Off-by-none: Issue #201

September 20, 2022

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Why is serverless so hard? 😩

Welcome to Issue #201 of Off-by-none (Community Edition)! 🎉 This issue is sponsored by our friends at Momento and Fauna.

In our previous issue, DynamoDB lifted a constraint, we talked about cold starts, and we looked at the cloud skills gap. This week, serverless containers get a power up, the CDK gets some much needed context, and we dig into why serverless is so hard. Plus, we have plenty of serverless content from our amazing community.

Read Alex DeBrie’s blog: Finally, a serverless cache that delivers on the promise of the cloud era
Caches are stuck in the 20th century. They deliver unpredictable performance and demand error-prone cluster management or expensive overprovisioning. Momento Serverless Cache changes everything, relieving operational headaches and enabling developers to build and iterate faster. Read Alex’s full Momento blog.  SPONSORED 

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Let's start off with some AWS news. AWS Fargate increased compute and memory resource configurations by 4x, which opens up more use cases for AWS's "serverless" container offering. I've always liked the promise of Fargate, and removing certain limits will make it more of a blunt serverless instrument with wide applications.

Also, the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) announced a new CDK Construct tree view in the AWS CloudFormation console. One of my complaints about the CDK was the loss of context once you deployed the stack, making it really hard to understand where some of your resources (that were baked into a construct) came from. This is a step in the right direction.

Cloudflare is in the middle of their GA Week, announcing GAs for Cloudforce One and what looks to be a very cool new service called Cloudflare Adaptive DDoS Protection.

In other cloudy news, Thorsten Höger has started a new podcast called Cloud Automation Weekly, WunderBase has launched as a new serverless GraphQL database on top of SQLite, Firecracker and Prisma, and it looks like Paolo Rechia figured out how to run Stable Diffusion on AWS Lambda.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Lee James Gilmore shares part 3 in his Serverless Architecture Layers & DDD series, this time focusing on the Domain Layer.

Teri Radichel has an in-depth piece about Lambda Networking and why there are security benefits to running Lambdas in VPCs. Hard to argue against her points, but I really don't want to pay for a Managed NAT Gateway.

And while we're on the topic of serverless security, OM Gupta shares some serverless security best practices. Hard to find anything really innovative in these types of posts, but I'd rather err on the side of caution and share these over and over until everyone knows what to do!

And finally, Allen Helton shares what idempotency actually is, and why it's essential to serverless APIs.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

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 

I'm always impressed by the number and quality of serverless tutorials out there, and have been trying to share just the ones with really interesting use cases. This one is for Azure, but shows you how to build a serverless lie detector that uses AI for facial recognition. Maybe not a common use case, but still an interesting compilation of tech.

JV Roig has two new parts to his Infinite Scaling with DynamoDB series. In Part 3 he discusses hierarchical classification, and in Part 4, he shows you how to break apart records to optimize read/write costs.

Aravind Vadamalaimuthu has two more entries in his AWS CDK 101 series. DynamoDB Local setup and integrating with sam invoke and SAM local to test and debug lambda function.

John Grinalds shows you how to create remote functions in BigQuery which is incredibly cool and, I imagine, very handy for complex data transformations at runtime.

Nadin Pethiyagoda shared a "Guide to AWS Serverless Microservices" that is quite extensive and walks you through pretty much the entire process of building and deploying a serverless microservice. Probably a great getting-started tutorial for anyone new.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Raphael Jambalos shares an excellent piece on how they embraced Amazon EventBridge for their event-driven architecture.

Paul Gillin shares some insight into survey results that find tool fragmentation frustrates full-stack observability goals. I'm not sure we needed a survey to tell us this, just hangout on tech Twitter for a bit.

Lawrence Hecht suggests that WebAssembly users are a mix of backend and Full Stack developers based on some recent surveys. I'm a big fan of the promise here, and I think we'll see this space continue to gain more and more traction.

Kevin Krewell wrote another piece about IBM Research’s path to Serverless Quantum Computing. I'm not even going to pretend that I know what they are talking about in this article, but it seems quite amazing.

In today's Premium Edition, I wrote up some thoughts on Paul Johnston's Learning Serverless (and why it is hard).

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

The Serverless Craic team discusses the Event Driven Architecture examples at EDA Day. Major FOMO not being there.

Julian Wood is joined by some fellow AWS colleagues on Serverless Office Hours to discuss the Amazon EventBridge Salesforce integration.

Allen Helton joined Corey Quinn on Screaming in the Cloud to chat about the Future of Serverless.

And Marcia Villalba asks, "What are Event-Driven Architectures, and why do we care?"

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

After using AWS for ~14 years, I've internalised a handful of design patterns that I try to apply to my own software. I'm keen to know if it's the same for other folks. Roughly: tags, IDs (thrice), limits, pagination. ~ Aidan W Steele

New from AWS 🆕

• Amazon SNS now supports message signatures based on SHA256 hashing
• AWS App Runner now supports deployment using cross-region Amazon ECR image
• Amazon RDS Performance Insights now supports displaying top 25 SQL queries
• AppFlow now supports deleting records in Salesforce
• Amazon Redshift announces enhanced system logs with consistent durability
• AWS Batch extends the job report retention period from 24 hours to 7 days
• Introducing Visual Conversation builder for Amazon Lex
• Amazon ECS now delivers a faster Cluster Auto Scaling experience for scale-in events

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

September 28, 2022 - Serverless Design Patterns and Antipatterns (webinar)

September 30, 2022 - AWS Community Day DMV 2022

October 3, 2022  - AWS Community Day Benelux 2021

October 14, 2022 - AWS Community Day Poland

October 18-19, 2022 - Datadog Dash Conference

October 19, 2022 - AWS Community Day Germany

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 Kevin Jernigan (@kjerniga). Kevin is a Principal Product Manager at MongoDB. Prior to joining MongoDB, Kevin got his start on the first product management team at Oracle, and after a consulting business and building a SaaS business, returned to Oracle to work on Oracle Database and then joined AWS to launch Aurora PostgreSQL. In early 2021, Kevin joined the Atlas Serverless product team and brought it from preview to general availability. He’s also been a guest on Serverless Chats to discuss MongoDB Atlas Serverless. Thanks, Kevin, for your inspiring work!

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.

Cheers,
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.