Off-by-none: Issue #214

December 20, 2022

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

Looking back at 2022! 🥂

In our previous issue, serverless continued to go through another identity crisis, we got some more thoughts on AWS re:Invent, and we got plenty of serverless tutorials to keep us busy through the holidays. This week, we look back at the most popular serverless links and announcements from 2022. Plus, we have a few new bits of serverless content from the community.

The Most Popular Links from 2022!

2022 was another busy year for cloud and serverless. DynamoDB turned 10 years old, Werner had a Serverless Chat, Amazon S3 turned 16, Aurora Serverless V2 was a major disappointment, Lambda got Node 16 support (then Node 18), Cloudflare introduced D1 and Cloudflare Queues, MongoDB went serverless, EventBridge got schedulers, Serverless Cloud spun off as Ampt, and a whole lot more!

Here are some of the most popular links that we shared in Off-by-none this past year:

A multi-dimensional approach helps you proactively prepare for failures, Part 1: Application layer by Piyali Kamra et al
People love patterns (I know I do), and this article was chock-full of them.

How to reduce 40% cost in AWS Lambda without writing a line of code by Seza Akgün
The headline might have been a bit of an attention grabber here, but the content was worth a look, as well.

Seven Tools to Help You Become a Better Serverless Developer by Yan Cui
Who doesn’t want to become a better serverless developer? Yan’s post made reference to several great tools that can help you on your serverless journey.

AWS General Design Principles in Serverless Applications by Andrew JR
This was an incredibly popular post, and for good reason. It was simple in its approach, but captured years worth of learning in a half a dozen paragraphs or so.

The biggest pre:Invent serverless announcements you may have missed by Yan Cui
Another post by Yan that caught our readers’ interest. Looking at this again, these pre:Invent announcements where probably more exciting than most of the actual re:Invent ones. 😐

Serverless Architectures on AWS, Second Edition by Peter Sbarski, Yan Cui, and Ajay Nair
Three serverless pioneers release the second edition of their popular book, and y’all were definitely interested in checking it out.

Lessons Learned From Switching to AWS SDK v3 by Allen Helton
Even though it was made generally available 2 years ago now, lots of people have yet to make the switch to v3 (I mean, AWS Lambda finally did just over a month ago). Allen shared his experience and others seemed awfully keen to follow along. As a side note, I love these types of posts.

Inconsistent thoughts on database consistency by Alex DeBrie
I love Alex’s content, even if I need to take some Advil after reading it. Lots of great information here and obviously a shared interest in what Alex has to share.

Serverless ≠ Microservices by Paul Swail
This was a very short article, but I think the title (and perhaps my excited praise) resonated with all of you. I still think this is an extremely powerful statement, and while you can build “microservices” with serverless, it is most definitely something different.

Three use cases for AWS Lambda Function URLs by Hudson Tavares
This is another short, but really useful post. When FURLs were released (then unreleased and released again), lots of folks were curious how they would fit in. This post only scratched the surface of what was possible with FURLs, but was enough to get people thinking about it.

Understanding AWS Lambda scaling and throughput by Julian Wood
Anything Julian produces is bound to be worth a good look, but this post was absolutely fantastic. Nothing is infinitely scalable, and even though we might think serverless does the hard part for us, you still need to understand its limits.

How to choose between EventBridge and SQS in Event Driven Architecture by Joey Yi Zhao
Another example of a great headline! People ask this question all the time and Joey not only piqued your interest with it, but also delivered an excellent post to make it worth the click.

Discover, Copy, and Share Common Code with the New AWS Serverless Snippets Collection by Steef-Jan Wiggers
This summary of the Serverless Snippets Collection release was much more popular than the actual release announcement. 🤷‍♂️ Perhaps the “share common code” references is what tempted everyone?

Build Better Serverless APIs By Going Storage First by Allen Helton
One of my favorite serverless patterns of all time, and another great post by Allen. Losing events is not good, so be sure to minimize your chances of data loss by saving them before your custom code kicks in.

4 ways of executing Lambda function via HTTP endpoint – a comparison by Pawel Zubkiewicz
Speaking of Lambda URLs, this post by Pawel supplied a great comparison chart showing the difference between API Gateway REST, API Gateway HTTP, ALBs, and FURLs.

Why you should use a single API Gateway Endpoint per microservice by Kieran Wrenn
Another question that is highly debated, but totally shouldn’t be. I said it before and I’ll say it again: if you want a unified endpoint for multiple microservices, put regional APIs behind a single CloudFront distribution.

re:Invent 2022: Serverless Takeaways by Ran Isenberg
And finally, the most popular re:Invent 2022 “serverless takeaways” post was this one by Ran Isenberg. That’s quite an accomplishment considering there were a lot!

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Serverless Concepts 🏗

Allen Helton shares an excellent piece about how he built a serverless app to cross-post his blogs.

Lee James Gilmore breaks down the Serverless Event Gateway Pattern that puts an API Gateway in front of your EventBridge event bus. This is one of the first patterns that emerged after the launch of EventBridge a few years ago, but extremely powerful for a number of reasons that Lee explains.

Aravind Vadamalaimuthu just dropped a series that explains the limitations and solutions to consider while using Amazon SQS.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Fatima Medlij shares a pattern for detecting if your SQS Batch is done processing. Someone asked me a similar question the other day, and while the implementation is different here, the API call to check the queue for remaining messages makes sense.

Abinaya Chandran explains how to run a serverless federated query using AWS Athena and AWS MSK. I’m not an AWS MSK user, but this is some really interesting (and powerful) stuff.

Dev Bhatt demonstrates how to run DynamoDB parallel scans for lightning-fast data access.

Enri Peters shares some tips on mastering local AWS Lambda development. I’m hoping 2023 will be the year of the Cloud Developer Experience and we’ll finally eliminate the need for local emulation entirely.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Interesting post from Loraine Lawson about why the Edge for applications is a trend heading into 2023. The edge is certainly becoming more capable, and I like the direction of some of these tools that are pushing the boundaries of what it can do. However, I think the need for region-based apps isn’t going away anytime soon. Perhaps the continued push for multi-region capabilities will be an intermediate step?

Ala Shiban shares his thoughts on how startups should approach refactoring and the associated reasons and tradeoffs for doing so. I love the “adaptive architectures” concept and how Klotho is thinking about it.

Great read from Chris Birkinshaw about why the serverless-first mindset is more than a technology strategy.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

The Serverless Craic team talks about what’s new from AWS now that re:Invent is over and why “Serverless first” isn’t scary anymore.

Marcia Villalba shows you how to build an application that routes traffic to a region based on latency.

New from AWS 🆕

AWS keeps pumping out more features and releases. Here are a few that I think are worth a quick look.

• Heads-Up: Amazon S3 Security Changes Are Coming in April of 2023
• Amazon Timestream now enables you to protect your data through AWS Backup
• Amazon Route 53 now offers threat intelligence sourced from Recorded Future
• Athena enhances read support for Delta Lake table format
• AWS Storage Gateway introduces Terraform modules for Amazon S3 File Gateway
• AWS Gateway Load Balancer and Gateway Load Balancer endpoint now support IPv6 traffic
• AWS Cost Anomaly Detection now supports percentage-based thresholds
• AWS Amplify JavaScript library announces version 5 release
• Monitor Amazon EMR Serverless jobs in near real-time using CloudWatch metrics
• Amazon Athena releases new connector for Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka (MSK) and Apache Kafka
• Introducing concurrent account provisioning operations for AWS Control Tower
• Amazon Kinesis Video Streams announces edge recording and scheduled cloud streaming capabilities (preview)
• Amazon CloudWatch launches Metrics Insights alarms
• Announcing AWS Amplify Library for Android v2.0
• AWS Marketplace introduces free trials for SaaS usage-based pricing products

Final Thoughts 🤔

Well, that’s a wrap for this year. There will be no newsletter next week, so we’ll be back again on January 3, 2023. I want to thank all of you for being subscribers and following along with Off-by-none this year.

As you’ve probably heard, Revue is shutting down early next year. This means that paid subscribers through Revue will be contacted separately to resubscribe to the Premium Edition. Community Edition subscribers will be unaffected, although starting on January 3, 2023, all emails will come from jeremy@offbynone.io.

It has been an incredibly busy year for me. Running a startup is highly rewarding, but also very time consuming. While I’ve had to step back from some of my open source projects and the podcast for a bit, I remain committed to bringing this newsletter to you all. We’ve been talking about the addition of a number of enhancements for some time, and starting with our next issue, we’ll begin rolling some of them out.

Wishing you all safe and happy holidays. I look forward to the possibilities of 2023 and sharing them all with you.

See you next year,
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.