Off-by-none: Issue #215

January 3, 2023

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

Welcome to 2023! 🎉

In our previous issue, we reminisced and took a look back at some of the most popular links and announcements from 2022. This week, we look at how JavaScript has taken the edge by storm, why you don’t have to worry about the end of programming, and what we can expect from serverless in 2023. Plus, we have lots of great serverless content from the community.

Serverless News & Announcements

There are a few big announcements from the end of last year that we need to catch up on. Vercel Edge Functions are now generally available, giving you the ability to run JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly in the region closest to your end user. There are several limitations since they use the V8 runtime, but still pretty cool!

Also, they announced SvelteKit 1.0, which is another really interesting framework. As the announcement states, “Because SvelteKit runs wherever JavaScript runs, you can deploy your app as a traditional Node server, or using serverless functions — including at the edge.” I really like their adapter approach.

GitLab launched a new Web IDE, giving developers more options for a fully remote development experience. I love my local tools, but there are several web-based IDEs that are making me rethink where to spend my time. The key to making these successful will be how well the developer experience translates, especially if they require local emulation.

And speaking of local emulation, I just came across Merloc, an open source tool for redirecting AWS Lambda invocations to your local environment for debugging and hot-reloading. I haven’t tried it out but I wonder if tools like this, or more integrated remote ones, are the better answer.

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Serverless Concepts

Serverless Architecture Layers & DDD (Part 4) — The Data Layer
Lee James Gilmore dives into the Data Layer in part 4 of his series on Serverless Domain Driven Design. Lots to learn here.

Achieving idempotency in the AWS serverless space
Idempotency is a topic that often gets lost on folks that are new to distributed systems. Qasim Albaqali shares his experience and some ways he’s found to implement it with AWS serverless services.

Should I use AWS Lambda SnapStart?
SnapStart was all the rage at AWS re:Invent last year, but Mohamed Latfalla points out some pros and cons to help you decide whether or not to start using it.

Measuring Java 11 Lambda cold starts with SnapStart – Part 3 Using Quarkus Framework
And if you want some more in-depth data on SnapStart, Vadym Kazulkin has you covered in part 3 of his series on the topic.

Side-by-side comparison of serverless databases
The team at Fauna compares themselves to the likes of MongoDB, DynamoDB, and CockroachDB. Fauna purports to have the edge (at least on paper), but I still think FQL needs some work.

AWS Serverless Event-driven architecture
Chirag Darji shares some useful design principles, as well as some thoughts on security, performance, and observability when building serverless event-driven architectures.

AWS Serverless Production Readiness Checklist
Ran Isenberg shares his serverless checklist with keys to performance, security, CI/CD practices, and more. There’s a lot on this list, but then again, there’s a lot that goes into making your apps production ready.

Serverless Tutorials

Suspend any Lambda functions using a single CloudWatch Alarm
Interesting post that shows you how to throttle problematic Lambda functions when there is an anomaly across regional invocations. Shimo also shared how to update alert thresholds in AWS Budgets using Lambda. These are some clever approaches, which makes me think they should just be built-in to AWS.

Multi-region event-driven applications with EventBridge Global Endpoints
Marcia Villabla shares another excellent tutorial on building event-driven applications this week. Plus, don’t miss her previous video on building DynamoDB Global Tables with AWS CDK for multi-region serverless applications.

How to use AWS X-Ray in an Event-Driven Architecture
Having insights into your EDAs is extremely important, and Guillermo Ojeda shows you how to use AWS X-Ray to add in some observability.

Running a git binary in AWS Lambda
Joris Conijn shares how to embed binaries in a Lambda function. All that extra functionality can add lots of great use cases to your serverless apps.

Serverless Testing, Part 3: Simplify Testing with SOLID Architecture
Michael Walmsley shares Part 3 of his Serverless Testing series. Lots of really great information and concepts in here that are worth understanding to see how to build flexible applications with a testing-first mindset.

Tips for keeping your Lambda functions secure
It’s hard for me not to share good serverless security advice. Nothing new here, but Lorenzo Campo covers the basics we all should know.

Deploy a simple data storage API with very little code using Amazon API Gateway and DynamoDB
Getting rid of unnecessary Lambdas was another re:Invent trend, so Paul Santus reminds us that API Gateway can talk directly to DynamoDB with just a bit of VTL. 😉

Serverless Reads

The “End of Programming” will look a lot like programming
Ben Kehoe candidly comments on the “The End of Programming” diatribe by Matt Welsh. I’m a hard agree with Ben. Even if “writing code” somehow completely went away, there still needs to be a way to accurately specify intent. Even if natural language processing could do that, eventually we’ll come up with a shorthand for it (i.e. a programming language).

2022 in Serverless
Allen Helton gives an excellent overview of serverless in 2022 and sets the stage for the year ahead.

2022 a Golden Year as JavaScript Moves to the Edge
It’s not like JavaScript wasn’t already a staple of the web, but as Loraine Lawson examines, it was quite a banner year for the programming language so many people love to hate. And it looks like 2023 could be even bigger.

Time To Rethink Cattle vs. Pets (serverless)
Brian Tarbox posits that “a system is serverless to the degree that you do not have knowledge of the hardware/instance running your system.” I’m not sure this is the right way to frame it (or that Lambda Functions are Fast Food), but there is something notable about this way of thinking.

New from AWS

• Amazon Rekognition improves accuracy of content moderation for images
• Amazon Rekognition adds labels and improves accuracy of existing labels for video
• Amazon EMR Serverless introduces account-level vCPU-based per-region quotas
• AWS Batch adds visibility for terminated and cancelled jobs
• Amazon Translate doubles its synchronous real-time text translation limits to 10,000 bytes
• AWS Organizations console adds support to centrally manage region opt-in settings on AWS accounts

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

February 28, 2023 – ServerlessDays Belfast

March 10, 2023 – ServerlessDays ANZ

June 7, 2023 – ServerlessDays Paris

Serverless Star of the Week ⭐️

This week’s star is Chloe McAteer (@ChloeMcAteer3). Chloe is a Senior Software Engineer at Hamilton Robson. She is also an AWS Community Builder and has a blog on Medium where she writes about various topics including a series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. Chloe recently shared her thoughts on re:Invent 2022 both on her blog and with A Cloud Guru on YouTube. Thanks, Chloe, for providing an inside look into what it means to be a part of the serverless community!

Final Thoughts

I hope you all had a chance to get some rest and recharge over the holiday break. 2023 is sure to be an exciting year for the serverless ecosystem and the cloud in general. With the ongoing investments in new developer experiences (including the ones from AWS), we're bound to see a lot of amazing innovation in this space. Hold on to your hats, because things are going to get interesting.

Wishing you all the best in 2023,
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.