Off-by-none: Issue #218

January 24, 2023

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Is ChatGPT better at serverless than you? 🤖

In our previous issue, AWS Lambda added Maximum Concurrency to solve the SQS polling problem, we learned the importance of “first principle thinking”, and we pondered the need for visual infrastructure design tools like the new AWS Application Composer. This week, AWS SAM goes all linty, event-driven apps get some visuals, and we look at why ChatGPT is doing more harm than good. Plus, there’s a whole bunch of amazing content from the serverless community.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

There wasn’t much on the serverless news front this week, which doesn’t happen very often. If I missed something big, please feel free to send me a note.

Something that did catch my eye was the announcement of CloudFormation Linter support being added to Serverless Application Model (SAM) templates. IaC templates are complex, so being able to run a few quick checks before trying to deploy is a handy little feature.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

How DAZN uses AWS Step Functions to orchestrate event-based video streaming at scale
Corneliu Croitoru and Chris Fane provide some interesting architectural insight into DAZN’s go at prototyping an event-based orchestration system.

Measuring Java 11 Lambda cold starts with SnapStart – Part 6 priming the request invocation
Vadym Kazulkin continues on his exploration of SnapStart. He’s a man obsessed, so the rest of you serverless Java folks don’t have to be.

Simplifying internal AWS Lambda APIs
Dan Jarvis provides us with an awesome deep dive into Lambda’s Extensions API, Telemetry API, and Runtime API. Don’t miss this one.

EDA VISUALS
David Boyne is on a tear lately, dropping Event-Driven Application knowledge like it’s his job (well, I guess technically it is). He’s launched a new site with “small bite sized visuals about event-driven architectures” that include extremely helpful posts for documenting your event-driven architecture, explaining different Event Types, outlining choreography vs orchestration, and providing patterns like the content enricher pattern. I’ve been following these and have picked up several ideas from them.

DynamoDB/NoSQL – One practice that can save you in the future
Almir Mustafic points out the potential need for utilizing a created and updated date in your DynamoDB tables. I add these attributes to every DDB table I create, but generally just for meta data purposes. Creating a separate GSI with a partial date is a fairly standard practice for aggregating items, but there are always tradeoffs. Almir points out some of them.

Serverless Latency: Understanding and Reducing the Delay
Daniele Frasca does an excellent job walking you through all the places in a serverless app that can add extra latency to your requests and some best practices for reducing them.

Multithreading in AWS Lambda, Part 1: Performance Scaling
For the serverless practitioner looking to squeeze out as much power as possible, JV Roig begins exploring how using multithreading helps scale performance in Lambda. Very cool stuff in here.

Serverless Frameworks for 2023
Sebastian Bille looks at four popular “serverless” frameworks and points out the to-dos and the to-don’ts, plus gives you helpful info to choose which one is right for you.

There were a ton of great posts this week, so here are a few more worth looking at:

• Monitoring AWS DynamoDB performance and latency by Steve Coochin
• Getting Started with Serverless Edge – Exploring the Options by Brian Rinaldi
• Observability: The hidden stories in your data by Lee Priest

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Delete Default VPC in multiple AWS Accounts using SNS & Lambda
I love “automation” as a serverless use case. Peter Eskandar shows you a pattern for cleaning up unneeded default VPCs.

The AWS Serverless feature you’re probably not using (yet)
I’m not a huge fan of AWS CodeGuru, but Yariv Levy swears by its profiler feature. If you need help optimizing your code, then it might be worth a look.

An efficient way to build your serverless microservices. Part 1. Local Development
I think y’all know my stance on local serverless development, but Andrii Melashchenko shares some “state-of-the-art tooling” if you want to give it a try.

Building DynamoDB to Redshift Ingestion Pipeline
Shubham Anand shares this tutorial to help move data from your DynamoDB tables to another datastore designed for ad-hoc analytics queries. I’ve always loved this pattern: use DDB for user-facing scale, replicate, and then RDBMS for data exploration. I think the tradeoffs are worth it.

Building an OpenSearch Index from DynamoDB with CDK
Emma Moinat shares another variation of the DDB to analytics pattern, this one using OpenSearch and deployed with the CDK.

Use ChatGPT to automatically reply to emails using AWS lambda functions and Simple Email Service
The idea is fascinating, but please don’t respond to my emails with ChatGPT. Shruti Tirpude shows you how to build this if you’d like to help contribute to the continued downfall of our society.

Blog series: from zero to hero! Part 2: Serverless backend API on AWS for blog website.
Depascale Matteo shares part 2 of a very complete tutorial on building serverless backends.

Serverless Image Analysis Stack in AWS
Satyam Sareen shares a tutorial that integrates Amazon Rekognition into a serverless image processing pipeline.

Migrating Amazon DynamoDB tables from one AWS account to another using simple Python script
Nanthan Rasiah shows us a simple way to migrate tables across accounts.

Serverless Reads 🤓

State of Infrastructure-from-Code 2023
Ala Shiban from Klotho shares an excellent post about the players in the Infrastructure from Code space and how they’re all working towards a better future for cloud developers.

How we do engineering at epilot
I love when engineering teams share their stories. Viljami Kuosmanen explains how they embrace API-first and serverless to build their backend.

I Have Good News And Bad News About Your Cloud Metrics
Allen Helton shares what your cloud metrics are good for, and what they’re not (like business metrics).

Get your self-esteem crushed with AWS Certifications and Badges!
Davide de Paolis’ post made me laugh. Not because he got his self-esteem crushed, but because his experience is more typical than you might think. It’s easy to use a few services here and there, but once you go down the serverless rabbit hole to build production systems, get ready to really learn.

Migrating from wkhtml2image to Playwright snapshots on AWS Lambda
Real world stories are important to see how serverless can have a major impact on your business. Sabatino Masala explains how Unipage took advantage of it for spiky workloads.

Why we can’t stop talking about ChatGPT?

When ChatGPT was first released, I remember my Twitter timeline being inundated with screenshot after screenshot of AI generated responses. Everything from simple questions to complex programming logic, with most marveling at this technological advancement. The tech was incredibly interesting, for sure. But to me, it quickly became quite tiring. I even contemplated muting the keyword for a bit! It wasn’t because I don’t welcome progress, quite the opposite. I just had this sinking feeling that AI generated text was going to pollute the internet. I wasn’t wrong.

There have been many, many, many, many things written and said about ChatGPT, including great posts by Forrest Brazeal (When programming is gone, will we like what’s left?), Dan Conn (Will ChatGPT replace developers?), and Kirk Kirkconnell (Using ChatGPT to assist with content creation). I share my thoughts in this week's premium edition.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

I hope you have some popcorn, because there’s plenty of serverless video content here to keep you entertained for quite some time. The talks from Serverless Summit 22 were posted this past week, giving you access to all the excellent presentations from Day 1 and Day 2.

Marcia Villabla explains Step Functions Distributed map and how to run 10k parallel serverless executions.

Product Manager John Jackson joins Julian Wood on Serverless Office Hours to talk about Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow at Scale.

Dev Agrawal enjoys a strawberry while discussing the problem with serverless. I don’t get the strawberry, but I get what he’s saying about serverless.

And finally, Luc van Donkersgoed gives us an AWS Re:Invent 2022 recap that focuses on EventBridge Pipes and Scheduler.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some announcements from AWS last week that might catch your interest:

• AWS Fault Injection Simulator announces increased quotas for target resources
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now gives recommendations about activating predictive scaling policy
• Amazon OpenSearch Service announces enhanced dry run for configuration changes
• Amazon CloudWatch launches cross-account Metric Streams
• Amazon S3 File Gateway now supports DOS attributes
• Amazon Detective adds new AWS managed IAM policies to improve secure access for security analysts
• Amazon EMR Serverless introduces account-level vCPU-based service quota
• Amazon CloudWatch announces enhanced error visibility for Embedded Metric Format (EMF)
• Amazon S3 File Gateway increases maximum file shares per gateway from 10 to 50

Serverless Tools 🛠

sls-mentor
AWS Serverless infrastructure configuration best practices framework-agnostic analyzer. More about this tool here and here.

Hearth – Never Worry About Cold Starts in AWS Lambda Again
Jay Cheskis shares a new tool called Hearth that runs on your desktop and helps you combat cold starts. Looks like it helps set timed invocations to warm functions, plus gives you some other visualization tools. Most Lambda warming methods have fallen out of favor (for good reason), but I understand why people are still trying to solve this.

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 Lee James Gilmore (@LeeJamesGilmore). If you’re a regular reader of Off-by-none, you’re very familiar Lee’s work. Lee is a Global Enterprise Serverless Architect for City Electrical Factors/City Electric Supply in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He’s an AWS Serverless Community Builder and, on his blog over at Medium, he writes extensively about serverless for the enterprise. We highly recommend checking it out! Lee was also a guest on Episode #139 of Serverless Chats. Oh, and did we mention he’s 7x AWS Certified? Keep all those serverless ideas coming, Lee!

Final Thoughts 🤔

This was a long one, so congrats if you’ve made it this far. While I’ve got ya, are there any additional topics that you’d like me to cover? Do you want more content about Cloudflare or other SaaS solutions in the serverless space? Drop me a line with your thoughts!

Until 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.