Off-by-none: Issue #220

February 7, 2023

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Dude, where’s my infrastructure? 🤷‍♂️

In our previous issue, Amazon OpenSearch “Serverless” went GA, we looked at some serverless DNA, and we asked just how much control you really need. This week, your cloud resources get on the ‘sam list’, we learn about the state of serverless and edge databases, and we clear up some confusion about the future of cloud development. Plus, we’ve got some amazing content from the serverless community.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Not a ton of news this week, but AWS SAM CLI did introduce the ‘sam list’ command to inspect AWS SAM resources, which is a handy feature. It may seem like a small thing, but anytime you can avoid distracting developers by making them jump around to other tools is a win in my book.

AWS also introduced a new way to visualize your VPC resources from the Amazon VPC creation experience. I know, you’re all super excited. Unfortunately, the need to create and manage VPCs is still a way of life for most organizations, so anything that makes that easier is a good thing. If you’re looking for a guide on Serverless VPC Access, give this one a look.

Last week we talked a bit about control and whether that was always a good thing, especially in the serverless world. Steef-Jan Wiggers did a roundup on AWS giving developers more control over Lambda Function Runtime updates with Runtime Management Controls, and I think it’s worth reading some notable experts’ takes on this.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Serverless Patterns
Jimmy Dahlqvist shares some of my favorites including Storage-First and Circuit Breaker, plus a few other to help you build resilient serverless applications.

AWS DynamoDB Fundamentals | A Complete Guide
Hopefully you’re not getting sick of all these DynamoDB guides (I know I’m not). Huzaifa Asif providers a fairly comprehensive primer here for anyone that’s interested.

How to throttle Amazon SP-API requests when delaying them with AWS Step Functions
Maybe not exactly your use case, but A. E. Veltstra describes a helpful approach to throttling calls to downstream APIs that have time-based quotas.

Benefiting from both Standard and Serverless EMR
Maor Boublil shows you how to determine which version of EMR is more cost effective, and how using a combination of them both can save you money.

2023 State of Databases for Serverless & Edge
Lee Robinson gives us an overview of the emerging databases that fit well with Edge and Serverless compute models. I call it the “serverless database space race,” and it’s getting pretty exciting.

Multithreading in AWS Lambda, Part 3: Multithreaded vs Multi-instance Lambda Architectures
JV Roig continues his excellent series on multithreading in Lambda, this time exploring when it makes more sense to scale work horizontally with multiple instances.

Deep dive into Amazon Inspector for AWS Lambda
Vadym Kazulkin has a great security post here that digs into Amazon Inspector and where it might have some advantages over other tools.

Concurrency Control Using Lambdas and SQS
This is a members only post from Mario Bittencourt, but it’s just too darn good not to share. I have faith that my readers will find a way. 😉

Extension Review: Funky Async Extension
Dan Jarvis shares another serverless extension review, this time on one that he wrote and uses in production. Lambda calling Lambdas? I mean, it makes sense with Lambda Destinations.

Showdown at High Noon
We spend a lot of time focusing on AWS in this newsletter, but GCP’s Cloud Functions V2 are taking an interesting approach to FaaS (like multi-concurrency), and there could be some hints as to where Fargate could go. Aviv Laufer gives some benchmarks of the current preview that confirmed some of my suspicions about this approach.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Adding real-time full-text search to a Next.js app with Tigris
I’ve been looking more at Tigris lately and I really like it. Check out Ekekenta Odionyenfe C.’s tutorial to see how developer friendly it is.

Amazon EventBridge Pipes: stitch AWS services together
Guido Nebiolo has a great tutorial that shows you how EventBridge Pipes can help reduce your technical debt.

Next-level performance with Distributed Map!
Dmytro Harazdovskiy explains the benefits of Step Functions’ new Distributed Map and how to implement it.

AWS Lambda Smart Feature Flags – Now with Time Based Conditions
Very cool tutorial by Ran Isenberg that shows how to use the new time conditions that were added to AWS Lambda Powertools feature flags utility that leverages AWS AppConfig.

Using an event-based serverless architecture to run your Christmas lights
Nicolas Triantafillou shares some more details on how you can use serverless to prepare yourself for the “The Great Christmas Light Fight” reality show.

How to schedule scaling (without writing a single line of code) on Amazon DynamoDB provisioned tables
Ersoy Pembe explains how to use EventBridge Schedulers to automatically adjust DynamoDB capacity. This could be super handy when running in combination with data intensive ETL tasks or other known spikes in activity.

Serverless Reads 🤓

The Risks of Moving Too Quickly with Serverless Development
Allen Helton shares his thoughts and advice on making sure we don’t rush serverless solutions just because we can. Lots of good points in here, but I’d also caution against premature optimization. Serverless can be hard to get “right”, especially in the early days of a project, and the bootstrapped solution might not always be the best implementation for your workload.

Decreasing incident response time for OutSystems with AWS serverless technology
This is a really cool serverless implementation of a security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) system built by OutSystems on AWS.

Resolving the paradox of cloud-native solutions: more agility without total control
Piet van Dongen explains the benefits of handing over some control so you can “focus your efforts on your core competitive edge while smartly integrating with the non-differentiating stuff.”

Summarizing 2 years of using Serverless Architecture
Omer Baki walks you through the evolution of Melio’s serverless architecture as they continued to scale and began running into limits with different components.

Infrastructure from Code: The New Wave of Cloud Infrastructure Management
Claudio Masolo did a recap of Ala Shiban’s post that we shared last week, so worth a read if you missed it. Lots of people talking about this new approach, but still lots of confusion around how it fits into more complex architectures.

Clearing up some Infrastructure from Code confusion 👨‍🏫

This past week we saw several questions and mentions of #IfC, including Guillermo Rauch referencing it on the Future Founder Promise Podcast (at about the 40:00 mark). As Ali Shiban’s post and my AWS re:Invent talk shows, there are a lot of companies exploring this idea of “Infrastructure FROM Code” and “Self-Provisioning Runtimes.” It’s exciting stuff, but there also seems to be a lot of confusion as to what it actually is, how it works, and what it means for developers and SREs. I try to clear all this up in this week's Premium Edition.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Unlock the Power of EventBridge Pipes: Integrate Across Platforms with Ease!
Marcia Villalba shows you how to integrate different event producers and consumers together without Lambda functions, and how to perform filtering and enrichment of the events that flow through the pipe.

Preparing your serverless architectures for the big day
Julian Wood is joined by Cloud Support Engineer Pallavi Srivastava to discuss scaling and testing, how best to do deployments and implement monitoring, plus performance optimizations tips, caching strategies, and much more.

AWS SAM v Serverless Framework
Eoin Shanaghy and Luciano Mammino do a great job laying out the pros and cons of the Serverless Framework and SAM as well as sprinkling in plenty of useful insights from their own experiences. Definitely worth a watch.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some additional noteworthy announcements from AWS. A few CloudWatch updates, Glue support for MongoDB Atlas, Athena’s data source connector for Google Cloud Storage, and the AppRunner update were particularly interesting for me.

• AWS CloudFormation StackSets gives quick access to list of Regions for stack instances of a stack set
• Amazon CloudWatch now simplifies metric extraction from structured logs
• Amazon AppFlow announces 4 new data connectors
• Amazon Fraud Detector introduces Cold Start model training for customers with limited historical data
• Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports enabling SAML during domain creation
• Amazon OpenSearch Service simplifies remote reindex for VPC domains
• Amazon ElastiCache for Redis announces 99.99% availability Service Level Agreement
• AWS App Runner now supports HTTP 1.0 protocol
• Amazon CloudWatch now supports high resolution metric extraction from structured logs
• Amazon increases NAT Gateway’s capacity to support concurrent connections to a unique destination
• Amazon Athena releases data source connector for Google Cloud Storage
• AWS Glue Crawlers now support MongoDB Atlas

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

February 10, 2023 – Serverless Boston/NYC Meetup with Allen Helton (virtual)

February 23, 2023 – Serverless Brno, Czech Republic Meetup (in person)

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 Pubudu Jayawardana (@pubudusj). Pubudu is currently a Senior Backend Developer at Starred, a candidate experience analytics platform. He’s an AWS Certified Developer and a MongoDB Certified Developer. He’s also an AWS Community Builder and has recently collaborated with @BandoloCyril to share ideas about how to learn a new skill and stay motivated while keeping up with data, analytics, and cloud updates. Last week, we featured his most recent blog post, “Split messages from single SQS queue into Multiple SQS queues using EventBridge.” Thank you for taking an active role in the serverless community, Pubudu!

Final Thoughts 🤔

It was great to see Infrastructure FROM Code getting some attention this week (even if some of it was misinformed). There are a lot of exciting things happening in this space, and they say there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

See you 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.