Off-by-none: Issue #200

September 13, 2022

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

200 Issues of Off-by-none! 🎉

Welcome to Issue #200 of Off-by-none (Community Edition)! 🎉 This issue is sponsored by our friends at Momento and Fauna.

In our previous issue, we introduce our new Premium Edition, StepFunctions got more intrinsic functions, and Google Cloud Functions second gen went GA. This week, DynamoDB lifts a constraint, we talk about cold starts, and we look at the cloud skills gap. Plus, we have some awesome serverless content from the community.

Serverless caching lab: This Thursday! Sept 15, 11:30am-1pm PT
Build a fully serverless social network with API Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDB with Momento’s Founding Engineer, Ellery Addington-White! 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 📣

A bit light on exciting serverless and cloud news this week, but something that stood out was the announcement that Amazon DynamoDB now supports up to 100 actions per transaction. I offered some thoughts on Twitter as to why the original constraint was probably a good thing. Others seemed to agree.

Amazon SNS introduced the public preview of message data protection that will "leverage pattern matching, machine learning models, and data protection policies to help security and engineering teams facilitate real-time data protection in their applications that use Amazon SNS to exchange high volumes of data." Looks like detecting PII/PHI are the primary use cases, but I'm sure there are plenty of others.

Also in the AWS orbit, AntStack released a new service called SEGG - Step Functions Express Graph Generator that gives you a way to more easily debug your Step Functions Express workflows.

If anyone's building the "next big thing" for serverless, maybe reach out to Heavybit, they just closed an $80 million early-stage VC fund.

And finally, Lightbend changed its software licensing model for both Akka and Akka Serverless to the Business Source License v1.1. I'm not a lawyer, but this actually makes a lot of sense to me. I love OSS as much as the next developer, but for cornerstone systems that require massive development investments, it only seems right that there's a favorable business model. I'm also guessing that another OSS that was commercialized by a massive public cloud provider may have weighed on this decision. Just sayin'.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Lee James Gilmore never disappoints, and this week shares Part 1 of his new series on Serverless Architecture Layers & DDD -  The Experience Layer.

Ervin Szilagyi provides an excellent deep dive on running serverless Lambdas with Rust on AWS. TLDR; don't go migrating all your existing Lambda Functions just yet.

How to deploy a container on AWS, let me count the ways. Lewis Tang provides some guidance for choosing the right container service to run your modern application. Take a look at AppRunner, I've been impressed lately.

Steve Bjorg points out the surprising cold start penalty in the AWS SDK for .NET. I personally avoid .NET cold starts by not using .NET, but I understand that there are plenty of folks who swear by it.

Tobias Schmidt shares all you need to know about AWS CodeBuild & CodePipeline. There is a lot of information in here, so even if you think you already know this, give it a quick skim and you might just discover something new. And, if you want a brain dump on everything Amazon SQS, give this piece a look.

Last, but certainly not least, is Alex DeBrie's post on cutting the caching clutter and understanding cache types. Caching is misused and abused all the time, and as Alex says, it's not a silver bullet. Several startups ago, I actually printed out a banner to hang over my desk that read, "It's a caching issue." When anyone would ask me what was wrong with the system, I'd just point to the sign.

See what you can build with Fauna’s database delivered as an API
Exclusive for Off-by-none readers! The team at Fauna has put together a curated collection of workshops, webinars, and sample apps specifically for serverless developers. Learn how you can ship dynamic, low-latency applications using Fauna’s database-as-an API and platforms like Netlify, Vercel, and Cloudflare. (No Fauna experience required) SPONSORED

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Mehmet Özkaya released a huge series on AWS Lambda & Serverless  that includes developer guides with hands-on labs. There is a ton of content there, so explore at your leisure.

Robert Slootjes provides a simple fix for an issue related to logging EventBridge events to S3 with Firehose. I had to fix something similar in the past using a Lambda transformer function, so now I need to revisit my solution.

Aravind V posted Part 22 (not a typo) of his AWS CDK 101 series. This one shows you how to send a message across accounts using SNS topic and SQS.

It's #ServerlessSeptember, so I figured I'd sneak in this tutorial from Nitin Manju that shows you how to go serverless with Azure Static Web Apps and Functions for scalable web applications. Azure serverless developers are people too!

Leeroy Hannigan has a quick post that shows how to track your DynamoDB table's storage history with CloudWatch. This could be very useful.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Allen Helton shares why we should stop talking about serverless cold starts. I agree that they generally aren't a problem, but this is the number one complaint for a reason. Talking about cold starts pressured AWS and others to address the issue, even while purporting that they only occurred in less than 1% of invocations. I'd like to live in a serverless world where cold starts are never a problem, but if we don't keep talking about them, then nothing will change.

Daniel Vaughan published a great recap of GOTO EDA Day with AWS. Lots of interesting learnings in here, but probably most shocking is that the "EDA model described in the conference was cutting edge and only 0.1% of developers are developing this way." Wow, I guess we really are in a bubble.

Forrester has identified several best practices for serverless development, so I guess that's settled now. 🙄 It's not that I don't appreciate this piece, but the headline doesn't sit well with me. It's akin to, "Columbus discovered America!"

Lydia Leong wrote a thought-provoking piece suggesting that cloud adoption will fail because of the skills gap. This certainly isn’t (or shouldn’t be) news to those of us paying attention. I wrote more about this in the Premium Edition.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Marcia Villalba wraps up Part 3 of her Lift and Shift migration to serverless series, this time focusing on migrating storage with AWS S3 and Cloudfront.

The Serverless Craic team hosts special guest Paul Swail on Episode #30 to discuss AWS Serverless Services.

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

Just been reading how McDonald’s are doing event-driven architectures 🍔😍

⚠️ Importance of standards
📄 Schema registry + validation
🌎 Event Gateway Pattern
🧑‍💻 Custom SDKs
✅ Defined flow of events

Here are some thoughts (with blog links) 🧵👇

— David Boyne 🚀 (@boyney123) September 9, 2022

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some noteworthy AWS announcements from last week:

• Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink supports three new container level metrics and improved CloudFormation support
• Applications using Amazon SNS to send SMS can now be hosted in four new regions
• AWS CloudFormation announces new language extensions transform
• AWS Fargate announces migration of service quotas to vCPU-based quotas
• Announcing new AWS Console Home widgets for recent AWS blog posts and launch announcements
• AWS App Runner now supports Amazon Route 53 alias record for root domain name
• Amazon Cognito enables time-based-one-time-password (TOTP) self-enrollment in hosted UI

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

September 20, 2022 - Serverless Office Hours - .NET on AWS Lambda best-practices

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 Upkar Lidder (@upkarlidder). Upkar is a Senior Product Manager at Tenable. Prior to his current role, Upkar was a Developer Advocate at IBM. He has presented several sessions with CFE, including a workshop on how to “Get Started with Serverless Using OpenWhisk,” as well as instructed sessions through IBM, like “Kickstart your Career in Cloud Application Development.” Upkar is also active in local tech groups and meetups. Thank you, Upkar, for helping educate the community and bringing others in!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter! 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.

Until next week,

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.