Off-by-none: Issue #210

November 22, 2022

Only have a few minutes? Check out this week's MOST POPULAR links as chosen by our email subscribers.

What happened to the World Cup of Serverless? ⚽️

In our previous issue, we got Ampt about the future of cloud development, Cloudflare introduced the “Supercloud”, and EventBridge launched a new scheduler. This week, Lambda gets Node 18, AppSync says goodbye to VTL, and Serverless gets an updated Console. Plus, we have plenty of great serverless content from the community.

Alex DeBrie dives into how to accelerate Amazon DynamoD in this blog!
DynamoDB is a rock-solid database for high-volume applications, but caching can make it even better. Alex outlines how to accelerate performance, increase scalability, and reduce cost for DynamoDB by adding a simple serverless cache like Momento. Read more here! SPONSORED

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Serverless, Inc. introduced Serverless Console V2, PlanetScale sped up queries by over 1000x with PlanetScale Boost, and Cloudflare now lets you keep track of Workers’ code and configuration changes with Deployments.

Also, Xata introduced Xata Workers that use Cloudflare Workers to create client-side database access without client-side secrets. Very cool stuff.

AWS has a whole bunch of announcements, including AWS Lambda adding support for Node.js 18 (James Beswick explains in more detail here) and the heavily anticipated AWS AppSync release of JavaScript support for GraphQL API resolvers (more from Marcia Villalba here).

Speaking of AppSync, DataDog discovered a Confused Deputy Vulnerability that was quickly resolved.

And finally, we got a batch of new AWS Heroes, including serverless heroes Jones Zachariah Noel N, Luciano Mammino, and Paweł Zubkiewicz!

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Khawaja Shams and Kirk Kirkconnell are not too keen on all these new #fauxserverless offerings. In this post, they explain how to fight off fake-serverless bandits with the true definition of serverless.

Manas Paldhe shares Instacart’s journey from Postgres to Amazon DynamoDB.

Rakesh Tripathi describes a method of using AWS Lambda to create a MongoDB Connection Proxy. The idea is interesting, but I’m not sure this is the best way to solve the problem.

Here’s a quick reference guide for handling different types of cron jobs using Schedule Expressions with AWS.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Raffaele Garofalo shows you how to generate an Amazon S3 pre-signed URL with AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway.

Davide de Paolis explains how to use Single-Sign-On Logins to make it easier to login and manage multiple AWS accounts as well as use temporary tokens for CLI access.

Arpad Toth teaches you how to build recursive logic with Step Functions.

And Martin Wentzel shows you how to add native binaries to your Nodejs Lambda functions.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Allen Helton shares the current state of Infrastructure From Code. This is a really great article that builds an app using three different IfC products (including Serverless Cloud, now Ampt). If anything, this should show you that there is a whole world of possibilities out there.

AJ Stuyvenberg points out a race condition with Lambda and CloudFormation when using unqualified ARNs, demonstrating that serverless tools cut both ways. It’s important to remember that there is a lot of orchestration happening behind the scenes with all these distributed systems.

I shared some gripes about Neptune serverless.

Matt Asay has an excellent piece about what open source gets wrong with Mastodon. More importantly, why the vast majority of people aren’t going to switch.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Matt Turner and Eric Johnson have a great chat about Cloud Native & Serverless.

Marcia Villalba chats with Julian Wood to help you understand AWS Lambda scaling and throughput.

The Serverless Craic team talks about Wardley Mapping and how it features in the Flywheel Effect book.

Of course I’m excited about re:Invent, but not as much as I used to be.

AWS re:Invent is NEXT WEEK! We’ve already seen a number of announcements this year about “serverless” services, and I happen to know of a few other things that will be unveiled at “the big show” as well. Of course I’m excited. re:Invent is always an amazing experience. But it’s no longer the World Cup of Serverless. This is one of the first years that my expectations are incredibly low. I share more thoughts in the premium edition.

New from AWS 🆕

The pre:Invent announcements keep rolling in, some more exciting than others. Here’s a bit of the firehose. We’ll do a much more complete wrap up after the madness of re:Invent.

• Amazon RDS events now include attributes for filtering with Amazon SNS
• Amazon S3 Glacier improves restore throughput by up to 10x when retrieving large volumes of archived data
• Amazon EventBridge introduces new capabilities that make it simpler to build rules
• AWS Secrets Manager now supports rotation of secrets as often as every four hours
• Amazon NAT Gateway Now Allows You to Select Private IP Address for Network Address Translation
• Amazon CloudWatch RUM now supports custom events for better troubleshooting and application specific monitoring
• Amazon S3 Select improves query performance by up to 9x when using Trino
• AWS Amplify Flutter Announces Web and Desktop support (Developer Preview) for API, Analytics, and Storage
• Amazon CloudFront launches continuous deployment support
• Manage your resources from AWS Organizations using AWS CloudFormation
• Amazon Athena releases data source connector for IBM Db2
• Build event-driven applications with AWS CloudFormation StackSets event notifications in Amazon EventBridge
• AWS SAM CLI introduces Terraform support for AWS Lambda local testing and debugging
• Amazon SQS announces attribute-based access control (ABAC) for flexible and scalable access permissions
• AWS Amplify Hosting announces support for Next.js 12 and 13
• AWS Amplify announces general availability of In-app messaging notifications for React and React Native
• AWS Fargate adds support for monitoring the storage utilization
• AWS X-Ray adds trace linking for event-driven applications built on Amazon SQS and AWS Lambda
• Amazon Athena query S3 data using SQL
• Amazon SNS announces enhanced integration with AWS Service Quotas
• Use CloudFront continuous deployment to safely validate CDN changes
• AWS Identity and Access Management now supports multiple multi-factor authentication (MFA) devices
• AWS Proton launches dashboard
• Simplify cross-account access for your AWS services with AWS Step Functions
• Amazon CloudFront now supports JA3 fingerprint headers

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

November 22, 2022 – Serverless Office Hours – pre:Invent 2022!

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 Luciano Mammino (@loige), Luciano is a senior cloud architect at fourTheorem and a recently named AWS Serverless Hero. He is one of the creators of Middy, a middleware-based Node.js framework for AWS Lambda, as well as a co-author of the Node.js Design Patterns book and co-host of the AWS Bites podcast. He also regularly contributes to several other open-source serverless projects. Thanks for all your work in the serverless community, Luciano!

Final Thoughts 🤔

If you want to support the newsletter and get extended commentary every week, be sure to check out the premium edition. This is the last issue before re:Invent, so if you’re planning on going, please DM me if you want to meet up. Hope to see you there!

Until next time,
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.