvain Kerkour has an interesting post on Denial of Wallet Attacks, especially as they pertain to "pay-as-you-go" services. There is, of course, truth to the possibility, and protecting yourself from such attacks should definitely be in your playbook, but the risk far from outweighs the benefits IMO. There's also a great chart in here comparing the costs across different providers.

Here's a short article I found that explains why the future is serverless for AWS partners, Sebastian Schlecht discusses rendering dynamic thumbnails at scale with AWS Lambda and Nest.js, and Payam Moghaddam says Infrastructure is Architecture (with CDK).

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Two great videos from Marcia Villalba. Start with part 2 of her Lift and Shift migration to Serverless series, this one on migrating Authentication and Authorization. Then check out how to run Artillery in a Lambda function to load test your serverless applications.

The Serverless Craic team has two episodes that continue explaining the phases of the Flywheel. Episode 28 explains Phase 3, Next Best Action and Episode 29 goes into Phase 4, What is Long Term Value?

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

What's the difference between an #Opensource conference such as #Kubecon and a vendor-centric conference such as #VMwareExplore? Take it from @kelseyhightower, who delivered the keynote at both.
Great analogy from Kelsey Hightower here.

September DB Engines rankings are out. DynamoDB has 4th fastest growth over the last year 👀🚀 ~ Alex DeBrie
And who else would be watching the monthly DB Engine rankings like a hawk? Cool that DynamoDB is still growing so fast.

New from AWS 🆕

• Amazon Location Service now supports refined access control for geofences and tracked devices
• AWS Fargate announces availability of Microsoft Windows Server 2022 images for Amazon ECS
• Announcing new AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS SSO) APIs to manage users and groups at scale

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

October 18-19, 2022 - Datadog Dash Conference

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 Shreya Gupta (@shreythecray). Shreya is a Developer Advocate for Courier and Founder of Bit Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to making tech accessible to underserved communities through inclusive developer education. At Bit Project, she has developed open source technical education content made accessible for a global community of 1200+ students. Additionally, Shreya and her Bit Project team are hosting ServerlessDays: Student Edition this August, and she is also the host of the monthly podcast Tech Talks with ShreyTheCray. Thanks, Shreya, for making serverless more accessible to all!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Thanks for reading this week's newsletter. We're still getting used to this new platform, so please bear with us for the next few weeks as we optimize the experience. Please let me know if you are having any issues.

We'll be experimenting with the format and length of the COMMUNITY EDITION over the next few months, so your feedback is always welcome. If you'd like to support Off-by-none and want to receive extended commentary and in-depth analysis of the serverless ecosystem, be sure to become a member today or sign up for our annual subscription and get two months free.

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, or email.