Off-by-none: Issue #204

October 11, 2022

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Abstractions are really hard! 🥸

Welcome to Issue #204 of Off-by-none (Community Edition)! 🎉 This issue is sponsored by our friends at Momento.

In our previous issue, Cloudflare dominated the news cycle, we looked at some pitfalls of serverless app ownership, and we explored the difference between Cloud-native and "native cloud" apps. This week, AWS re:Invent session reservations go live, event schema validation gets even more important, and we see what happens when abstractions go wrong. Plus, we have lots of great content from the serverless community.

Read The dark art of multi-tenancy
It’s October. Spooky season! Multi-tenancy can be a little spooky, too. Maximizing utilization while maintaining isolation feels like a magic trick, but DynamoDB shows how to pull it off. Dive into the topic with this blog by Khawaja Shams, CEO and Cofounder of Momento—and follow him on Twitter for more DynamoDB content!  SPONSORED

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

AWS re:Invent session reservations opened today, so here are some recommendations from Sheen Brisals and Emrah Samdan. Sad news is that if you haven't book your sessions yet, they're probably already full. But all hope is not lost. Sign up for the waitlist as lots of folks will drop their sessions and spots will open. Plus, if you like to stand in long queues (I'm looking at all you English folk), there's always the option of just showing up on the day of and hoping there's space.

In other AWS news, they announced AWS SAM serverless connectors that help you manage resource permissions. Allan Chua wrote an opinionated view of AWS SAM Connectors that makes a lot of sense to me. I have many, many more thoughts in this week's Premium Edition.

Finally, Cloudflare Pages enabled support for Early Hints, which is another micro-optimization that can make loading heavy frontend framework sites faster. I wish these were more automatic, but I still like how Cloudflare keeps pushing the envelope with this type of stuff!

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Lee James Gilmore has an excellent piece on Enterprise Amazon EventBridge schema validation. This is a big topic, with lots of dragons, but Lee gets you thinking in the right direction.

Allen Helton explains how to skip the Lambda Function and connect directly to your AWS services. But, of course, there are tradeoffs.

Shivang Chauhan gives a detailed comparison of DynamoDB and MongoDB, Yogesh Sharma explains how to Boost your Lambda serverless power using PowerTools, and Neal Davis shows you how to calculate WCUs and RCUs for AWS DynamoDB.

JV Roig has been sharing some really interesting pieces lately, and this one on Serverless Analytics is no exception. In this post he explains how to build cheap and scalable terabyte-level analytics using one of my favorite services, Amazon Athena.

Finally, Prabhakar Pratim Borah shares how to test your Lambda on your localhost using LocalStack. I know I've said this before, and I really do appreciate what they've built, but cloud development workflows that rely on local emulation are unsustainable. However, until frameworks and providers fully embrace cloud developer sandboxes, LocalStack might be your best option.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Pedro Cabido has a whole bunch of recent tutorials including an HTTP API advanced tutorial, and ones for Lambda basics and Lambda advanced concepts.

Ran Isenberg shares a number of AWS CDK best practices from the trenches.

Maxime Vivier shares some techniques for serverless event-sourcing with AWS using state of the art data synchronization, Stephen Leonard shows you how he tracks house price stats using AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway and Terraform, and Lakindu Hewawasam teaches you how to build a PDF Generator using AWS Lambda.

Daniel Muller shared an interesting tutorial that shows you how to use IAM Identity Center to protect your CloudFront served app, Arpad Toth explains how to dynamically handle origins in HTTP APIs, and Jannik Wempe shares his secret on how to securely use secrets in AWS Lambda.

I'm a sucker for serverless patterns, and I really like this one. Mehmet Özkaya implements the Saga Pattern for orchestrated distributed transactions using AWS Step Functions.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Matt Campbell has a round up on platform engineering, DevOps, and cognitive load and where the different responsibilities should lie. I really like the notion that "developers don't like dealing with infra," but that "companies need control of their infra as they grow." There might be a billion dollar idea there. 😉

Shivang Chauhan explains why you might want to switch to AWS Serverless. I don't think you'll learn anything new here, but I like the simplicity of how he positions it.

How not to send all your money to AWS. I mostly included this because I love the title, but there are some good tips in here as well.

I shared a post this past week asking "Is learning serverless really that hard?" Premium subscribers got early access to these thoughts a few weeks ago.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Renato Losio shared a video that compares SQL to NoSQL in a Serverless World.

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

I'm sure you've all seen this... 😂

new little song:

"The Re-Org Rag (I'm My Own VP)" pic.twitter.com/NLB4dtpD8s

— Forrest is at #GoogleCloudNext (@forrestbrazeal) October 4, 2022

New from AWS 🆕

• Amazon CloudWatch Log announces increased query concurrency
• IAM Access Analyzer makes it easier to author and validate role trust policies
• AWS Global Accelerator launches two new edge locations
• IAM Access Analyzer now reviews your AWS CloudTrail history to identify actions used across 140 AWS services and generates fine-grained policies
• Achieve faster database failover with Amazon Web Services JDBC Driver for PostgreSQL
• Amazon DevOps Guru now allows customers control over the notifications they receive
• Amazon S3 Object Lambda now supports using your own code to modify the results of S3 HEAD and LIST API requests
• Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 now supports AWS CloudFormation
• AWS Lambda Functions powered by AWS Graviton2 now available in 12 additional regions
• Amazon SQS announces Server-Side Encryption with Amazon SQS-managed encryption keys (SSE-SQS) by default
• Amazon Redshift Serverless now supports resource tagging

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 Laura Hyatt (@LauraJHyatt). Laura is a Global Solutions Architect for AWS Resilience Hub, helping customers around the world make sure their architecture is resilient and that they are prepared in the event of outages. Laura also specializes in IoT and is passionate about junior talent, having set up the first Solution Architect Intern program for AWS Public Sector UK. She’s also a frequent contributor to AWS’s Architecture blog entitled Let’s Architect and has a course on “How to Turn on a Lamp from Anywhere in the World” on A Cloud Guru. Laura has also appeared on episodes on AWS FM and the Jon Myer show and will be speaking at the upcoming Serverless Architecture Conference in Berlin on October 18th. Thank you, Laura, for these incredible contributions to the community!

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.

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.