Off-by-none: Issue #226

March 21, 2023

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Has "serverless" become meaningless? 🤔

In our previous issue, AWS Application Composer went GA, we got some new AWS heroes, and serverless PHP reached another milestone with the launch of Bref 2.0. This week, we get Amazon Linux 2023, Apache EventMesh graduates to a Top-Level Project, and we explore the meaninglessness of serverless. Plus, we’ve got plenty of great content from the community.

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Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Last week, AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Linux 2023. Starting with this release, AWS now promises a new major release every 2 years with up to 5 years of support. I hope they can keep that promise given all the recent layoffs. 😢

Also, the Apache Software Foundation announced a new top-level project called Apache® EventMesh. It’s billed as a new generation serverless event middleware for building distributed event-driven applications. It’s built around the CloudEvents specification (which seems to have been ignored by at least one major cloud provider), so definitely something to keep an eye on.

If you missed ServerlessDays ANZ from a couple of weeks ago, Steve Coochin has provided us with a nice Serverless Days ANZ 2023 recap.

And finally, SST v2 is now available (it actually launched a few weeks ago, not sure how I missed that!). Anyway, it looks like Dax and the team have put a significant amount of work into this new version to deliver a really great developer experience for your AWS serverless apps.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Serverless & Well Architected and Serverless Orchestration
Kristi Perreault has been quite prolific lately, churning out some amazing bits of serverless content.

The Distance from Data to You in Edge Computing
Interesting post by Paul Scanlon that explores the relationship between your browser, the edge, and the backing database used to serve content.

How to test AWS Serverless Microservices – the proper way?
Daniel Bot shares some thoughts on different testing strategies for serverless. I’m not 100% sure this is the “proper way”, but at least it’ll give you some good reasons why you should test and ideas for how to do it.

Lambda Invoke: The Minimal Loveable API
Dave Hall shares a pattern for exposing an API-like interface for Lambda Functions to other internal services. If you need to call another Lambda internally, then using the SDK is certainly more efficient, but I try to avoid synchronous calls here in favor of async workflows when possible.

Benchmarking the AWS SDK
AJ Stuyvenberg spent some time testing the performance impact on Lambda functions when using different versions and configurations of the AWS SDK. I think the takeaway is that the less code you need to parse, the faster your cold starts will be.

Watch for Scalability Boundaries
What happens when external services don’t scale as well as your other serverless services? Michael Walmsley calls these “scalability boundaries” and explains how to watch out for them.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

There are always so many amazing serverless tutorials each week that it’s really hard to pick only a few to share. Here are some of my favorites:

Serverless voice with Amazon Polly
Jimmy Dahlqvist has a great walkthrough of how he enabled Amazon Polly to read all his blog posts for you.

Implementing Magic Links with Amazon Cognito: A Step-by-Step Guide
Yan Cui continues on his mission to show us that Amazon Cognito is less bad than we all think it is. Plus he shares a helpful use case.

Handling Large AWS SQS Messages Using Amazon S3
Fatima Medlij shares a simple pattern for incorporating S3 to store SQS messages that exceed the 256KB payload size limit.

Implementing an event-driven serverless story generation application with ChatGPT and DALL-E
Absolutely brilliant idea from David Boyne, and probably one of the better uses of generative AI I’ve seen. 😀

Combining Node.js and Python in a Single AWS Lambda Function
I’m not suggesting you do this, but Andrea Falzetti’s solution here could probably be useful in some real life use cases.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Serverless in 2023
Mike Roberts shares a number of thoughts about the current state of serverless including the “Enterprise-ification of Serverless” and whether or not companies will embrace the “serverless-enabled event-driven renaissance.” Lots of great insights in here.

Serverless take the wheel
Speaking of calling things serverless, I shared my ramblings about why giving up control is a good thing.

How to go broke developing on AWS: The S3
We’re laughing with you Stefan Sarmir, because you’re not a true serverless developer unless you’ve created an infinite Lambda loop. That’s why that “Throttle” (aka “Panic”) button is there.

Exploring the Emerging Cloud Development Tooling Landscape
Yehuda Cohen wrote an excellent piece that does a deep dive on the different tools and services in the cloud development tooling space. This boils down years of research into a 30 minute read. Amazing.

Software Engineering is about trade-offs: make sure you have options! (architecture patterns comparison)
This is a fun read from Davide de Paolis that points out one of life’s fundamental truths: there’s always more than one way to solve a problem. Explore your options, but don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis.

The Meaning(lessness) of Serverless
Ben Kehoe weighs in on the recent reemergence of the “what is serverless” debate. I’m with him- it’s not worth getting worked up over marketers coopting the term, but that doesn’t mean we can’t hold cloud providers to a higher standard.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Sessions with SAM & Friends: All about AMPT.
Eric Johnson and I finally got a chance to talk about Ampt and run through a demo. We just launched the private beta, so make sure you get on the waitlist!

Building and Operating a Pretty Big Storage System (My Adventures in Amazon S3)
Andy Warfield shares his experience building storage at the scale of S3. This is a fascinating talk for anyone interested in how Amazon builds and operates these cloud-scale services.

DynamoDB Single Table Design: Simplify Your Code and Boost Performance with Table Design Strategies
Marcia Villalba explains what single table design is and explores the benefits it can bring to your projects that use DynamoDB.

Serverless Craic Ep43 Wardley Mapping 101
The Serverless Craic team tries to help you understand Wardley Mapping, including sharing a new Wardley Mapping canvas by Ben Mosior that shares six steps on how to map.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are a few additional announcements from AWS that might interest you:

• AWS CodeBuild now supports a small GPU machine type
• Amazon GuardDuty RDS Protection for Amazon Aurora is now generally available
• AWS Database Migration Service now supports S3 data validation
• Amazon CloudWatch Logs adds support for new Amazon VPC Flow Logs metadata
• Announcing cross-account support for Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points
• Amazon OpenSearch Service introduces security analytics
• Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) now supports client-side timestamps

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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 Sarah Young (@_sarahyo). Sarah is a Senior Cloud Security Advocate at Microsoft. I recently had the privilege of hearing her talk entitled “Serverless Security Essentials” at Serverless Days ANZ (one of my favorite presentations of the conference, btw). Since 2021, she has been an Ambassador for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation which “provides support, oversight and direction for fast-growing, cloud native projects.” As a fellow advocate of the importance of security in serverless, thank you for all you do, Sarah!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I think I’m finally over my jet lag from ServerlessDays ANZ, but I would absolutely do it again in a heartbeat. The organizing team shared some amazing photos of the event if you want to look through and get a massive case of FOMO. Looking forward to seeing the videos of the talks when those come out.

Also, we’ve been a bit quiet at Ampt for the last few months, but that’s because we’ve been working hard to launch the private beta. Now that we’ve reached this milestone, I hope to be creating a lot more content around serverless, developer experience, and this new emerging space. Exciting times ahead.

Until 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.