Off-by-none: Issue #213

December 13, 2022

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What is serverless again? 😞

In our previous issue, we wrapped up re:Invent, reviewed some of the major announcements, and shared some of my favorite sessions. This week, serverless goes through another identity crisis, we get some more thoughts on AWS re:Invent, and we get plenty of serverless tutorials to keep us busy through the holidays. Plus, we have lots of serverless content from the community.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

In some broader cloud news, Upstash announced Serverless Kafka Connectors, Grafana Labs announced Trace Query Language (TraceQL), and TriggerMesh announced Shaker, an open-source AWS EventBridge alternative.

There were also a few more interesting AWS re:Invent follow ups that I wanted to share. Quick takes are useful, but sometimes it’s good to let things sink in for a bit. For example, Maciej Radzikowski shared his top 12 serverless announcements from re:Invent 2022, but included some pre:Invent and “no:Invent” mentions in there as well.

Chloe McAteer also shared some of her thoughts on AWS re:Invent 2022 along with some thoughts on the sessions she attended. Renato Losio did a nice wrap up of thoughts on the preview of OpenSearch Serverless. I’ve heard early rumblings that the product is very good, but clearly the pricing leaves something to be desired.

And if you like drinking from the firehose, Ed Targett shares 119 new AWS services and features (from re:Invent) in 30 words each. 🧑‍🚒

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Serverless Concepts 🏗

What’s better, Serverless or Kubernetes? Jessica Wachtel recaps the re:Invent breakout session that let the people vote. Not sure I agree with these findings. 🤔

Waleed Rafi shares a practical guide to Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) that makes for a good intro (or refresher), Lumigo sheds some light on the hidden costs of serverless observability, and Vadym Kazulkin did some more benchmarking of Java 11 Lambda cold starts with SnapStart, this time using the Micronaut Framework.

Aditya Pandita explains how to achieve zero-downtime deployments with Provisioned Concurrency. Interesting read.

Another great piece is Marin Radjenovic’s Why do you still need to think of scalability when architecting Serverless apps? Great primer on how your architectural and framework choices might change based on traffic patterns.

Finally, Massimo Re Ferrè shares a very interesting post that advocates for using AWS Step Functions to mitigate code liability. There is a lot of good stuff in here and, if anything, should get you thinking about the long term sustainability of your code. I’m not 100% convinced that Step Functions are the right abstraction, but I also wouldn’t bet against AWS’ longterm support of ASL. That’s not to say there won’t be some changes that’ll affect backwards compatibility, but I’d say Step Functions will be around for awhile.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

So many tutorials this week! As always, I try to skip over most of the beginner stuff and only share the really interesting use cases, and there are some good ones.

Ali Boyraz shares how to build a cloud-native scheduler app with AWS SQS, Lambda, and a State Machine with the AWS CDK. If you skip over the CDK stuff, the underlying pattern is handy.

Madhu Singh and Krupanidhi Jay share a great tutorial on securing Lambda Function URLs using Amazon Cognito, Amazon CloudFront and AWS WAF. This is another popular pattern that is emerging that bypasses API Gateways altogether, but with mitigated risks.

Tetiana Mostova demonstrates how to connect and work with AWS Aurora Serverless. There haven’t been a lot of tutorials on this, so just in case anyone is looking for a quick start, this might help.

Fahim Rustamy shares an in depth tutorial on serverless question answering with NLP. There’s a lot here, so you might want to save this one for the weekend.

Luca Mezzalira et al, share another “Let’s Architect” post, this one focusing on optimizing the cost of your architecture. Definitely worth a look if you like saving money.

This tutorial by Aditya Pandita shows how to allow only specific IP addresses to access the HTTP API using Lambda as an IP Authorizer.

Joris Conijn explains how to search and find related logs in AWS Log Groups by adding a correlation_id. It’s good to know how this works, but picking the right observability tool makes this a lot easier.

Everyone seems to be obsessed with ChatGPT right now, so Antonio Lagrotteria teaches you how to create a serverless API for ChatGPT text-to-speech answers.

Sayan Moitra outlines a pattern for triggering AWS SNS with DynamoDB Streams without Lambda using EventBridge Pipes. We’ll be seeing more and more of these.

And since we’re apparently trying to get rid of Lambdas, here’s Hemendra Chaudhary’s tutorial on using Amazon API Gateway and Amazon DynamoDB together without Lambda.

Serverless Reads 🤓

I wish we didn’t need to keep having this conversation, but there is a good reason that Allen Helton doesn’t know what serverless is anymore. There’s some similar thoughts buried in Jairo Andres’s serverless takeaways

Pablo Bermejo also shares some thoughts on what’s next after serverless. Interesting perspective on Infrastructure FROM Code, but totally agree that AWS should stay focused on providing the best possible primitives they can.

Jennifer Riggins asks and explores if Low-Code development is better for the environment? Lots of perspective in this well-researched article.

AWS announced the new “Serverless Badge” at re:Invent. Daniel Aniszkiewicz has some first impressions and Stephen Sennet share his thoughts on the value and potential for cloud professionals.

Marco Troisi shares the truth about debugging serverless applications. There was an interesting discussion on Twitter that’s worth reading through.

And finally, Erik Bernhardsson shares an excellent post on what he has been working on with Modal.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Marcia Villalba talks about getting started with Route53 for multi-region applications.

If you missed Rick Houlihan at re:Invent, here’s his talk on going from RDBMS to NoSQL, with a slight MongoDB twist. 😉

And Julian Wood leads a group discussion and demonstration of the new Amazon EventBridge Pipes.

New from AWS 🆕

There were a few AWS announcements that piqued my interest this week.

• NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB now supports creating data models directly from sample data model templates
• NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB now includes DynamoDB Local
• Target multiple resources type with wildcard configuration for AWS CloudFormation Hooks
• Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose now delivers to Logz.io
• AWS Cost Anomaly Detection adds account name and other important details to its alert notifications
• Amazon RDS Proxy now supports creating proxies in Aurora Global Database primary and secondary regions

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 Rosemary Wang (@joatmon08). Rosemary is a Developer Advocate at Hashicorp. Previously, she held positions with Thoughtworks as an Infrastructure Consultant and with BNY Mellon as a Specialist Programmer & Engineer in Infrastructure Architecture. Rosemary is also the author of Infrastructure as Code, Patterns and Practices. She has worked on many infrastructure-as-code projects, and open source tools such as Terraform, Vault, and Kubernetes. Rosemary has been a speaker at the Datadog Dash Conference and has also given talks at HashiConf Europe, GitOpsDays, and ​​O'Reilly Media Cloud Superstream: Cloud Security, among many others. Thank you, Rosemary, for your incredible work in infrastructure!

Final Thoughts 🤔

It’s been another incredibly busy week for me personally, so trying to find time to write what I want to write has been difficult. I’ve been working on a piece around my thoughts on OpenSearch Serverless and the effect that has on the developer experience. It has required quite a bit of research, but I hope to finally wrap it up this week. Forget about the definition of serverless, there is a much more important angle here that goes to the future of how we build cloud applications.

See you next week,
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.