Off-by-none: Issue #207

November 1, 2022

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Is it really serverless? 🚫

Welcome to Issue #207 of Off-by-none (Community Edition)! 🎉 This issue is sponsored by our friends at Momento.

In our previous issue, Cloudflare brought back server-side includes, Oracle launched “serverless Kubernetes”, and we looked at why some people are just plain doing cloud wrong. This week, not-so-serverless Neptune goes GA, the serverless database race heats up, and we brace for the AWS pre:Invent firehose. Plus, we have lots of serverless content from the community.

Alex DeBrie breaks down 6 common caching design patterns to create your caching strategy!
Caching is powerful, but caching design patterns are not one-size fits all. Alex has shared 3 crucial caching choices to make when implementing a caching strategy. Let's now review popular caching design patterns that proceed from those choices! Read Alex’s full thoughts on Momento's blog!  SPONSORED

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

I guess the big “serverless” news this week is that Amazon Neptune Serverless is now generally available. Lots of folks have been writing about it, including TechCrunch. In addition to Danilo Poccia’s introduction to Amazon Neptune Serverless, AWS even put out a sponsored piece on how serverless is transforming graph databases. Pretty exciting, right? I don’t think so, nor do others. More on this below.

In other serverless database news, Grafbase announced $7.3M in funding to “Build the Data Platform of the Future.” Also, bit.io raised $7.5M and launches bit.io Serverless Postgres. They claim they will “make collaborating on Postgres as user friendly as Google Docs.” Here is their official blog post along with some benchmarking of their autoscaling Postgres. Also, a little bird told me that Xata is launching to the public tomorrow as well. Let the serverless database wars begin! ⚔️

AWS did have some other interesting announcements, including AWS App Runner launching support for PHP, Go, .Net, and Ruby managed runtimes. We’ve been using it for Node.js and, despite a few snags here and there, have been rather impressed.

Heitor Lessa let us know that AWS Lambda Powertools for Python 2.1.0 is now available, Matt Campbell followed up on the new Container Lens that was added to the AWS Well-Architected Framework, and Renato Losio collected some opinions about Amazon Athena’s new engine.

And finally, Remix is “joining forces” with Shopify. My guess is that you quickly see this integrated into Shopify’s developer platform. Makes sense.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Seth Eliot, Jason Barto, and Laurent Domb have a post on verifying the resilience of your workloads using Chaos Engineering. Being able to test your system’s weaknesses becomes more and more important as our systems become increasingly complex.

Another post from the AWS blog here, but Lewis Tang does a great job explaining what to consider when modernizing APIs with GraphQL on AWS.

Jérôme Van Der Linden shares a great overview of when to use a Lambda function, and when not. There are a lot of factors that can go into each decision, but Jérôme does a nice job of breaking them down.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Lee James Gilmore shares the power of AWS SAM & AWS CDK together. Sometimes two tools are better than one.

JV Roig shares part 4 of his Serverless Analytics series, this one on ETL tasks, and why you may not need crawlers.

Arpad Toth reveals a different way of retrieving secrets in Lambda functions, Adam Shepherd shows you how to delete unwanted EFS files with a Lambda function, and Elango Ramar walks you through how to export a DynamoDB table to S3 and restore the data into a new table. It might be surprising how useful this can be.

Mark Ilott teaches you how to manage logging and create dashboards using AWS Lambda PowerTools, Ryan Cooke explains how to run Node.js on AWS serverless with Fargate (though I think App Runner might be the better choice here), and Lars Jacobsson shows you how to build a low code URL shortener using API Gateway, StepFunctions and DynamoDB.

Josh Armitage goes on a quest for Serverless CQRS and Pawel Zubkiewicz shows you how to add types to your JavaScript Lambda functions.

Finally, Matt Martz continues with his series on event driven documentation with this post that demonstrates how to automate documenting EventBridge schemas in EventCatalog.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Sometimes I try to be funny, so I thought to myself, “What if I took DHH’s piece about leaving the cloud and replaced ‘cloud’ with ‘electric grid’?” As I’m sure you can all imagine, hilarity ensued.

Here is a post by Chris Birkinshaw that essentially states the obvious to serverless enthusiasts like us. But for everyone else, they might need some help understanding a Serverless-First mindset in an evolving landscape.

Tim Anderson interviewed Google’s Kelsey Hightower on making sense of back-end vs front-end vs Edge. It’s worth the read.

Marin Radjenovic shares some scary Halloween serverless stories (plus part 2, part 3, and part 4) of things that could and have gone wrong with serverless implementations.

I shared some thoughts on getting abstractions wrong with AWS SAM Serverless Connectors.

And finally, Patrick Zhang recapped a talk at QCon San Francisco by Jessica Kerr about how Honeycomb used serverless to speed up their servers. An interesting read about limits.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

William Overton from Fastly gave an interesting talk about better serverless computing with WebAssembly.

Julian Wood hosts Serverless Office Hours and chats about AWS SAM Connectors.

New from AWS 🆕

I’m guessing we should see the real flood of pre:Invent announcements starting this week, but there are some notable ones here as well:

• AWS WAF launches Challenge rule action and Bot Control for Targeted Bots
• AWS Fault Injection Simulator now supports network connectivity disruption
• Amazon RDS now supports events for operating system updates
• CloudWatch RUM now supports Extended CloudWatch Metrics with additional dimensions
• AWS Organizations console now allows users to centrally manage primary contact information on AWS accounts
• Announcing two new HERE map styles for Amazon Location Service
• IAM Access Analyzer findings now support Amazon SNS topics and five other AWS resource types to help you identify public and cross-account access
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) now supports the transfer of Elastic IP addresses between AWS accounts
• Amazon MSK adds support for Apache Kafka version 3.3.1
• Amazon Kinesis Data Streams adds capability to easily inspect data records in AWS Management Console

Serverless Tools 🛠

Substation – Substation is a toolkit for creating highly configurable, no maintenance, and cost efficient serverless data pipelines.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

November 7 – 11 – 8th International Workshop on Serverless Computing (WoSc 8)

November 16 – 17 – Serverless Summit 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 Joe Duffy (@funcofjoe). Joe is co-founder and CEO of Pulumi, a modern infrastructure-as-code platform on which developers can build, deploy, and manage modern cloud applications and infrastructure using familiar languages, tools, and engineering practices. Before founding Pulumi, Joe was a longtime leader in Microsoft’s Developer Division, Operating Systems Group, and Microsoft Research. He has appeared on TFiR to discuss “How Different Is Cloud Engineering From Infrastructure As Code,” and was a guest on Serverless Chats. Thank you, Joe, for your work in this community!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Thanks again for reading the newsletter. If you want to support the newsletter and get extended commentary every week, be sure to check out the premium edition. The next few weeks are sure to be filled with exciting pre:Invent announcements that you won’t want to miss! I know I’m excited.

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.