Off-by-none: Issue #225

March 14, 2023

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The weary serverless traveler ✈️

In our previous issue, I taught serverless to kangaroos, Neptune Serverless lowered its minimum NCUs, and the SAM CLI added Rust build support. This week, AWS Application Composer goes GA, we get some new heroes, and serverless PHP reaches another milestone. Plus, we have lots of awesome content from the serverless community.

I just got back from ServerlessDays ANZ in Melbourne, Australia late yesterday evening, so after 26 hours and close to 11,000 miles of travel, I still have some recovering to do. The Aussie Serverless Community is absolutely amazing, and I can’t thank the organizing committee enough for making this trip possible! Eric Johnson and I tried to do a live stream from the conference, but due to some technical constraints, we had to have a bit of fun instead. Tune in this Thursday for the real episode.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

There were plenty of AWS announcements recently, including the news that AWS Application Composer is now generally available. There have been plenty of folks talking about this, but here’s the official post by Channy Yun.

Mountpoint for Amazon S3, a high performance open source file client is now in alpha. James Bornholt et all give us the inside story on what it’s for and how to use it.

You can now use S3 Object Lambda with Amazon CloudFront to tailor content for end users. Danilo Poccia explains why this is super powerful.

Amazon DynamoDB now supports table deletion protection, letting you protect your tables from accidental (or intentional) deletion via the API.

Amazon Redshift Serverless announced a lower data warehouse base capacity configuration, dropping the minimum to 8 RPUs instead of 32 RPUs. This means that you can pay as little as $3 per hour (billed by the second) to run your queries. Unlike some other recent AWS “serverless” products, Amazon Redshift Serverless actually scales to zero and only charges you for compute when your cluster is active. Perhaps some other teams could learn from this?

And S3 turns 17 years old today, and AWS is celebrating during its AWS Pi Day 2023.

AWS also announced a new batch of AWS Heroes, including Serverless Hero Aidan Steele from Melbourne, Australia and Data Hero Wendy Wong from Sydney, Australia!

In other news, Bref 2.0 was released! According to the post, Bref has been installed more than 2 million times and powers more than 10 billion Lambda executions every month. That’s pretty impressive. Congrats to Matthieu and everyone that contributed to this.

And finally, GPT-4 has been released. Yay, I guess. If you haven’t watched the latest episode of South Park, it might add some perspective.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Here is what you should know about the AWS Application Composer Service
Govind Kumar gives us an overview of this new service as well as its advantages and limitations.

Service Discovery for Serverless Microservices on AWS
Useful post from Jason Butz that explores a few options for implementing service discovery for your serverless apps.

Why Serverless Is Inherently More Secure Than Containers
JV Roig makes several important points about why serverless holds a number of security advantages over a container-based solution.

SQS Partial failures
Super cool visuals by Marcin Sodkiewicz in this primer on SQS and how to deal with different types of failures.

Evaluate Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 for your provisioned Aurora clusters
I don’t love the pricing, but by all accounts Aurora Serverless v2 is a solid product worth looking at if you have highly variable RDBMS workloads.

Serverless Storage
Kristi Perreault outlines the different serverless storage solutions available on AWS and what they’re good for.

Deep dive in EventBridge Pipes
EventBridge Pipes are very cool, and Rahul Grover explains why.

Top things you should avoid when building with AWS Lambda & Top best practices you should follow when building with AWS Lambda
George Mao shares two posts worth of thoughts on the best way to build apps with Lambda, and some things to avoid.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Guide to Serverless & Lambda Testing – Part 2 – Testing Pyramid
Ran Isenberg shows you how to write tests for your serverless service, complete with plenty of tips and tricks, along with his serverless adaptation of the standard testing pyramid.

Use EventBridge to handle API requests
Joris Conijn shares a quick tip on how wiring API Gateway to EventBridge can be super effective for the right use cases.

SNS to Step Functions via EventBridge Pipes with CDK
Benjamen Pyle shows you how to update some “legacy serverless” code in your applications using EventBridge Pipes to simplify the process.

Self-healing Serverless App with Lambda Destinations and EventBridge
Pubudu Jayawardana shares a method for conditionally redriving failed messages based on the error. Definitely worth a look.

Passwordless Authentication made easy with Cognito: a step-by-step guide
I’m not a big fan of Cognito, but Yan Cui shows you how to push it past one of its limitations.

Upload Large files in chunks to AWS-S3 using Nodejs
Asim Hafeez shows you how to use Multer, the aws-sdk, and express.js to upload files to AWS S3 in a more streamlined and efficient manner.

Serverless Reads 🤓

In defense of serverless
Hendrik Nehnes counters DHH’s recent nonsensical rant about being fooled by serverless. Lots of good points in here.

How we saved 90% of costs by moving from AWS Lambda to AWS Fargate
Emre Kaya’s experience is not unique and, depending on your use case, switching parts of your app to containerized services can make a lot of sense. I probably would have used App Runner instead (to get the free load balancer), but ECS worked out just fine for his team.

Building a Serverless Post Scheduler For Static Websites
Allen Helton shares another post this week (his 64th in a row!) about how he used serverless to implement a static site post scheduler (so he could finally take a vacation).

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Choreography vs Orchestration: Which is Best for Your Distributed Application?
Marcia Villalba does a deep dive on the differences between these two patterns and explores when to use them and their tradeoffs.

Serverless in 2023 – Thoughtworks Technology Podcast
Mike Mason and Prem Chandrasekaran are joined by Mike Roberts to discuss the current state of serverless, how it’s understood today, and the impacts and challenges it has for both businesses and developers.

Real-World Serverless podcast – Episode 73
Yan Cui chats with Vijai Ramcharan about his experience with introducing serverless at NN, a 175 years-old financial services company based in the Netherlands.

Ready, Set, Cloud Podcast! – Episode #5
Allen Helton discusses improving Diversity, Equality and Inclusion in tech with Kristi Perreault, AWS Serverless Hero and Principal Software Engineer in Cloud Architecture & Engineering Enablement at Liberty Mutual.

Serverless Craic Ep42 – ServerlessDays Belfast
The Serverless Craic team discusses the recently held ServerlessDays Belfast conference. This year’s theme was “The Reality and Fantasy of Serverless, Building Serverless Teams and Making it Real.” I’m looking forward to watching the videos of the talks!

Lambda cookbook with Python – Serverless Office Hours
AWS Community Builder Ran Isenberg joins Julian Wood to show the AWS Lambda Handler Cookbook for Python.

Succeeding with serverless – Serverless Office Hours
David Anderson, Mark McCann, and Michael O’Reilly join Julian Wood to show you how you can effectively harness technology to drive innovation and power change in your organization.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are few more recent AWS announcements:

• Amazon SES adds email receiving metrics for better visibility and control
• Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports OpenSearch version 2.5
• Amazon Route 53 Resolver endpoints for hybrid cloud announces IPv6 support
• Amazon Neptune announces support for Slow Query Logs
• Amazon Neptune introduces graph summary API
• Amazon Redshift now supports 200K tables in a single cluster
• Amazon MQ now supports RabbitMQ version 3.10.17
• AWS Data Exchange for Amazon S3 is now generally available
• Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose now supports data delivery to Elastic

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

Did you know that the Australian Open digital scores are powered by serverless? Now you do!

Wow I never knew this cool fact . Impressive #Serverless

— Darshit Pandya (@serverless99) March 12, 2023

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

March 16, 2023 – Sessions with AWS SAM & Friends: All about AMPT

March 23, 2023 – Sessions with AWS SAM & Friends: All about Wing

March 30, 2023 – Sessions with AWS SAM & Friends: SAM Accelerate deep dive

May 6, 2023 – AWS Community Day Turkey

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 Peter Hanssens (@petehanssens). Peter is an AWS Serverless Hero and part of the organizing team for ServerlessDays ANZ which took place just last week. When he’s not organizing serverless conferences and data engineering meetups, he’s running two cloud consultancies, Cloud Shuttle and cloudseeder. As he likes to say, “Cloud Shuttle transports you to the cloud and cloudseeder makes you effective there.” Thank you, Peter, for lending your time and talents to make ServerlessDays ANZ a success!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I’ve been lucky enough to visit with the serverless communities in a number of countries now, and it is absolutely amazing just how strong and vibrant all of them are. Passionate people are what drive serverless innovation and every time I get the chance to witness that passion, I’m reminded why I love the idea of serverless and what it enables. We still have more to do, but never am I more excited by the possibilities of the future than after a trip like this.

Here’s to the future,
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.