Off-by-none: Issue #22

January 29, 2019

Investing in the future of serverless…

Welcome to Issue #22 of Off-by-none. I’m so happy you’ve joined us this week! 😁

Last week we looked at ways to scale your serverless apps, highlighted some recent innovations, and examined how serverless and the cloud is affecting the IT landscape. This week, we look at some recent investments into the serverless ecosystem, highlight some upcoming events, help you pick the right database for your next project, and share plenty of great serverless resources and reads.

There is so much happening in serverless right now! Let’s get to it. 💥

When you see people jumping on the serverless investment train… 🚂

This past week, Lumigo raised an $8M seed round to help manage serverless operations. I love seeing companies that are focusing on serverless raising money. It means that investors are seeing the value, which means they can see a market for it, which means that more companies will begin to invest in serverless technology, which means more options, which means great adoption, and ultimately, world domination… Okay, maybe I pushed that a bit too far.

Torsten Volk recently posted the Top 10 VC investments in serverless startups in 2018: $33M for Twistlock, $15M for Pulumi, $11M for Solo.io, $7M for Puresec, $10M for Serverless Inc., $5.5M for Stackery, $5M for CloudZero, $4.1M for Epsagon, $2M for IOpipe, and $2M for Protego Labs.

I really hope to see companies like this succeed and continue to push the limits of serverless!

When you’re trying to think of some useful serverless use cases… 🤔

Authentication at Edge with StackPath by Jason Byrne is an interesting look at how his company is attempting to eliminate an extra round trip to authenticate requests.

Centralized Logging System for Lambda Functions walks you through the process Mohamed Labouardy and the team over at Foxintelligence followed to deliver near real-time feed of logs from CloudWatch to ELK.

CloudFetch released an open source project called cloudquery that lets you turn any website to serverless API, including support for single-page applications.

Ricardo Trindade shows us a super simple way to create Slack Notifications via AWS Lambda and SQS. Great example of how you can add serverless to your existing workflows to reduce the complexity of your “serverfull” systems.

Our data lake story: How Woot.com built a serverless data lake on AWS is a great article that shows how Woot.com was able to reduce their operational costs by 90%. Plus, it’s a great use case that you can apply to your business straight away.

When your database selection process is down to eeny meeny Dyna-mo… 🤷‍♂️

You’re not alone. Choosing the right database for your application isn’t always easy. AWS has a great post that shows you How to determine if Amazon DynamoDB is appropriate for your needs, and then plan your migration. DynamoDB is an excellent choice for many different types of workloads, but it’s not right for everything.

If you do choose DynamoDb, getting started with writing interactions can be a bit overwhelming. You might want to check out Begin Data: DynamoDB made ridiculously easy!

Another often confusing concept is figuring out How to calculate a DynamoDB item’s size and consumed capacity. Zac Charles has got you covered in his recent piece.

Sasidhar Sekar from Hotels.com has a great piece about creating Efficient Indexes in DynamoDB. It’s the fifth post their DynamoDB series and definitely worth checking out.

Of course, if you want to push serverless data to the extreme, you can always Analyze and visualize nested JSON data with Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight. Mariano Kamp’s piece is incredibly useful.

When serverless observability just keeps getting better… 🕵️‍♀️

Thundra now supports observability for .NET functions. For those of you that thought (or were hoping) that C# was dead, Microsoft has news for you. Azure Functions is gaining a tremendous amount of popularity, and where there’s Microsoft, there’s .NET. Learn more by ready Sarjeel Yusuf’s post about Monitoring .NET Lambda Functions with Thundra.

If you want to learn a bit more about Serverless Observability Fundamentals, check out Christina Wong’s post about Breaking down your options when collecting data from AWS Lambda.

And Epsagon, another amazing observability platform, just released their public changelog. I really like this type of radical transparency, especially when you’re trusting companies like this to support your applications. They also initiated a fun Twitter contest. Export a picture of your architecture from Epsagon and tweet #ThisIsMyEpsagon to win a prize.

When you’re looking for deep thoughts on serverless… 🤓

Julian Friedman has a really interesting post titled What comes after Serverless? In it he argues that there is a “Deployless” future, where we’ll skip passed code repos and staging environments, and essentially just edit code. It might seemed a bit far-fetched, but it is worth a read.

From Servers to Serverless recounts Avner Braverman’s journey through infrastructure and cloud innovation. Interesting read with some good history and insights into why serverless is so powerful.

NoOps in a serverless world is an interesting piece that talks about shifting IT’s focus from operations to outcomes. The authors point out that in a 2018 Deloitte global CIO survey, 69% of respondents identified “process automation and transformation” as the primary focus of their digital agendas. NoOps is still a ways off, but as the authors argue, serverless is a powerful tool for companies to reduce their operational overhead.

Sujith Reddy Komma argues the PRO’s & CON’s of Serverless Architectures. It’s a fairly simple list, but I’ve included it because his “cons” are quickly being solved thanks to observability startups, multi-region deployments and SLAs. And the cost argument is starting to get a bit old (at least to me). Need to figure TCO, not just your services bill.

And speaking of costs, The Great Serverless Cost Debate: Serverless ≠ Costless is a great piece by John Demian that explains the cost benefits of going serverless. He makes the extremely salient point that “Running back-end operations is a business in itself.” For larger companies, this may be fine, but for smaller ones looking for a competitive advantage, it’s probably not a business you want to be in.

If you’re looking for more reasons to go serverless, Ryan Jones from Serverless Guru’s piece, Serverless Impact — Developer Velocity explains how serverless speeds up developers and lets them accelerate the delivery features faster.

Greg Simons also wrote about the added benefits of serverless. In Serverless; it’s more than a FaaS, he outlines a number of reasons why serverless is much more than just hype. Plus, there was a nice mention in there. 👍

9 trends to watch in systems engineering and operations from O’Reilly Media touches on a few interesting topics. They waver on whether Knative will become the standard (I don’t think so), the importance that cloud security will play in both automation and DevOps culture, and, of course, AIOPs, because we don’t have enough buzzwords right now.

They also noted that the “serverless craze is in full swing,” with a growth of over 17% from 2017. Erez Berkner, CEO & co-founder of Lumigo says, “2019 could be serverless’ breakthrough year.”

Of course, security should always be top of mind when deploying services to the public cloud. Serverless And The Evolution In Cloud Security, How FaaS Differs From IaaS is a great piece by Ory Segal from Puresec that will give you a side-by-side look so you know what you’re responsible for.

If you’re looking for some visuals, check out How to Fold a Fitted Sheet by Joe Emison from Monktoberfest 2018. If you don’t take away a higher meaning from it, at least you’ll know how to fold a fitted sheet.

Also, Slobodan Stojanovic was interviewed on the The Serverless Show talking about The Importance of Open Source & Community Involvement. Always love listening to Slobodan.

Finally, The Rise of “No Code” by Ryan Hoover isn’t about serverless, but it makes some interesting points about the people who are becoming makers. Thanks to products that allow “non-developers” to build MVPs (or even full-scale working applications), everyone is becoming a maker. What does this mean and how does it affect an IT world that is already being eaten up by automation? Something to think about.

When you’re looking to up your Lambda Layers game… 🚀

Ever wanted to publish your Docker containers as Lambda Layers? Well, now you can with aws-lambda-container-image-converter. This should open up some people’s imaginations.

Serverless Anything: Using AWS Lambda Layers to build custom runtimes by Ben Ellerby shows you how to use layers to build a custom PHP runtime. Sure, we’ve seen this before, but this piece provides an important reminder: “Don’t forget to terminate your large EC2 instance.” 😉

AWS already created a custom Rust runtime for us, but Doug Tangren took it a step further and built the serverless-rust plugin for the Serverless Framework. Love this type of community support!

Just recently, Gojko Adzic gave us some utility Lambda Layers for FFmpeg, SOX, Pandoc and RSVG. Nathan Glover used them to create Serverless Watermarks. Very cool.

When you’re trying to simplify your serverless development… 👩‍💻

Serverless, Inc. announced the release of Serverless Framework v1.36.3. Lots of enhancements and bug fixes in this one.

Brian Leroux published Introducing Architect 5.0: fully serverless WebSockets. More great updates and, of course, support for WebSockets.

And it seems that more frameworks are emerging everyday. Osiris is a new library for building and deploying serverless web apps on AWS. Haven’t spent much time with it, but give it a look.

I also came across the functional-typescript project, a TypeScript standard for rock-solid serverless functions. Looks pretty interesting.

And Eslam Hefnawy created a project called backend.js. It’s a super light module that lets you import your Lambda functions into the browser as a backend library. Not sure what I’d do with this, but kind of a cool concept.

Where to go to find some great serverless events… ✈️

If you’d like to go sans travel, there are a number of webinars scheduled to up your serverless game.

Nested Applications: Accelerate Serverless Development Using AWS SAM and the AWS Serverless Application Repository is on January 31. This is a good opportunity to learn more about SAM and how to reuse your serverless components.

Trend Micro also has a webinar on the 31st to help you Make Sense of the Cloud, Containers, and Serverless. There are some promises of security principles in there, a topic I’m always interested in.

If you’re in the area, or just feel like taking a trip, Serverless, Inc. is running a Serverless workshop on March 1 in San Francisco. Lots of topics covered in here for the serious serverless professional.

AWS is running a Serverless Solution Provider Day in London on February 12th. There will be three great talks by three great companies: Epsagon, Stackery and Puresec. Definitely worth the visit.

Serverlessconf announced that it is coming to the east coast this fall. Exact location and date to drop in February. 🤞 for Boston. 😉

Serverless Computing London 2019 announced that their call for papers is now open. This was a great conference last year, so no doubt it will be amazing again.

The Serverless Architecture Conference in The Hague, Netherlands is running from April 8th through the 10th. Lots of great speakers, plus yours truly will be giving a talk about Serverless Microservice Patterns for AWS. Definitely looking forward to this one.

And don’t forget ServerlessDays Cardiff, Hamburg, and Austin are all coming up. Plus ServerlessDays Boston will be announcing speakers later today!

When you’re looking for some good serverless tips and tricks… 💡

Tom McLaughlin wrote a post titled, AWS Lambda And Python Boto3: To Bundle Or Not Bundle With Your Function. Quite a bit of research went into finding out that “you should not be using the AWS Lambda runtime’s boto3 and botocore module.” If you’re developing serverless apps with Python, take a few minutes to review this post.

Subscribe SQS to a SNS topic in another AWS account with CloudFormation, and gotchas! is another time-saver provide by Yan Cui. It’s a common pattern to connect to services from other accounts, and configuring it correctly with CloudFormation is with Yan’s help.

Danielle Heberling from Stackery gives us some Chaos Engineering Ideas for Serverless. Unit tests and integration tests are a necessity for serverless applications, but testing failures in distributed systems is a surefire way to make sure your systems are resilient and can handle different types of failures.

When you realize that serverless is much bigger than just AWS… 🤯

The Serverless360 team put together the Top 15 Azure Serverless Blogs of 2018. Lots of interesting posts here.

Doug Stevenson from Google answers Firebase & Google Cloud: What’s different with Cloud Functions?

An introduction to Azure Durable Functions: patterns and best practices is a great introduction to some common patterns that you can use in Azure. Only caveat, the examples are in Java. 😬

Serverless on Google Cloud Platform: an Introduction with Serverless Store gives a bit of background on serverless, event-driven computing and how it all fits together with Google Cloud Platform. There is also a link to download the Serverless Store demo app.

IBM Cloud Functions is raising the memory execution level to 2Gb to better handle Monte Carlo methods, genetic algorithms, map-reduce, and a host of other combinatorial optimization and operations research algorithms that lend themselves to running in a serverless environment.

Getting started with Custom Dockerfiles for Node.js for Serverless Functions will show you how to us the Fn project to build functions that you can run on Kubernetes.

And if you’re looking for better secrets managment, Unifying Secrets for OpenFaaS will point you in the right direction. Hint: don’t check them into source control.

Finally, if you’re interested in doing more serverless computing at the edge, Taking a look at Cloudflare Workers might be worth your time.

When the teams at AWS are forced to listen to “We can’t stop, we won’t stop” by Miley Cyrus on constant repeat… 👩‍🎤

AWS Introduced Python Shell Jobs in AWS Glue. Now you can leverage your Python skills to build things like serverless ETL tasks without learning Apache Spark.

TLS Termination for Network Load Balancers has also been added. Not applicable for serverless yet, but it could just be a matter of time.

The AWS CloudFormation UpdateReplacePolicy Attribute allows you to specify an update policy to delete, retain, or create a snapshot of old resources once the new ones have been created. Handy feature for automated serverless deployments.

The AWS Amplify CLI now supports IAM roles including MFA flows, which is a nice way of adding some extra security to the set up process.

AWS Cloud9 Supports AWS CloudTrail Logging now. So if you’re using that as your IDE, CloudTrail can track configuration changes to your environment.

Amazon Cognito Announces 99.9% Service Level Agreement, which is nice. Serverless authentication out of the box, now with guaranteed uptime.

And if you’re using Elasticsearch to handle analytics or full-text searches, you’ll be happy to hear that Amazon Elasticsearch Service doubles maximum cluster capacity with 200 node cluster support. And they announced support for Elasticsearch 6.4.

Also, be sure to check out Jerry Hargrove’s visual notes for AWS AppSync.

When you’re looking for spirited serverless discussions on Twitter… 🍿

@rakyll had some thoughts on Kubernetes being about “never having to wait for your cloud provider for a feature because you can build it yourself.” Ben Kehoe and some others whole-heartedly disagreed.

Paul Johnston posted that “Relational databases are the swiss army knife of databases”, meaning that there are likely better choices, especially for your serverless projects. The Internet did what the Internet does best and generated a lot of opinions. Very interesting thread.

Not to be outdone by others, I too sparked a heated discussion around Event Injection in your serverless apps. There was some candid feedback, and perhaps my point of “developer responsibility” was lost a bit in my wording. However, even though event injection existed before Lambda wasn’t the point, it’s still something to be aware of, especially those that are new to event-driven architectures.

The good news about the above discussion is that it actually highlighted some confusion around the “47” service integrations that Lambda has. Ajay Nair thought this was “good feedback”, so hopefully we’ll get some better documentation out of it. Silver linings. ☁️

Serverless Star of the Week ⭐️

There is a very long list of people that 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 let me know.

This week’s star is Brian Leroux (@brianleroux). Brian is the co-founder of @begin, a serverless application platform that promises “Serverless in seconds.” He’s also working on the open-source Architect project, another powerful framework for building and deploying serverless applications. Brian is a regular speaker, blogger, and always welcome voice in the serverless community.

Final Thoughts 🤔

When I first started this newsletter almost six months ago, I was scouring the web each week trying to find interesting and relevant serverless content. Now every week I have to narrow down the list, and there are still over 75 links in this week’s issue alone!

I love serverless, and I love how more and more people are embracing it, experimenting with it, and seeing how it can transform the way they are building applications and their businesses. Erez from Lumingo said 2019 could be the breakout year for serverless. With all this momentum, I think he could be right.

I hope you enjoyed this issue of Off-by-none. I love hearing your feedback and suggestions, it helps me make this newsletter better each week. Feel free to contact me via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or email and let me know your thoughts, criticisms, or how you’d like to contribute to Off-by-none.

See you next week,
Jeremy