Off-by-none: Issue #211

November 29, 2022

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Live from AWS re:Invent!

In our previous issue, Lambda launched Node 18 support, AppSync gave us JavaScript resolvers, and Serverless Console V2 was released. This week, we’re live at AWS re:Invent desperately trying to avoid the re:Cold, and, as always, being overwhelmed by the shear scale of this event and flood of product announcements. Plus, we’ve got some additional, non-re:Invent content from the community as well.

Watch out for faux-serverless bandits
Re:Invent always comes with exciting announcements about what’s next in serverless. Gearing up for that, Khawaja Shams and Kirk Kirkconnell spent time reflecting on what true serverless looks like—and how to recognize when faux-serverless banditry is afoot. Find their analysis and a litmus test you can use to identify serverless data services on the Momento blog. SPONSORED

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

There are a ton of AWS announcements that we’ll cover below, but in case you missed some of the biggest pre-re:Invent serverless announcements, Yan Cui has you covered here.

AWS provides an updated list of the top announcements of AWS re:Invent 2022 that you can follow as well.

In other cloud news, you can catch up on everything that was announced during Cloudflare Developer Week 2022 .

And Elad Ben-Israel asks why Cloud is so difficult? and introduces a new language for the cloud that hopes to make it easier.

Cold Starts are Heating Up! 🔥

It seems as though the big serverless announcement (so far) was the release of SnapStart. This will snapshot your Java Lambda containers to minimize the typical 5 second cold start that has plagued Java serverless developers since the beginning. It’s not without tradeoffs, but everyone already wrote about it, so here’s a collection of posts to take you down the rabbit hole.

• Official announcement: Announcing AWS Lambda SnapStart for Java functions
• Jeff Barr: New – Accelerate Your Lambda Functions with Lambda SnapStart
• Yan Cui: AWS Lambda cold starts are about to get faster
• AJ Stuyvenberg: Introducing Lambda SnapStart
• Rustem Feyzkhanov: How AWS Lambda SnapStart eliminates cold starts for Serverless Machine Learning Inference
• Johannes Koch: How to save costs using AWS Lambda SnapStart for Java based functions
• Frederic Lardinois: AWS makes Lambda cold start latency a thing of the past with SnapStart
• Oğuzhan Özdemir: Serverless Performance Boost with SnapStart
• Collin Smith: Improving your Lambda ColdStart Performance with AWS Lambda SnapStart
• Serverless Sam: 6 Considerations Before Using AWS Lambda SnapStart

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Let’s get a few tutorials in if your brain isn’t already overwhelmed by re:Invent announcements:

Serkan Sakinmaz shows you how to create simple data pipeline with AWS Step Functions.

Ashwin Parmar explains how to setup an AWS Lambda Function PHP Runtime.

Samuel Zeru walks you through enabling AWS Multi-Region Multi-Account DynamoDB access.

And Revathi Joshi shares a tutorial on creating an AWS Lambda function to process records in an Amazon DynamoDB stream.

Say hello to the latest entrant in Serverless Observability
5 minutes is all it takes, to achieve real-time observability of your Serverless workloads on AWS. Founded by three friends-turned-entrepreneurs, KloudMate offers a generous forever-free plan, specially meant for developers who'd like to signup and give it a try. Monitor AWS Lambda, or just about any serverless service you employ. No credit card required. SPONSORED

Serverless Reads 🤓

Asher Sterkin share his thoughts on the 4 Pillars of the “Infrastructure from Code”.

Marc Brooker recounts some interesting history from Amazon’s Distributed Computing Manifesto.

Dave Vellante shares some analysis as to why re:Invent 2022 marks the next chapter in data and cloud.

Matt Asay wonders what AWS customers really care about and whether it’s actually open enough, multicloud enough, and serverless enough for them, despite what us purists might think. He’s probably right. 😞

Allen Helton explains why serverless direct integrations aren’t as scary as they sound.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Serverless Craic Team covers some of the initial AWS re:Invent announcements.

Marco Troisi talks to Sam Williams about becoming a confident serverless developer.

And Marcia Villalba covers the new Amazon EventBridge Scheduler and how to schedule tasks to over +200 targets.

New from AWS 🆕

Okay, this is a firehose. There are a lot of announcements that are interesting to me (and hopefully you) that I’ve included below. I will do a much deeper analysis of these announcements when I have more time to dig deeper on the services.

• AWS announces Amazon Inspector support for AWS Lambda functions
• Amazon SNS adds support for payload-based message filtering
• Amazon Rekognition adds new pre-trained labels, and introduces color detection
• New Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points failover controls enable active-passive configurations and customer-initiated failovers
• Announcing the general availability of AWS Wickr
• Elastic Load Balancing capabilities for application availability
• Amazon VPC Reachability Analyzer now supports network reachability analysis across accounts in an AWS Organization
• Introducing account customization within AWS Control Tower
• Amazon RDS Optimized Writes enables up to 2x higher write throughput at no additional cost
• Announcing Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor Preview
• Introducing AWS Glue 4.0
• Announcing data protection in Amazon CloudWatch Logs, helping you detect, and protect sensitive data-in-transit
• Announcing Amazon RDS Blue/Green Deployments for safer, simpler, and faster updates
• Announcing Elastic Throughput for Amazon Elastic File System
• AWS announces Amazon Verified Permissions (Preview)
• Announcing Schema Conversion feature in AWS DMS
• AWS announces lower latencies for Amazon Elastic File System
• Amazon CloudWatch launches cross-account observability across multiple AWS accounts
• Announcing preview for Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller zonal shift
• AWS Compute Optimizer now supports external metrics from observability partners
• Amazon RDS Optimized Reads is now available for up to 50% faster queries on Amazon RDS for MySQL
• Announcing comprehensive controls management with AWS Control Tower (Preview)
• Amazon ECS introduces Service Connect
• Amazon Redshift announces integration with Informatica Data Loader tool to accelerate data uploads at no cost
• Amazon Redshift extends SQL capabilities to simplify and speed up data warehouse migrations (preview)
• Support for reading and writing data in Amazon DynamoDB and cross account Amazon S3 access with Amazon EMR Serverless

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

JS resolvers for AppSync are great… but it’s done with a custom JS runtime, which means AWS now provides 3 different JS runtimes, all with their own quirks on limitations, supporting different versions of JS… ~ Ant Stanley

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

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 Karen Huaulme (@YouOldMaid). Karen is a Principal Developer Advocate at MongoDB, where she collaborates with developers to unleash their creativity across all aspects of data and technology. She has authored several tutorials and blog posts for the MongoDB developer center and has spoken at events like DeveloperWeek, the Game Developers Conference, and GDG DevVest Italia. She’ll also be presenting at AWS re:Invent and speaking at Jfokus 2023. Prior to MongoDB, Karen spent most of her career working with video game developers as a Solutions Architect and Integration Engineer at Nvidia, Amazon, and Twitch. Thanks for your amazing work, Karen!

Final Thoughts 🤔

There is so much going on here at re:Invent that it’s hard to process in real time. Lots more re:Capping to come in the weeks ahead. Also, if you’re at re:Invent, please DM me if you want to meet up.

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.