Off-by-none: Issue #202

September 27, 2022

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Serverless and Sustainability 🐻‍❄️

Welcome to Issue #202 of Off-by-none (Community Edition)! 🎉 This issue is sponsored by our friends at Momento and Fauna.

In our previous issue, serverless containers got a power up, the CDK got some much needed context, and we looked at why serverless is so hard. This week, Cloudflare queues up more free egress, CockroachDB serverless goes GA, and serverless saves polar bears. Plus, we have a whole bunch of awesome content from the serverless community.

Read how you should Stop settling for almost serverless
You aren't fully serverless until your cache is serverless. We have serverless functions, storage, and databases. But when it’s time to accelerate with a cache, the fully serverless dream falls apart. Not anymore! Read Meera Jindal’s blog on what truly serverless means and about a truly serverless cache!  SPONSORED 

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Last week was Cloudflare's GA Week 2022. Here's an overview of what you may have missed, but I was particularly interested in R2 now being Generally Available as well as the announcement of Cloudflare Queues. Globally distributed queues with no egress fees? #gamechanger? 🤷‍♂️

CockroachDB serverless is now generally available as well. Mike Wheatley adds some more context.

In AWS news, AWS App Runner now finally supports Node.js 16, with a little less than a year left before EOL. 🤦‍♂️

Researchers discovered that Netlify was vulnerable to XSS, SSRF attacks via cache poisoning. It was fixed 2 days after being reported and is no longer an issue.

Serverless Cloud also launched an integration with Gitpod today that lets you build native cloud apps directly from your browser.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Teri Radichel has another great piece on validating input parameters in a Lambda Function. My favorite line from this is, "I’m sorry if you love your ORM but please, learn SQL. It’s going to help your application run faster too if you’re using a decent database and optimizing your queries." ❤️

Amit Singh Rathore gives you a few serverless options for a data platform in AWS, Yann Stoneman tells you to stop making your own AWS Lambda Layers, and Binh Bui tells you about AWS API Gateway Access Logs including how to get them and what to do with them.

Mehmet Özkaya shares some details about Amazon DynamoDB Availability, CAP, Eventual/Strongly Consistent and Read/Write Capacity Mode that should broaden your knowledge a bit.

And finally, Bobur Umurzokov explains how to build event-driven API services using CQRS, API Gateway and serverless.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Allen Helton shares how to have success with Step Functions, and helps you find a way to build that doesn’t suck.

And if you want more Step Functions, Rosius Ndimofor has an excellent post that shows you how to build apps with them.

GraphQL seemed popular this week, including Abhishek Rajendra Wagh's post on how to build a serverless GraphQL API using AWS AppSync and Roman Abdulmanov's Production Ready GraphQL for AWS & Serverless.

Martin Patino explains how Architect is an easy way to jump into the serverless world. I've always loved Architect's approach.

And Raphael Jambalos has a great tutorial that shows you how to use EventBridge for your event-driven architecture in 8 steps.

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Serverless Reads 🤓

Vasco Veloso recaps Gregor Hohpe's talk on preventing serverless vendor lock-in with design patterns. Um, yeah, this is what I've been talking about for a very long time. Good to see an Enterprise Strategist from AWS is saying this, too!

This post by Josh Armitage on whether or not local serverless testing is considered harmful hits the nail on the head. I like how certain frameworks have integrated local testing, but fidelity is important, especially when using the myriad of constantly changing cloud services.

Great profile of Tim Wagner and Shruthi Rao's venture here: Enterprise blockchain has been a dud. These two AWS vets think they can make it work.

JV Roig wrote a great article this past week about polar bears, serverless and sustainability. The premise is quite simple: if we make better choices in the cloud, we can reduce our impact on the environment, and thus, save the polar bears. The sentiment is nice, but it is, of course, much more complicated than that. I addressed this in detail in this week's premium edition.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Marcia Villalba teaches you about queues and how to use them for point to point messaging in your event-driven architectures.

The Serverless Craic team discusses the Second Cloud Transformation in Episode 32. This is a really interesting topic, because it was (and still is) so easy for companies to do cloud wrong the first time.

And for those that want to rely on AI to help you with cloud, Serverless Office Hours is showing you how to generate AWS Lambda code with ML using Amazon CodeWhisperer (aka Skynet 😉.)

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

I came across this interesting post on Reddit asking if nocode things like appsheet.com count as serverless. There weren't a lot of responses, but I remember Kelsey Hightower asking a similar question way back in 2018. I think the question might be moot now. Just look at the marketing out there. Everything is serverless!

New from AWS 🆕

Bit of a quiet week from AWS, but still a few announcements that stood out to me:

• Amazon CloudWatch Evidently adds support for Client Side Evaluations for AWS Lambda (powered by AWS AppConfig)
• Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler launches new advanced settings for Amazon Athena data sources
• Amazon Route 53 announces support for DNS resource record set permissions
• Amazon MSK Serverless is now HIPAA eligible

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

October 3, 2022 - AWS Community Day Benelux 2021

October 14, 2022 - AWS Community Day Poland

October 17 – 19, 2022 - Serverless Architecture Conference Berlin

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 Matt Morgan (@NullishCoalesce). Matt is Senior Director of Engineering at PowerSchool, the leading provider of cloud-based software for K-12 education. He’s also an AWS Community Builder, co-author of The TypeScript Workshop, and has a blog covering various topics, including serverless. Matt will be a speaker at the upcoming AWS Community Day DMV and has also given talks at this year’s CDK Day and AWS Summit DC, as well as on the VBrownbag Podcast. Thank you, Matt, for your contributions to the serverless dialogue!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Thanks for reading the 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.

See you 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.