Off-by-none: Issue #212

December 6, 2022

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re:Covering from re:Invent! 🤒

In our previous issue, we were live from AWS re:Invent with 50,000+ AWS fans being overstimulated by a flood of product announcements and flashing lights in Vegas. This week, we wrap up re:Invent, review some of the major announcements, and share the sessions you don’t want to miss. Plus, we have plenty of excellent content from the serverless community.

Well, another AWS re:Invent is in the books, and, as always, I have some thoughts. But there is way too much to cover in this issue to dive too deep right now. I’ll be share another post later this week.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Obviously, AWS re:Invent dominated the news last week, and there was plenty of commentary to go around. Here are a few of my favorite wrap ups of the major announcements:

• Ran Isenberg: re:Invent 2022: Serverless Takeaways
• Greg Bulmash: Serverless roundup at AWS re:Invent 2022
• Ian Mckay: Twitter thread
• Paul Santus: AWS (re:Invent) 2022 in review
• Ran Ribenzaft: All Serverless Announcements From re:Invent 2022 You Need to Know
• Renato Losio: Recap of AWS re:Invent 2022
• AJ Stuyvenberg: AJ’s re:Invent Recap – 2022

And if you want to see a minute by minute account of ALL the announcements, Mike Moore has you covered here.

Finally, AWS announced new AWS Serverless digital learning badges that let you demonstrate your AWS Serverless knowledge and skills via a verifiable, digital badge. About time. 😉

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Let’s talk about a few re:Invent announcements…

There were clearly a lot, but a couple of them really stood out to me. I hope to dig into these further in the coming weeks, but here are my first impressions.

AWS Application Composer

The introduction of the AWS Application Composer (Preview) has been anticipated for quite some time. Yes, for those that want to know, this is essentially Stackery 2.0, but with some notable new features (like the local file syncing) and a beautifully designed UX. Anna Spysz explains why visual building matters (especially for Serverless), and Danielle Heberling says that AWS Application Composer is the app building future we need. Even TechCrunch wrote about it.

I really like this. Sure, there are plenty of things I’d like to see added (and no, CDK exports is not one of them), but a visual designer like this can help you move very fast without worrying about writing IaC. I have concerns about how this might fit into a more mature workflow, but this is the sort of innovation that could unlock serverless for a new generation of developers.

VPC Lattice

Ugh, VPCs. I know, I know! But let’s look at Amazon VPC Lattice (Preview) for just a second. Danilo Poccia wrote a very helpful post about how it simplifies networking for service-to-service communication by creating “a logical application layer network, called a service network, that connects clients and services across different VPCs and accounts, abstracting network complexity.” I’m thinking this is like an EventBridge for VPCs, giving you a simple way to route traffic between the virtual hellscape that is AWS VPCs.

AWS Lambda SnapStart

I’ve never seen Java developers so excited as when they announced AWS Lambda SnapStart for Java functions last week. I still have nightmares of public static void main, so the Java part wasn’t that exciting for me. However, this snapshotting technology has a future well beyond all the Sun Microsystem nostalgics. Tim Anderson spoke with Deepak Singh about this, and he said, “We want to get to a world where you don’t have to think about cold starts.” That’d be nice.

For now, if you were somehow tricked into selling your soul in the past and are now forced to use Java, Anand Gupta shares some info on enabling Cold Start optimization for the Java Runtime using the AWS Lambda SnapStart opt-in feature. Plus, Vadym Kazulkin gives some first impressions after measuring Java 11 Lambda cold starts with SnapStart.

Amazon OpenSearch Serverless

So after years and years and years of asking (or more like begging) for this, AWS finally announced Amazon OpenSearch Serverless. Unfortunately, it seems to be some kind of sick joke, and I’ve been trying very carefully to craft my response (coming soon). If I was Closed Captioned, you’d see a lot of [barely restrained seething]. If you want to know more about the product itself, check out AWS’s official blog post.

AWS Verified Access

I’m very excited about the AWS Verified Access announcement. Apparently “Death to VPNs” wasn’t an acceptable product name. Anyway, this is still a bit complex to set up, but I love the Zero-Trust approach. VPN-less Secure Network Access to Corporate Applications should be music to a lot of people’s ears.

EventBridge Pipes

Amazon EventBridge Pipes is now generally available, and prepare to have your mind blown. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But this is a really great feature that lets you create point-to-point integrations between Event Producers and Consumers. There are so many use cases that require a Lambda function just to shuttle data from one source to another destination. This service can eliminate a whole bunch of these while also putting all that responsibility on AWS to ensure delivery. Lots of interesting patterns that should come from these!

CodeCatalyst

Another highly anticipated announcement was Amazon CodeCatalyst. It’s being marketed as a “Unified Software Development Service” and there are some really solid capabilities it offers. But I’m a bit bearish on this service. This isn’t the first time AWS has tried something like this, and I’m not sure this version is adding anything particularly new to the conversation. I haven’t spent much time with it, so I don’t want to prematurely criticize it, but it seems to be reinforcing an antiquated cloud development methodology. Don’t @ me just yet. I’ll do some deeper digging.

Step Functions Distributed Map

Not much to say about AWS Step Functions launching large-scale parallel workflows for data processing and serverless applications other than this is awesome. Codifying the fan-in/fan-out (aka scatter-gather) pattern will make these workloads a lot safer with less overhead for the developer to manage. More details here in the official AWS blog post.

Amazon Inspector

AWS also announced Amazon Inspector support for AWS Lambda functions, which is a nice little addition for those of us that care about security. 😉

Jones Zachariah Noel share some more here, as does Sena Yakut’s piece here.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Frédéric Barthelet shares an excellent post that covers 9 surprises he discovered when using AWS EventBridge Scheduler to replace the duct tape and popsicle sticks we’ve all used to implement this ourselves.

Sheen Brisals shares part 2 in his series on how to think granular to go faster in serverless. This one is all about the Granular Mindset.

Binh Bui shares thoughts on whether we should take advantage of AWS Lambda support for Node.js 18 now, or if we should wait.

And finally, Lee James Gilmore is back with part 2 of his Serverless Clean Architecture & Code with Domain-Driven Design series.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Yan Cui shares a practical guide to testing AWS Step Functions. This is a really helpful tutorial for anyone serious about building Step Functions.

I’m sure we’ll start to see more tutorials like this that utilize the new AWS Application Composer. Here’s one that shows you how to build a serverless AWS announcements email service with AWS Application Composer and AWS SAM.

Handy tutorial from Revathi Joshi that shows how to use AWS Backup cross-account backup to copy and restore DynamoDB tables between AWS accounts.

An interesting tutorial from the AWS team explains how to email delta cost usage reports in a multi-account organization using AWS Lambda. AWS cost control is no joke, so this might come in handy if your finance department wants to keep tabs on you.

And here’s another useful tutorial from David Bros that will help you master Step Functions States and Paths.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Tim Anderson interviews Anthony Liguori, an AWS Distinguished Engineer to talk about why AWS prefers VMs for code isolation and some tips on developing for Lambda. Interesting that he says “code size” will no longer matter with SnapStart. Can’t wait to get that for other runtimes, too.

Andrew Brown shared a piece titled, “You’re running an online conference but get called out for having an all-male speaker lineup 2 days prior. Yo, What do you do?” This is in reference to the is serverless ready? conference that was supposed to happen today. There are valid criticisms here that are worth reading and deeply understanding. There is some ignorance in the comments, which falsely equates “wokeism” or “political correctness” to a much more endemic problem for women and underrepresented groups in tech. It looks like the SST team switched it from a one day conference to an episodic type series, so hopefully they will work harder to diversify the line up in the future. I have a podcast, and yes, finding men to speak is a lot easier. But this isn’t a pipeline problem, and we all have a responsibility to fix the toxicity that forces women and others out of tech.

Some of my favorite re:Invent talks! 🗣

Unleash developer productivity with infrastructure from code (COM301)
Without sounding too vain, I must say that my own talk on Infrastructure from Code was quite good. 😉 Give it a watch and let me know what you think.

Building next-gen applications with event-driven architectures (API311-R)
It’s hard not to love Eric Johnson and his presentation style. It’s even harder not to love learning how to build next-gen apps with EDA and serverless.

Deploy modern & effective data models with Amazon DynamoDB (DAT320)
Love me some DynamoDB modeling and Alex DeBrie has become the defacto expert. Amrith Kumar, a Senior Principle Engineer for DynamoDB details the underlying architecture that adds a lot of context to your modeling choices.

Architecting secure serverless applications (SVS302-R)
I really liked this talk from Josh Kahn as well. Lots of goodies in here, especially his answer to the “to VPC, or not to VPC?” question.

Designing event-driven integrations using Amazon EventBridge (API307)
EventBridge is an amazing serverless service and Stephen Liedig shares some of the patterns for building EDAs as well as strategies for creating standards and managing governance across your organization.

Accelerating innovation with serverless on AWS (SVS210-L)
Holly Mesrobian, Guillermo Rauch, and Sheen Brisals combine to explain how serverless is powering innovation in startups and enterprises.

Get started building your first serverless, event-driven application (SVS209)
Emily Shea does an amazing job walking the audience through the process and making this accessible for developers of all skill levels. Great talk to share with those just getting started.

Best practices for advanced serverless developers (SVS401)
This is quickly becoming a staple talk at every re:Invent. Julian Wood pushes past the basics and dives into the practices that serverless developers need to know to take their apps to the next level.

There were several keynotes, as well, including Adam Selipsky’s and Peter DeSantis’. There are some notable moments, but the first few minutes of Dr. Werner Vogels‘ keynote made me laugh.

Some other new stuff from AWS 🆕

• Amazon Comprehend announces support for semi-structured document processing
• Amazon Athena now supports Apache Spark
• Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose adds support for data stream delivery to Amazon OpenSearch Serverless
• Amazon S3 Access Points can now be used to securely delegate access permissions for shared datasets to other AWS accounts
• Process PDFs, Word Documents, and Images with Amazon Comprehend for IDP
• Amazon Redshift now supports auto-copy from Amazon S3

Final Thoughts 🤔

If you’re able to, you should try to experience AWS re:Invent at least once. The energy and the camaraderie is unparalleled and the folks at AWS are always willing to sit and have a conversation, or hear a complaint, about your AWS service(s) of choice. It was a very productive (but also exhausting) week, so I’ve got more work to do to evaluate and review the announcement firehose. As I said, I have some additional words to share later this week, so stay tuned for that.

Now to get some more rest (and watch more World Cup),
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.