Off-by-none: Issue #219

January 31, 2023

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Control is an illusion 🌀

In our previous issue, AWS SAM got some linting, event-driven apps were taught visually, and we looked at why ChatGPT is doing more harm than good. This week, Amazon OpenSearch “Serverless” goes GA, we look at some serverless DNA, and we ask just how much control you really need. Plus, there’s some awesome serverless content from the community.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

AWS announced runtime management controls for AWS Lambda, giving customers that enjoy adding more work for themselves the ability to disable automatic runtime patching. I can see some edge cases where this could be important, but for everyone else, remember that “an unexpected runtime incompatibility” is a “very rare event.”

Also, Amazon OpenSearch Serverless is now generally available, but still not serverless. 🤷‍♂️

Andrew Brown launched the FREE AWS Cloud Project Bootcamp website, and it made me wax nostalgic. Unfortunately, I think registration is full, but do yourself a favor and check out the site. It’s a wonderfully brilliant assault on your senses.

DevZero raised a $21 million Series A to speed up programmer tasks by shifting developer tools to cloud. I think you know how I feel about local emulation, so I love people that are pushing the boundaries like this.

Michael Walmsley introduced ServerlessDNA.com, a new site dedicated to Serverless. I’ve always been a fan of “in-depth knowledge in small, digestible doses,” so I’m looking forward to following Serverless DNA.

We already told you that AWS Lambda now supports Maximum Concurrency for SQS as Event Source, but I also appreciate Renato Losio’s round ups on these things.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Extension Review: AWS SSM Lambda
Dan Jarvis shares his thoughts on the AWS SSM extension published by AWS that allows you to fetch and cache SSM parameters.

3 Principles for Building Secure Serverless Functions
This is a sponsored article, but the more security knowledge shared the better. Plus, Chris Tozzi’s recommendations are solid.

Understanding Logical IDs in CDK and CloudFormation
Maciej Radzikowski explains the importance of Logical IDs and how they get generated. And more importantly, shows you how to avoid “resource already exists” errors during deployments.

Which flavor of DynamoDB secondary index should you pick?
Pete Naylor explains GSIs versus LSIs. For me, the limitations of LSIs outweigh any benefits, so I almost always default to GSIs. Pete says he’s going to debunk “Single Table Designs” in his next post, so you might want to grab some 🍿 for that one. 😉

Message Delivery & EventStorming
David Boyne shares more EDA visuals to help expand your mind.

AWS Lambda Pricing: A Complete Guide to Understanding the Cost of the Serverless Service
Sandro Volpicella does a great job breaking down all the Lambda pricing mechanisms as well as some tips to optimize costs.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Deploying a Structural Engineering Application to the Cloud with AWS Lambda
Did you know you could use a Lambda function to calculate the capacity of a steel column? Murat Melek explains how he implemented this use case.

Multithreading in AWS Lambda, Part 2: Multithreaded Code in Python
JV Roig continues his exploration of multithreading performance gains in Lambda. This shows you how to implement multithreading to benefit from the added performance.

Serverless GraphQL API Federation
Lee James Gilmore shares an excellent tutorial on how to utilize AppSync as a proxy to multiple private APIs built on Amazon API Gateway. Very cool.

Storage-First pattern in AWS with API Gateway, Part 1: using S3
This is one of my favorite patterns of all time. Robert Bulmer explains why capturing user data before processing is a good idea and how to implement it.

Building AWS Ruby Lambdas that Require Gems with Native Extension
I’m not a Ruby person, but for folks like Robert Berger, making sure your Ruby Gem dependencies are compatible with Lambda is obviously important.

Anonymising access logs in AWS Cloudfront
Marcin Kepka shows you how to comply with privacy laws by removing or anonymizing IP addresses captured in CloudFront logs.

How to right-sizing your AWS Lambdas with Lambda Power Tuning
German Suárez explains how Lambda Power Tuning can help you optimize your Lambda functions for performance and cost.

Split messages from single SQS queue into Multiple SQS queues using EventBridge
Interesting pattern from Pubudu Jayawardana. Lots of really interesting use cases (like priority processing) possible with this approach.

A bref AWS PHP history – Part 1
Rafael Araujo started a series for folks that still love PHP and want to use it for modern serverless applications.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Growing Your Career in the Evolving Tech Field
Allen Helton has made a huge impact in the serverless community over this past year, and his hard work continues to payoff (for him and us). In this post, Allen shares his playbook for career growth in a rapidly changing tech ecosystem.

Why the fuss about conversational programming?
Simon Wardley shares an excellent treatise on the evolution of the programming model and how emerging abstractions will accelerate future generations of developers. Reading this might make you 10x smarter.

It Doesn’t Matter How Much You Spend on AWS
Interesting perspective from Roi Rav-Hon here. Premature technical optimization, especially disconnected from the business metrics is likely a recipe for disaster. Luckily for us, serverless gives us a lot of granularity to connect and correlate this data.

DynamoDB pain points: How to address them and exploring possible alternatives
Shadid Haque advocates for Fauna in this piece (perhaps a bit aggressively), but I also think many of the points are valid. Is Fauna a silver bullet? No, but that’s why it’s important to consider your use cases before deciding.

Serverless take the wheel 🙏 🚗

More control is a good thing, right? I mean, who doesn’t want the ability to twist every knob and tweak every settings to your heart’s desire so that each minute detail of your infrastructure is artisanally hand crafted? I’ll tell you who: this guy! Why? Because I have neither the time, energy, nor expertise to even begin to understand the impact of most of those configuration changes. Not only that, but I likely don’t even have the information needed to understand which optimizations are required, let alone a way to prioritize them. In this week's Premium Edition, I dive deeper into the reasons why too much control may be holding you back.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

AWS Java Panel #2 SnapStart and SpringCloud AWS
Mark Sailes, Maciej Walkowiak, Serkan Ozal, Vadym Kazulkin, and Goran Opacic discuss the latest AWS cold start killer.

Ready, Set, Cloud! – Episode #2 with Ran Isenberg
Allen Helton does a deep dive into platform engineering with guest Ran Isenberg and discusses whether or not this trending topic in cloud communities is going to replace DevOps.

Step Functions Intrinsic Functions – Do simple data processing directly from the state machines!
Marcia Villalba shows us the intrinsic functions provided by the Amazon States Language and how you can use them to perform basic data processing operations without using a Task state.

Using Terraform with AWS SAM – Serverless Office Hours
Praneeta Prakash and Mohamed ElAsmar join Julian Wood to show you how to use the AWS SAM CLI together with Terraform configuration to develop and test serverless applications.

New from AWS 🆕

Other than Runtime Management Control for Lambda and the GA release of OpenSearch Serverless, there wasn’t much from AWS that stood out for me:

• Amazon RDS now supports increasing storage size when creating read replicas and restoring databases from snapshots
• AWS announces access of Simple Monthly Calculator estimates in the AWS Pricing Calculator

Serverless Tools 🛠

CDK Bundle Analyzer
A library that delivers tools to analyze the bundle size of TypeScript/JavaScript CDK functions.

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 Luca Bianchi (@bianchiluca). Luca is an AWS Serverless Hero, the co-organizer of ServerlessDays Italy/ServerlessDays Milano, co-founder of the Serverless Italy Meetup, and the Chief Technology Office at Neosperience in Milan. Luca writes about the serverless-first development approach and machine learning on Medium and has recently earned his AWS Learning: Serverless badge. He’s always looking to collaborate on cloud or AI related coding source projects. Thank you, Luca, for your continued contributions to the serverless community!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I’m super excited to be delivering the keynote at ServerlessDays ANZ in Melbourne, Australia on March 10th. My talk is titled “Serverless = Developer Experience” and I think it might just change the way you think about serverless. 🤯

Take care,
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.