Off-by-none: Issue #221

February 14, 2023

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Serverless love is in the air ❤️

In our previous issue, your cloud resources got on the ‘sam list’, we learned about the state of serverless and edge databases, and we cleared up some confusion about the future of cloud development. This week, Asynchronous Lambdas get some much needed metrics, SAM Connectors (probably) took my advice, and we ask where serverless devs are spending their time. Plus, we’ve got lots of awesome serverless content from the community.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Not a whole lot of super exciting cloud news this week, but AWS Lambda did launch new CloudWatch metrics for asynchronous invocations adding AsyncEventsReceived, AsyncEventAge and AsyncEventsDropped. It’s sort of amazing that we didn’t have these metrics before, but better late than never.

Also, Amazon SNS now supports AWS X-Ray active tracing to visualize, analyze, and debug application performance. I find tracing marginally useful most of the time, but when you need it, it’s nice to have it.

AWS also launched AWS SAM connectors as a resource parameter instead of specifying them as random floating configs with your SAM template. Perhaps this was in response to my criticism when they first launched, but either way, this is much cleaner now.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

12 Databases you probably never heard of
Alex Maher shares a list of databases (mostly) competing in the serverless data space race. There are a lot of them out there, and this list is far from comprehensive.

Serverless AWS CDK Pipeline Best Practices & Patterns — Part 1
Lee James Gilmore shares his opinionated approach on how to set up, structure, and deploy your AWS CDK Serverless apps using CDK Pipelines. Lots of really interesting information and ideas in here.

Building Serverless apps with more configurations
There are a lot of AWS services that allow you to build serverless apps without using Lambda functions. Jones Zachariah Noel N shares some of the benefits to this approach along with a few examples and use cases.

Multithreading in AWS Lambda, Part 4: Massive Throughput and Cost Efficiency
JV Roig adds another installment to his series on multithreading in Lambda, this time analyzing whether it’s more efficient and cost effective.

5 control points to implement serverless integration tests like a boss
Corentin Doue lays out some really good dos and don’ts for making sure you’ve got appropriate test coverage for your serverless apps.

Macro-services to Nano-services: Evolution of Software Architecture
Mehmet Özkaya shares some background on changing software patterns and when and why you might choose one over the other. I’ve never really bought into the nanoservices classification as I think these are just implementation details that can be used with any of the more traditional approaches. I’d hope that at the very least they would run within a bounded context.

Trying to use AWS Lambda as an API? Here’s what you need to know
Jagannath Saragadam quickly breaks down different ways to expose Lambda to API calls and what limitations they carry.

Running Serverless in Production: 7 Best Practices for DevOps
Nothing in here that you don’t already know, but Gilad David Maayan explains a few key security best practices for your serverless apps.

AWS Lambda Layers Best Practices
Ran Isenberg covers some AWS Lambda layers basics, the pros and cons of using them, and his recommended best practices, which I think you should follow.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Is it time to combine Serverless and SaaS?
Hard agree that any new SaaS company should definitely consider serverless so that it can rapidly iterate and scale quickly. There are some good justifications in here as well as a link to the AWS Serverless SaaS Workshop.

Automate Lambda Monitoring and Error Reporting through in-house AWS services
There are lots of ways to monitor Lambda functions and serverless apps, but Zain Amjad shows you how to build your own simple reporting tool.

Managing Unconfirmed Users in AWS Cognito with a Lambda Function: A Step-by-Step Guide
I heard a rumor that AWS Cognito is getting some much needed upgrades soon, but in case this isn’t one of them, Akshat Tamrakar has you covered.

AWS Lambda Handler Cookbook – A Serverless Service Template
Ran Isenberg’s Python serverless service template that implements best practices for AWS Lambda, Serverless CI/CD, and AWS CDK in one template is now available on ServerlessLand.com

Using events to migrate from legacy architectures & Bounded context with event architectures
David Boyne shares two more excellent bite-sized lessons to level up your EDA game.

Necessary Configuration For AWS SQS Queues
Awesome tutorial by Amirhossein Soltani that covers all the SQS queue configurations you need to know in order to tune your application.

ChatGPT Is My New Personal Trainer
I didn’t know Allen Helton was a fitness guy, but if you want to give your serverless skills a workout, check out how he used serverless and ChatGPT to auto-generate his workout schedules.

How to handle serverful resources when using ephemeral environments
Yan Cui gives some tips for dealing with shared resources that don’t fit the isolated ephemeral stack model that we serverless developers really love.

About Amazon EventBridge Pipes
Awedis Keofteian shares a quick overview and demonstration of EventBridge Pipes. Nice little intro if you’ve yet to dig in.

Serverless Reads 🤓

This Month’s Reason Technology will Save the World: Energy Savings and Serverless Principles
Thomas Kräuter says serverless is part of the green IT revolution because it moves us towards more efficient consumption and makes financial and sustainable sense. Yep, makes sense to me.

Platform Engineering Teams Done Right
Who understands the concept of platform engineering better than the cloud architect who was at the company that essentially invented it? This post by Adrian Cockcroft is incredibly insightful and worth taking the time to not just read it, but really study it.

Containers and Serverless—Rivals or Cohorts?
I’ve never been a big fan of the Containers versus Serverless debate, especially since they both have their place in a modern cloud architecture. Omer Hamerman seems to agree, but I’m not sure I agree entirely with his conclusion.

The Rise of the Serverless Monoliths
Bit of a fun read from David Bottiau that walks through the evolution of meta-frameworks and managed databases.

Where are serverless devs spending their time?

I posted this poll on Twitter the other day mostly to satisfy my own curiosity. I have been seeing these random (unsourced) statistics that suggest modern developers spend only a fraction of their time writing actual application code. Instead, they seem to be either bogged down with meetings or tinkering with the cloud. This is a useful statistic, especially as someone who has been spending the vast majority of my time working on a developer productivity tool.

For all you #cloud/#serverless devs that regularly use #IaC like #cdk/#terraform/#SAM/etc. when building apps, what percentage of your time is spent researching, planning, configuring, instrumenting, deploying, and testing cloud infrastructure instead of writing application code?

— Jeremy Daly (@jeremy_daly) February 12, 2023

I may have worded the question awkwardly. Pitting application code versus time spent “working with the cloud” wasn’t necessarily what I was going for, but nonetheless, the results were interesting. I dig into this a bit more in this week's premium edition.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Building Modern Apps with Serverless & Feature Flags
Jessica Cregg and Julian Wood chat about the mindset and tools required to build scalable software without over-engineering a solution.

Amazon EventBridge Pipes: Enrichment and filter of events
Marcia Villalba has another excellent video that shows you how to use AWS SAM to setup EventBridge pipes that filter and enrich events.

Building Loosely Coupled & Scalable Backends Using AWS Serverless
In this vBrownBag tech talk, Lakindu Hewawasam discusses the proper way to scale serverless architectures using AWS services.

Visually design and build serverless applications | Serverless Office Hours
Ryan Coleman joins Julian Wood to demo the preview of the new AWS Application Composer.

Ready, Set, Cloud! Podcast #3 – Building A Better Developer Experience
Allen Helton welcomes Lars Jacobsson to discuss what makes for good and bad developer experiences and why it shouldn’t be an afterthought.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are a few more AWS announcements that caught my eye:

• AWS Config now supports 20 new resource types
• AWS Cloud Map increases default limit
• Amazon ElastiCache for Redis now supports auto scaling in six new regions
• AWS Elemental MediaConnect expands support for event notifications in Amazon EventBridge
• Amazon CloudFront now supports OAC with Elemental MediaStore origins
• Amazon EMR Serverless now supports large worker sizes to run more compute or memory intensive workloads
• Amazon EMR Serverless now supports HIPAA, HITRUST, SOC, and PCI DSS workloads
• Amazon VPC Announces General Availability of Resource Map in AWS Management Console

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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 Ben Moses (@BenMosesUK). Based in the UK, Ben is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS, helping customers to adopt and best use technology. He was part of the Serverless Panel Discussion at Serverless Summit last November and hosts “Step Up!” on the AWS Twitch channel along with past Off-by-none Serverless Star of the Week, Rebecca Kulidzan (@rkulidzan), recently discussing topics like EDA expressions, serverlesspresso and thinking asynchronously. Thank you for doing your part to help others grow their knowledge of serverless concepts, Ben!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Thanks for reading this week’s issue! By the way, if any of you are out in the Denver/Boulder area, I’ll be speaking at Gluecon on May 24th. If you’d like to join me, use the code “jeremy15” to get 15% off your registration fee.

Until next time,
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.