Off-by-none: Issue #203

October 4, 2022

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Cloud-native versus "native cloud" apps 🤨

Welcome to Issue #203 of Off-by-none (Community Edition)! 🎉 This issue is sponsored by our friends at Momento.

In our previous issue, Cloudflare queued up more free egress, CockroachDB serverless went GA, and we wondered if serverless could save polar bears. This week, Cloudflare dominates the news cycle, we look at some pitfalls of serverless app ownership, and we explore the difference between Cloud-native and "native cloud" apps. Plus, we have plenty of serverless content from our amazing community.

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Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Cloud news was dominated by Cloudflare this past week, and for good reason. I also had a chance to go back and catch up on a few of their (many) announcements from the previous week. Apologies if this is a bit Cloudflare heavy, but don't worry AWS fans! pre:Invent is right around the corner!

Cloudflare Radar 2.0 was announced, which picks up where Alexa.com left off a few months ago. Plus they launched the Cloudflare Radar Outage Center along with it to give us the "the status page the Internet needs."

They also introduced workerd, the Open Source Workers runtime, Cache Rules, which gives you precision caching capabilities, and v2.0 of their comprehensive Startup Plan to help you build your business in the cloud.

And, if you're interested in using Cloudflare to build your startup, they announced a new program that claims leading venture capital firms will provide up to $1.25 BILLION to back startups built on Cloudflare Workers. Connie Loizos pointed out that this takes aim at AWS, but even so, the devil is in the details. Take note of the "up to" and the fact that "there is no discreet new fund involved." Basically, you get a warm intro if you are accepted into the program and your startup is one of the quarterly winners of their Launchpad program. I'm not sure this will move the needle for most founders, but I've been wrong before.

Cloudflare also provided some updates on their D1 database. It's still in private beta (though they say public beta is on the horizon), but this post walks through some of the features and discusses how they plan on handling transactions.

The last Cloudflare announcement that was really interesting to me was the introduction of Dynamic URL redirects. This gives you the ability to dynamically generate URLs based on request specific data like location, cookies and more. Very cool.

And finally, a non-Cloudflare announcement. Immerok launched a serverless Apache Flink cloud service for real-time streaming data, and picked up $17m in funding.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

There were lots of great articles this week, but let's start with something near and dear to my heart. Allen Helton wrote up a piece on his first impressions of Infrastructure From Code. Looking forward to his upcoming comparison of services.

For those of you just getting started with serverless, the AWS Serverless DAs added a Serverless 101 section to the ServerlessLand.com site.

JV Roig has an excellent piece about PartiQL in DynamoDB and why it's fun, but also dangerous. If you're using PartiQL then this is definitely worth a read.

Gedas Gardauskas has a great writeup about managing workflows with AWS Step Functions and how they apply them to CI/CD at Revel Systems.

This is a vendor piece, but I think it does a reasonably good job comparing Fauna and MongoDB. I love reading detailed comparisons like this, just make sure you recognize where the biases are.

Rawad Haber shares 5 specific ways to supercharge your DynamoDB database design. Lots of really good tips and insights in here.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

"CORS sucks!" seems to be a common refrain amongst API developers. Arpad Toth shows you how to fix up CORS errors in HTTP API.

Mehmet Özkaya shows you how to secure microservices with API Gateway using Amazon Cognito User Pools. The only problem is that you're using Amazon Cognito. 😀

Markus Toivakka shares some tips for debugging failed Eventbridge invocations, Tirush Venamadala shows you how to deploy PHP web applications on AWS Lambda using Bref, and Johannes Gehrs explains an edge case where Lambda deployments aren’t zero-downtime (and how to fix it).

And finally, Lee James Gilmore shows you how to guarantee event ordering when using Amazon EventBridge as your Enterprise Service Bus.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Bob Donderwinkel outlines three pitfalls of serverless development ownership. I think I mostly agree with these, as they all seem to be symptoms of the larger cloud skills gap issue (which I wrote about recently.) The more responsibility (or the more parts of these complex systems) owned by an individual, the harder it is to have the knowledge and experience to do everything correctly.

Not serverless related, but a piece worth reading. Is This the Beginning of the End of the Internet? by Charlie Warzel is a scary look at what happens when policies have unintended consequences. Even scary if they're not unintended.

Cloud-native is probably the wrong term ☁️

I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about the next evolution of the cloud, and more importantly, what the developer experience looks like. In the PREMIUM EDITION of this week's newsletter, I share my thoughts on why "Cloud-native" apps don't actually take advantage of the awesome power of the public cloud. We need to be building native cloud applications instead.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Serverless Craic discusses how to apply the well architected tool in Episode #33.

And the recently promoted Marcia Villalba continues to explore event-driven patterns, this time focusing on Pub/Sub with AWS SNS.

New from AWS 🆕

• Amazon EMR Serverless is now available in 12 additional AWS Regions
• Amazon File Cache is now generally available
• AWS Systems Manager adds CloudWatch Alarms to control tasks
• AWS announces new course for practical decision making using no-code ML with Amazon SageMaker Canvas
• AWS announces updated Support Plans Console with new IAM controls
• AWS X-Ray launches support for tracing PHP applications via OpenTelemetry in public preview

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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 Allen Helton (@AllenHeltonDev). Allen is an AWS Serverless Hero and a Cloud Architect at Tyler Technologies with a sharp focus on serverless-first development. Allen writes extensively about serverless on his blog Ready, Set, Cloud! where he shares everything from reference architectures to enterprise level production readiness tips. He also has a weekly newsletter with his serverless picks of the week. Thank you, Allen, for spreading the serverless love!

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.

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.

Please check out our Community Edition sponsor Momento.