Off-by-none: Issue #208

November 8, 2022

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Serverless goes mainstream? 🥂

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

In our previous issue, not-so-serverless Neptune went GA, more serverless databases joined the race, and we prepared for a slew of AWS pre:Invent announcements. This week, serverless apparently goes mainstream, we get even more serverless data options, and AI is probably stealing your code. Plus, we have some amazing content from the serverless community.

Momento Serverless Cache is about the developer experience. A true serverless cache that scales down to zero and can be added to your stack with only 5 lines of code in less than 5 minutes! Quality products don't come out of thin air. Read here about the why, and how the ex-DynamoDB founders of Momento built their product for developers! SPONSORED

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

There were a couple of really amazing product launches last week. Our friends at Momento launched out of stealth with their serverless cache and a $15M seed, Xata went GA to give Jamstack developers access to a serverless data platform with an API call, and Vercel introduced Turbopack, a Rust-based successor to Webpack.

Netlify released their Jamstack report, which states that the serverless development model is officially mainstream with 70% of developers using it, up from 46% the previous year. I have thoughts.

AWS App Runner now supports privately accessible services within Amazon VPC. Amit Gupta and Shivendra Panicker do a deep dive to explain why that’s important.

And who would have thought that AI generated code that learned from private repos would result in a lawsuit alleging “software piracy on an unprecedented scale?” 🤷‍♂️

Finally, cloud security is hard, which is why an Azure Cosmos DB vulnerability gave access without authentication.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Okay, that’s enough picking on Microsoft for today. Let’s look at some Azure Durable Functions Patterns shared by Stefano Giannattasio.

Allen Helton tries to answer, “When is serverless more expensive than containers?” TLDR; sometimes, it depends, TCO. 😉

Speaking of serverless costs, Seza Akgün walks you through how to reduce AWS Lambda costs by 40% without writing a line of code. Quite an interesting story here.

Alex DeBrie explains how to use a cache to accelerate DynamoDB (or replace it), Erik Petersen shares a quick tip when using VPCs in your serverless applications, and Omid Eidivandi shares some serverless communication patterns.

David Wells has a repo with tons of resources explaining how to use JSDoc for TypeScript types.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Lee James Gilmore has an excellent tutorial that demonstrates how to implement serverless clean architecture and code with Domain-Driven Design.

Arpad Toth shares how to authorize requests with Lambda@Edge, Robert Slootjes has a quick trick for creating a UUID in Step Functions, and Santiago Palladino shows a nifty (but perhaps overly complex) way to type-check Lambda permissions with TypeScript.

Martyn Kilbryde shares an awesome walkthrough of building out a serverless event driven AI as a service project.

Daniele Frasca shows you the different options of routing API Gateway to a Lambda function using Lambda proxy and non-proxy integrations, with OpenAPI specs.

And David Boyne is pumping out EventBridge content like crazy. Try to keep up.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Davide de Paolis shares a migration story from a PHP monolith to serverless with a multi-stack cross-account canary rollout. The Strangler Fig pattern is at play here, though as the post demonstrates, a real world implementation can be tricky.

David Linthicum says lift-and-shift cloud migrations are dying. Apparently 75% of IT organizations are building net-new applications to take advantage of cloud-born features like serverless. Sounds about right to me.

Matthew Meckes explains how to scale your startup with Serverless on AWS. There’s some good background on cognitive load in here.

Dave Vellante does some breaking analysis on Cloudflare’s supercloud. He says this is what multicloud should have been.

I shared some thoughts on Serverless Platform Engineering.

Hillary Wilmoth proclaims that Kubernetes isn’t done yet. I think we need a catchphrase like “OK boomer” to dismiss this type of nonsense. 😂

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Dev Agrawal has a great video on why you probably don’t know serverless.

Kaivalya Apte from The Geek Narrator does an AWS DynamoDB (Internals) Masterclass with Alex Debrie.

Marcia Villalba is back, with a new video on why you should build a multi-region serverless application, and why you should not.

The Serverless Craic team talks about the launch of The Value Flywheel Effect Book. I was lucky enough to get an early copy of this, and it is an excellent read.

New from AWS 🆕

Well, color me disappointed. I thought there would be a lot more announcements starting on the first of November, but there’s been nothing game-changing yet. Let’s cross our fingers for next week.

• AWS Well-Architected Tool improves workload discovery and speeds up reviews
• AWS CloudFormation StackSets improves insights on stack instances for stack set operations
• AWS WAF Now Supports Granular Geographic Match
• AWS Copilot adds support for AWS App Runner’s privately accessible services and more
• Amazon Simple Email Service announces Virtual Deliverability Manager to help enhance email delivery success rate
• Amazon SNS message data protection is now generally available with real-time data redaction and masking
• Amazon Textract announces updates to the Analyze Expense API used for processing documents such as invoices and receipts

Serverless Tools 🛠

David Boyne announced the launch of SchemaWatcher, an open source EventBridge CDK construct that will notify your downstream consumers of schema changes. Pretty cool.

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

So you want to roll your own application platform. All you need is:

Linux
Docker
Kubernetes
Istio
Prometheus
Fluentd
Grafana
Jaeger
Harbor
Open Policy Agent
Vault
Spinnaker and Jenkins

Oh, almost forgot, you're also going to need servers, people, and glue. Bring lots of glue.

— Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower) April 3, 2020

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 Dhaval Nagar (@dhavaln). Dhaval is the founder and director of AppGambit, a cloud consulting firm, and an AWS Serverless Hero. Dhaval is also the Lead Technical Architect at Vizabli. He has cleared 11 AWS Certifications, among other cloud certifications, and is a regular speaker at AWS user groups and conferences. Dhaval also writes on his Medium blog, and runs the Surat AWS and Serverless User Groups and has organized over 20 meetups since starting them in 2018. Thanks, Dhaval, for your contributions in growing the serverless community!

Final Thoughts 🤔

If you want to support the newsletter and get extended commentary every week, be sure to check out the premium edition. I was mightily disappointed by the lack of serverless pre:Invent announcements this past week. I’m crossing my fingers that re:Invent will leave me pleasantly surprised. Either way, I’ve got some really big news to share next week.

Until then,
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.