Off-by-none: Issue #229

April 11, 2023

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Serverless life is but a stream 🚣

In our previous issue, Amazon VPC Lattice went GA, Cloudflare workers got better Node.js support, and SSM Parameter Store was still the better choice. This week, AWS Lambda gets payload streaming support, S3 buckets get better default security, and serverless databases level up. Plus, we have some amazing serverless content from the community.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

AWS had some welcome news this past week when AWS Lambda introduced response payload streaming. This not only allows Lambda functions to progressively stream responses back to the client to reduce TTFB, but also allows you to exceed the standard 6MB payload limit. Julian Wood’s official AWS blog post goes into a lot more detail as well as calls out some of the limitations with API Gateway and ALBs.

Some on Twitter seemed a bit underwhelmed, but I think this is an important step to expanding serverless use cases, especially for many modern frontend frameworks (like them or not). For other helpful “getting started” pieces, check out Yan Cui’s excellent post on how to return large objects with AWS Lambda’s new Streaming Response and AJ Stuyvenberg’s Introducing AWS Lambda Response Streaming.

Response payload streaming in Lambda comes on the heels of Vercel’s recent announcement of serverless streaming. Also, Vercel joined the AWS Marketplace creating a tighter integration between the two.

In other AWS news, Amazon S3 is beginning to apply two security best practices to all new buckets by default. From this point forward, S3 Block Public Access and disabling S3 access control lists (ACLs) are now automatically applied, hopefully making S3 buckets a lot more secure. And one more bit of interesting news, AWS App Runner added 7 new compute configurations. I really like the direction of this service, so I get excited whenever there are new developments.

In other cloud news, Neon announced autoscaling for their Postgres offering, Honeycomb pocketed $50M in new funding, and SearchStax launched a new Serverless Solr Service.

We’ve also been quite busy at Ampt, recently introducing WebSockets and a handful of other updates. 🚀

Serverless Concepts 🏗

The Sky’s the Limit: Debating the Benefits of AWS Spending Restrictions
Yan Cui goes through the pros and cons of setting AWS spending limits. I totally agree that service outages should not be a consequence of strict spending controls and AWS Budget alerts are a great sanity check.

Developers Journey to AWS Lambda
Stephen Sennett walks you through five steps for optimizing your experience with building serverless applications with Lambda.

Exploring Aurora Serverless v2: Architecture, Scaling, High Availability, and Failover
There are a lot of serverless database options out there, but AWS’s Aurora Serverless is still a great choice for the right workloads. Satish Mishra gives us a high-level overview of how it works and when to choose it.

Optimizing Amazon API Gateway use: Strategies for Effective Usage Plans
Moudud Abu from the Lego Engineering team shares a number of strategies for choosing, implementing, and managing usage plans on your API Gateways.

Ensuring Serverless Success: A Guide to Service Level Agreement (SLA) Definitions and Guidelines
Ran Isenberg shares definitions, guidelines, and his approach to understanding SLA, SLI, SLO, RTO & RTP, and other related definitions in a serverless service context, including how you can estimate a serverless service’s availability.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Serverless API Gateway Federation
Lee Gilmore shares another amazing tutorial, this one on how to implement Amazon API Gateway as a proxy to federate multiple private API Gateways.

Connect your Telegram chatbot with Lambda Function to do something useful, like scraping websites
Full tutorial for extending Telegram with a chatbot built using a serverless architecture.

Create Point-to-Point Integrations Between DynamoDB and Lambda with Amazon EventBridge Pipes
Shreya Rajendran shares a great tutorial showing you the power of Amazon EventBridge Pipes.

Schedule AWS Lambda based on time zone with Serverless
Tie Liang shows you how to use the new EventBridge scheduler service to more accurately schedule tasks.

100 millions Lambda execution and guess our AWS $$$ Bill – GoLang
Rakesh Sanghvi shows you how they use golang to optimize the heck out of their Lambda functions and their AWS bill.

AppSync JavaScript Resolvers
Ion Scorobogaci shares the power of AppSync JavaScript Resolvers and when and how to implement them.

Building a tracker for gym class sign-up using the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM)
Iris Hunkeler has a great walk through of how she built a completely serverless system that interfaces with her local gym and checks for class availability.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Are Serverless Services Worth It?
Allen Helton gives his thoughts on whether or not introducing serverless services into your architecture is worth the tradeoffs. I get his point, but I think the benefits make this an easy decision.

Pain Points I Faced Using Serverless
Interesting read on some of the pain points the author encountered while trying to build out a serverless application. I think a lot of these are real and can significantly slow down serverless adoption.

Unleashing the Power of Serverless: Conquering the IT Kingdom The Game of Thrones Style
Samuel Ayinde Oluwasegun explains serverless to Game of Thrones fans. 😂

Intersection of Technology and People
Benjamen Pyle talks about why choosing serverless goes beyond just a simple technology decision.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Designing a DynamoDB Table in 4 Steps: From Entities to Access Patterns
Marcia Villalba teaches you how to design a single table for DynamoDB and how to model your data efficiently for maximum performance and scalability.

Ready, Set, Cloud! Podcast – Episode #7
Boris Tane and Thomas Ankcorn from Baselime join Allen Helton to discuss how they build software quickly without breaking things.

Real-World Serverless podcast – Episode #75
Yan Cui chats with Dax Raad about SST, the challenges of building an open-source community, and a whole lot more.

Serverless AI with ChatGPT and DALL-E | Serverless Office Hours
This is a truly brilliant episode! Dave Boyne, Developer Advocate at AWS, joins Eric Johnson to show us how he used ChatGPT and serverless services to built an AI service that generates unique bedtime stories for children.

New from AWS 🆕

Lots happening at AWS this past week. Here are a few announcements that caught my attention:

• Amazon RDS Optimized Reads now offers up to 2X faster queries on RDS for PostgreSQL
• Amazon Athena adds view support for external data sources
• Announcing updates to the AWS Well-Architected Framework
• AWS Well-Architected Framework strengthens prescriptive guidance
• Amazon GuardDuty Adds Three New Threat Detections to Alert Customers on Suspicious DNS Traffic
• AWS Firewall Manager adds support for six additional AWS WAF features
• Amazon S3 adds new visibility into object replication status
• AWS Glue visual ETL now supports new native Amazon Redshift capabilities
• Announcing general availability for macOS Support on Amplify Library for Swift
• Amazon CloudFront supports S3 Object Lambda Access Point origin
• Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is now available in additional AWS regions
• Amazon CodeCatalyst Dev Environments now supports GitHub repositories

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

April 20, 2023 – Serverless.LAB(meetup) #4 – Prague Edition

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 Luc van Donkersgoed (@donkersgood). Luc is a Lead Engineer at PostNL and has been an AWS Serverless Hero since 2021. He is also the author and creator of Bite-Sized Serverless, a website that offers over a dozen multi-level educational articles on the topic of AWS Serverless. You can find him regularly attending and speaking at serverless conferences in his native Netherlands and internationally. Thank you for your contributions to the serverless space, Luc!

Final Thoughts 🤔

So much going on in the serverless space lately. The Serverless Database Space Race continues to heat up with Neon and SearchStax raising the bar, plus, within the span of a week, streaming serverless payloads suddenly became widely available across multiple vendors. There is more amazing serverless stuff to come, and even though streaming support may be a niche use case for some, I’m excited to see what people are going to build with it!

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.