Off-by-none: Issue #223

February 28, 2023

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Don't be fooled by serverless! 🙀

In our previous issue, AWS added more account lifecycle controls, App Runner learned to share more, and a new plugin let you use serverless with bash. This week, Google Cloud helps you automatically reduce cold starts, we get some practical EventBridge Pipes advice, and we point out some flaws in anti-serverless arguments. Plus, we’ve got tons of great content the serverless community. Let’s get started!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

There were two AWS announcements that stood out to me this week. The first was that AWS SAM connectors now supports multiple destinations. I was a bit critical of SAM connectors when they were first released, but they’ve improved quite a bit, and this simple syntax consolidation is another step in the right direction.

Also, AWS App Runner now supports HTTP to HTTPS redirects. Again, this is a small improvement, but incredibly important especially when coupled with custom domains. I really like this service, and I think it could become a foundational serverless service for AWS. There’s still some work to do, but it’s getting there.

Perhaps not the most exciting news, but I saw this press release that said NordLocker is no longer in “beta”. What makes this interesting is the fact that they moved to a completely serverless architecture. Not that you needed to be convinced, but I like serverless success stories.

In other cloud news, Richard Seroter mentioned on Twitter that Google Cloud now lets you minimize cold starts with Recommender. This is kind of like Lambda Power Tuning, just built in to the service. Very cool.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Event-Driven Architectures vs. Event-Based Compute in Serverless Applications
Alex DeBrie makes a bit of a nuanced distinction here, but I get his point. It’s important to consider how these “event” services interact with compute, but if you understand the choices you make, I’m not entirely sure the nuance really matters.

AWS Performance Testing: Ensuring Smooth Migration to Serverless
Interesting post by Dimcho Karakashev that outlines the process and emphasizes the importance of stress testing your serverless architecture.

Amazon EventBridge: The missing piece to your app
Yep, EventBridge is awesome. Jones Zachariah Noel N explains why.

Avoiding the Serverless Workflow Antipattern
You know what else is awesome? Step Functions. Matt Morgan looks at some common serverless workflow patterns and how they can be improved with Step Functions.

Choosing the Right AWS Messaging Service for Your Application
There are a lot of messaging services on AWS, but as Steven Coochin outlines in this post, each choice has ramifications based on a number of factors (including cost).

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

EventBridge Pipes: A comparison before and after
Antonio Lagrotteria shows you how to trigger Step Functions from SQS with and without EventBridge Pipes.

Say Goodbye to Your CDK Stacks: A Guide to Self-Destruction
Matt Martz shares a method for automatically cleaning up CDK stacks.

Solving the DynamoDB EventBridge Pipes Problem
Jason Wadsworth points out that EventBridge Pipes don’t support full JSON paths, so he needed to add in a Step Function to properly transform DynamoDB lists.

Guide to AWS Serverless & Lambda Testing Best Practices – Part 1
Ran Isenberg shares some practical guidelines for testing serverless services and Lambda functions.

Manage EventBridge Schedules using Step Functions
Pubudu Jayawardana shares a clever method for cleaning up your completed EventBridge Schedules after they fire.

The biggest problem with EventBridge Scheduler and how to fix it
Yan Cui shares another method for cleaning up EventBridge Schedules, but using Lambda Destinations instead. Also very clever.

Improving a Serverless App To Cross-Post Blogs
Matt Martz took Allen Helton’s already awesome app and made it even better.

There were so many good tutorials this week! Here are few more rapid fire style:

• Mastering Serverless Architecture: How to Chain Lambda Functions in AWS for High-Performance Applications by Tait Hoglund
• Build a serverless Telegram bot on GCP with Cloud Run by Tait Hoglund
• Integrating Lambda to send and receive messages from SQS and SNS: Part 1 & Part 2 by Aalok Trivedi
• AWS Step Functions in Serverless Framework by Neelaka Rupun
• Transcribing audio uploaded to S3 by Edgar Roman
• NoSQL data Modeling by Sagar Arora
• My journey through Data Modeling with DynamoDB by Muhammad Abutahir

Serverless Reads 🤓

Implementing DORA4 with Serverless Technology at sennder (Part Two)
Miguel Fontanilla follows up on his first excellent article with another one.

Automate Your Life and Save Time By Going Serverless
Allen Helton shares all the ways that serverless can help you save time with automation, leaving you more time to do other amazing things.

Benefits of a serverless CMS – White paper
This is just a great white paper by the folks over at Webiny. Lots of really interesting research in here about the benefits of a serverless platform.

Oops, You Wrote a Database
Fun read by Shawn “swyx” Wang that will hopefully get you to realize the tremendous amount of value that existing, full-featured solutions can bring.

Are we being fooled by the promise of serverless?

DHH has shared another gem with all of us. Don’t be fooled by serverless he warns! The “rental math” doesn’t make sense. “There’s no magic that can change the fundamental fact that if you need all the computing cycles of a computer, you ought to own that computer.” In this week's premium edition, we discuss the flaws in his argument.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Refactoring to Serverless | Serverless Office Hours
Gregor Hohpe and Sindhu Pillai join Julian Wood to go through how serverless is more than just a run-time for your code.

AWS App Runner – Demo hosting a NodeJS app in the cloud directly from GitHub ( AWS CDK )
Marcia Villalba shows you how to grab an existing NodeJS app and host it in the cloud directly from Github.

They released some new GOTO Conference 2022 videos on YouTube, including these excellent ones:

• The Road To Event-Driven Architecture At LEGO.com • Sheen Brisals
• I Made Everything Loosely Coupled. Does My App Fall Apart? • Gregor Hohpe
• Best Practices to Design & Build Event-driven Applications • Marcia Villalba

Real-World Serverless podcast – Episode #73
In this episode, Yan speaks with Rowan Udell about mastering IAM.

Ready, Set, Cloud! podcast – Episode #4
Allen chats with Andres Moreno to explore the idea behind “first” mindsets and asks, “Can you be API-first and serverless-first?”

Building SaaS on AWS – Write your own serverless adventure with Momento
Can’t get enough of Allen Helton? Catch him and Momento CEO & Founder, Khawaja Shams, discussing how they leverage AWS to build their caching solution.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are a few more interesting AWS announcements:

• Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor is now generally available
• AWS App Runner introduces web application firewall (WAF) support for enhanced security
• Amazon Forecast now supports built-in holiday data for 251 countries to improve your forecasting accuracy
• Amazon Aurora Serverless v1 now supports customer configurable maintenance windows

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

March 10, 2023 – ServerlessDays ANZ 🗣️

June 7, 2023 – ServerlessDays Paris

June 22, 2023 – ServerlessDays Zurich

September 21, 2023 – ServerlessDays Cardiff

Serverless Star of the Week ⭐️

This week’s star is Ran Isenberg (@IsenbergRan). Ran is a Principal Software Architect at CyberArk where he designs SaaS platform services and oversees cross-teams and services integrations. He also regularly posts on his blog, Ran the Builder, where he shares about all things AWS Serverless. You probably notice we feature his posts in Off-by-none all the time (including this week!) He is also a regular contributor to and advocate of open-source projects. Thank you, Ran, for your commitment to supporting and enriching the serverless community!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I got some great ideas from all of you for my “Serverless = Developer Experience” talk that I’m putting together for ServerlessDay ANZ. If you haven’t shared your thoughts on what you love about the serverless developer experience, what you hate about it, and the one thing you’d change, please send them to me as soon as possible!

Have a great 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.