Off-by-none: Issue #230

April 18, 2023

Only have a few minutes? Check out this week's MOST POPULAR links as chosen by our email subscribers.

A Bedrock Serverless Experience?

In our previous issue, AWS Lambda got payload streaming support, S3 buckets got better default security, and the serverless database space race is picking up pace. This week, AWS jumps on the Generative AI bandwagon, CodeWhisper goes GA, and someone puts the servers back in serverless. Plus, we have lots of awesome content from the serverless community.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Probably the biggest news is that AWS announced Bedrock, their new generative AI service builder thing. Note that they say it provides a “serverless experience”, but given AWS’s recent confusion over what that even means, I’m not getting my hopes up. It’s still exciting, though. This space is moving insanely fast so if this service does what it promises, then we’ll hopefully see more sustainable AI services that don’t all start with “drop you OpenAI API key in here.”

AWS also announced that Amazon CodeWhisperer is now generally available. It’s free for individual use, which is great, but probably only a matter of time before it’s named in the class action lawsuit.

Also, Amazon DynamoDB now supports up to 50 concurrent table restores and AWS AppSync now supports publishing events to Amazon EventBridge, so that’s pretty cool.

In other cloud news, Thundra’s assets have been acquired, Grafbase introduced Edge Resolvers, and Supabase open-sourced the Supabase Edge Runtime to enable self-hosted Deno Functions. And speaking of Deno, they recently improved Node.js support with built-in modules, package.json, dynamic imports and worker compilation.

SST released OpenNext 1.0 and announced it with this video. Seriously, the attention to detail is to be applauded.

And for those of you that want to put the servers back in serverless, Aidan Steele created serverful just for you. 😂

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Energise Yourself With Express Step Functions
Lee Priest gives a great overview and walkthrough of the benefits of Express Workflows in AWS Step Functions.

No execution logs on AWS Express workflow?
And speaking of Express Workflows, Maxime Vivier shows you how to enable execution logs for them.

Serverless testing is not complicated. It just requires some effort
Daniele Frasca shares the process he uses to test serverless applications.

A Journey into Serverless and Handling Step Function Failures
Andreea Merariu explains how she enabled the ability to capture execution errors without exposing sensitive customer data in CloudWatch.

Building a Lightning-Fast Serverless Blog on AWS with SvelteKit (Part 4)
Depascale Matteo has an excellent series that lays out a ton of optimizations for speeding up a frontend app hosted with AWS serverless tech. And seriously, getting rid of CORS is something worth looking at.

Testing Step Function workflows Locally
I won’t hold the fact that Benjamen Pyle is “unapologetically a fan of local development” against him, for most, it’s the only efficient option. In this post, he explains what’s possible locally with Step Functions.

Migrating a Web App to AWS Lambda with Lambda Web Adapter
Efi Merdler-Kravitz reminds us of the Lambda Web Adapter that lets you run a bunch of different frameworks on Lambda directly. I’m not a huge fan, but it might work for you.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Choreography and Orchestration using AWS Serverless
Yusuf Mayet gives us a practical example of when to use choreography versus orchestration with serverless micoservices.

Lessons learned from making a SaaS completely serverless
Kevin Martin Jose is critical of the serverless dev experience (justifiably), as well as DynamoDB and Cold Starts (perhaps less justifiably). But it’s still a familiar story that I hear from devs all the time. Also, in a fast moving space like serverless, it means lots of outdated and often inaccurate information adds to the confusion.

Zero to Serverless Car Insurance – Part 2
Part 2 of Matthew Wilson’s team’s serverless journey. This post focuses on some optimizations, including going Lambda-less where possible.

WebAssembly: The Ultimate Guide
Not sure if you’re interested in this, but I’ve been following along quite closely. If you’re not quite sure why, reading this might help.

Are You Ready for This? Top 5 Earth-Shattering Pros and Cons of AWS CDK
Yan Cui does a deep dive on the effects of using the AWS CDK in different types of organizations. There are lots of good things (reusability and standardization with constructs is great), but for me, the lack of opinionation introduces too many opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot. That and generated resource ownership. 😐

LocalStack: Why Local Development for Cloud Workloads Makes Sense
Corey Quinn evolved his thinking on local development. I think his arguments make sense given how providers like AWS have designed their services, but that doesn’t make it right.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Amazon CodeWhisperer – Improve developer productivity using machine learning (ML)
Marcia Villalba walks you through set up and gives you a quick overview of how to use AWS’s new Copilot-like tool.

Advanced Event-driven Architectures at the LEGO Group • GOTO 2022
Sarah Hamilton’s excellent presentation from GOTO 2022 where she talks about the advanced EDA patterns used at The LEGO Group, including data processing, data orchestration and cross-domain communication.

Visually build Serverless apps with AWS Application Composer
Arshard Zackeriya and Jones Zachariah Noel N talk about AWS Application Composer and how it can help you build serverless applications with the best practices in mind.

New from AWS 🆕

• Amazon EC2 Inf2 instances, optimized for generative AI, are now generally available
• AWS Lambda supports Maximum Concurrency for Amazon SQS as an event source in AWS GovCloud (US)
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) provides ODBC driver to connect from BI tools
• AWS Glue launches new capability to monitor usage of Glue resources
• Amazon Redshift enhances string query performance by up to 63x
• Amazon Rekognition launches Face Liveness to deter fraud in facial verification
• AWS WAF supports larger request body inspections for Amazon CloudFront distributions
• AWS Lambda adds support for Node.js 18 in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
• AWS Lambda now supports SnapStart for Java functions in 6 additional regions
• AWS WAF increases web ACL capacity units limits
• AWS IoT Core announces general availability for MQTT5 Shared Subscriptions and new CloudWatch metrics
• Amazon EFS now supports up to 10 GiB/s of throughput

Serverless Tools 🛠

jb41/lambdapi – Serverless runtime environment tailored for code produced by LLMs. Automatic API generation from your code, support for multiple programming languages, and integrated file and database storage solutions.

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

Saturday night thoughts … LLM’s like ChatGPT will make frameworks like CDK, Pulumi, Serverless, SAM etc redundant. Why bother to learn a framework that generates Cloudformation (or Terraform), when you can get it generated for you using an LLM? ~Ant Stanley

There were some interesting responses to this post by Ant, especially around the notion of resource ownership. I think there are powerful use cases for LLMs to generate boilerplate and specific configurations for you, but you still own the resources that it ultimately creates. If you don’t understand those, or why they are being used, I think that’s a recipe for disaster. Now, a system that interfaces directly with the cloud provider and can manage the services for you? That sounds like the more powerful trajectory to me.

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 Aaron Francis (@aarondfrancis). Aaron is a developer educator at PlanetScale. Among his many projects, you can find him building a software component company along with Colleen Schnettler, and sharing a free MySQL for Developers video course that’s a “deep dive into practical topics for developers.” He also co-hosts the The Hammerstone Podcast and Framework Friends. Thank you for your many contributions to helping developers everywhere, Aaron!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Another busy week with lots of stuff happening in the serverless ecosystem. I’m also curious to see how this Amazon Bedrock and Titan stuff shapes up. There is so much happening with AI right now that it’s hard to keep up, but the intersection of conversational programming, AI, and serverless could be an intriguing mix. Interesting times we’re living in!

Take care,
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.