Off-by-none: Issue #224

March 7, 2023

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Serverless Down Under 🦘🇦🇺

In our previous issue, Google Cloud helped you automatically reduce cold starts, we got some practical EventBridge Pipes advice, and we pointed out some flaws in anti-serverless arguments. This week, I’m teaching serverless to kangaroos, Not-So-Serverless Neptune tries to redeem itself, and the SAM CLI gets a bit rusty. Plus, we’ve got some amazing content from the serverless community.

This week I’m hanging out in Melbourne and Sydney, getting a chance to explore these beautiful cities while also meeting members of the amazing Aussie serverless community. I’ve got the Sydney Serverless meetup on Wednesday, the Melbourne Serverless meetup on Thursday, then ServerlessDays ANZ on Friday. Lots going on this week, so this issue is a bit condensed, but still chockfull of serverless goodness. Enjoy!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

AWS announced that Amazon Neptune Serverless now scales down to 1 NCU to save costs. So instead of paying a minimum of $290 per month, you now only have to pay $116. Nice gesture though. 🙄

In other AWS news, AWS SAM CLI announced preview of Rust build support, AWS Lambda Powertools for .NET is now generally available, code scans for Lambda functions within Amazon Inspector is now in preview and AWS Lambda now supports Amazon DocumentDB change streams as an event source.

Joe Emison wrote a book called Serverless As a Game Changer: How to Get the Most Out of the Cloud. It’s available for pre-order, and I think you definitely want to buy it!

IaSQL enters beta, adding Multi-Region and Transactions to its unique approach to deploying to AWS using Infrastructure as SQL.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here are some excellent tutorials to keep you busy this week:

• Manage EventBridge Schedules using Step Functions (Part 2) by Pubudu Jayawardana
• Easily Find Deprecated Runtimes on Your Lambda Functions by Pierre Chollet
• Serverless AWS CDK Pipeline Best Practices & Patterns — Part 2 by Lee James Gilmore
• Running Eleventy Serverless On AWS Lambda@Edge by Gabi Dobocan
• AWS SAM Multi-Destination Connectors by Allan Chua
• Serverless Weather Reporting with AWS Step Functions and CDK by Danielle Heberling
• Serverless Lessons – Location Is Everything! by Allen Helton

Serverless Reads 🤓

Why companies fail on cloud? A perspective from a cloud consultant
Cagdas Ozbey is a cloud consultant that says hiring a cloud consultant will minimize your chances of failure in the cloud. But if you look past the self-promotion, there are some good points in here.

Can WebAssembly Solve Serverless’s Problems?
B. Cameron Gain says “vendor-lock in” is serverless’ biggest problem and that this is where WebAssembly – “at least in theory” – really shines. There are some holes in this argument, but I’ll leave it up to you to draw your own conclusions.

The Problem With Serverless — From a Serverless Addict
JV Roig says some might call him a “serverless nutjob” because he’s such a fan of serverless. And he doesn’t think “vendor lock-in” is the real problem.

The side effect of increasing developer responsibility
I wrote some ramblings about how adding more to a developer’s plate can become a forcing function for change.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

What is Amazon DynamoDB? What are the most important concepts? What are the indexes?
Marcia Villalba shares some of the most important concepts of DynamoDB and how to get started with it in your serverless projects.

EDA visually explained | Serverless Office Hours
Dave Boyne joins Eric Johnson to discuss the ServerlessLand EDA visuals collection (which is awesome), plus walks us through a bunch of EDA concepts and shows us the amazing story generator he built.

Another batch of GOTO Conference 2022 videos were released on YouTube, including these awesome ones that you don’t want to miss:

• Event Design & Event-first Development • David Boyne • GOTO 2022
• EDA in Practice: Building an eCommerce Platform at Cinch • Emily Shea & Toli Apostolidis
• Minimum Viable Migrations (MVMs): A Path to Cloud Native EDAs • Ben Ellerby

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some other interesting AWS announcements:

• Amazon MSK adds support for Apache Kafka version 3.3.2
• AWS Comprehend simplifies custom model retraining and management
• Amazon Kinesis Data Streams increases On-Demand write throughput limit to 1 GB/s
• Introducing Amazon Lightsail for Research
• Amazon Timestream now supports batch loading data
• Amazon EMR Serverless now supports application log encryption with Customer Managed Keys (CMK)
• AWS Step Functions Distributed Map is now available in more Regions
• AWS App Runner is now available in AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore, Sydney) and AWS Europe (Frankfurt) regions
• AWS Lambda now supports up to 10 GB of ephemeral storage for Lambda functions in 6 additional regions

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 David Anderson (@davidand393). David is a Cloud Architect at Globalisation Partners. He is also the author of The Value Flywheel Effect (a must read for any modern organization!) and contributor to The Serverless Edge. He led the organization and planning efforts for ServerlessDays Belfast which took place this past week. If you’ve never been to a ServerlessDays event, be sure to check out the website for an upcoming event. The organizers of these community events volunteer their time and talents for the betterment and education of serverless developers around the world. Thank you, David, for being a leader in the serverless community!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Thanks for reading this week’s issue. I’ll be back home next week!

G’day, mate (sorry, had to do it)!

– 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.