Off-by-none: Issue #231

April 25, 2023

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Blue checks or Bluesky? ✔️

In our previous issue, AWS jumped on the Generate AI bandwagon, CodeWhisper went GA, and someone put the servers back in serverless. This week, AWS Lambda (finally) gets Python 3.10, CodeCatalyst goes GA, and we think about value metrics. Plus, we’ve got loads of serverless content from the community.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

AWS announced that AWS Lambda added support for Python 3.10. It’s great to see this finally happen, but as others pointed out, the delay in getting here is rather concerning.

AWS SAM CLI announced local testing support for API Gateway Lambda authorizers, which will be helpful, I guess, but seems a bit counterintuitive to the efforts being made by SAM Accelerate.

They also announced Amazon GuardDuty support for AWS Lambda. Integrated security tools is a good thing. A bit more context here.

And, AWS announced the general availability of Amazon CodeCatalyst (along with a new Dev Environment dashboard in preview). I know some people who are excited about this, but I can’t say I’m one of them.

If you’re a PHP fan, make sure you sign up for Matthieu Napoli’s Serverless PHP newsletter. Matthieu is the authority on serverless PHP, so might as well go straight to the source.

In other cloud news, my startup, Ampt, introduced Regions support to let you deploy serverlessly to one of six regions (so far), plus we had some other updates and improvements.

And finally, last week, Momento launched the Momento Console which allows you to manage your caches, create access keys, and even query and insert items right from your web browser. I’ve been using Momento quite a bit lately and this just made the experience so much better. There’s also a video walk through from Kirk Kirkconnell that gives you a great overview.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Serverless Asynchronous REST APIs on AWS
Zied Ben Tahar walks you through a popular serverless architecture for implementing long-running tasks behind an API.

The Serverless Toolbox – Tools To Build Serverless Apps Easier
Allen Helton shared his serverless toolbox, giving us four helpful, prebuilt use cases to add to our serverless projects.

Optimize your Serverless architectures with event filtering
Mohammed Izzy explains why event filtering makes sense and shows you how to implement it across a number of AWS event sources.

Maximizing Efficiency: A Guide to Cost-Optimizing Your DynamoDB Population
Danylo Halaiko shares some tips on calculating (and thinking about) DynamoDB costs when populating data.

Secure Your Media Files by Removing Metadata with AWS Lambda
Have you ever looked at the metadata stored in an image? There is a lot of info in there that you likely want to strip out.

Best Practices for Building Robust and Secure AWS Lambda Functions
Informative white paper from Guillermo Caserotto, Benjamin Calace, and Alex Naumchuk.

Learn How to Write AWS Lambda Functions with Three Architecture Layers
Ran Isenberg has another great piece that teaches you how and why to separate your concerns when building serverless applications.

Serverless Reads 🤓

How AWS and Serverless Revived Our MVP Development Journey
Fun piece by Marko Djakovic that puts the requirements of MVPs into perspective and gives some advice around scope creep as well.

Solving the serverless cloud cost conundrum
Will Kelly gives some tips for optimizing serverless costs. I agree that costs at “scale” can potentially become an issue, but a lot of this can be premature optimizations.

How Kubernetes And Kafka Will Get You Fired
This is a members only article, but I had to share it. Jan Kammerath makes a lot of good points. There are so many better things to spend your time on.

Zero to Serverless Car Insurance – Part 3
Matthew Wilson continues with his series on adopting serverless, this time focusing on encouraging the Serverless mindset and convincing developers that writing less code is actually a good thing!

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Beginner’s Guide to DynamoDB with AWS CDK: Step-by-Step Tutorial for provisioning NoSQL Databases
Marcia Villalba provides a step-by-step guide that walks you through how to use DynamoDB deployed with the AWS CDK.

Ready, Set, Cloud! Podcast – Episode #8
Allen Helton chats with Matt Martz to discuss whether SAM or CDK is the better choice. It’s a nuanced discussion and worth a listen.

What the Heck is Edge Computing?
Austen Gil gives a pretty good overview of what Edge computing is, how it compares to other types of compute, and when it makes sense to use it.

Serverless Craic Ep44 Can Wardley Maps predict the future?
David, Mark and Michael talk about some of the Wardley Mapping predictions we’ve seen materialize over the last few years, and why it might be worth incorporating future predictions into your strategies.

MySQL for Developers Course — PlanetScale
Aaron Francis (last week’s Serverless Star) has an excellent free course on MySQL. With serverless database services like PlanetScale getting better and better, folks might need to brush up on their skills.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are a few more AWS announcements you might want to check out:

• Amazon RDS events now include tags for filtering and routing
• AWS WAF Captcha launches JavaScript API support
• AWS Amplify supports Push Notifications for mobile and cross platform apps
• AWS Amplify Flutter announces general availability for web and desktop support
• AWS Glue Crawlers now support creating partition indexes
• Amazon Comprehend improves accuracy of document classification using layout data
• Amazon Redshift announces general availability of Dynamic Data Masking
• Amazon EMR Serverless adds job-level billed resources for efficient cost management
• AWS Systems Manager now supports AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) applications

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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 Hamilton (@serverlesssarah). Sarah is a Software Engineer at the LEGO Group and an AWS Community Builder as well as an AWS Certified Solutions Architect. She was featured on Episode 136 of the Serverless Chats podcast, has spoken at numerous conferences on topics such as Advanced Event-Driven Architectures and, as a matter of fact, is speaking this week at the Serverless Architecture Conference in London on the topic of DevOps and Serverless. Thank you, Sarah, for sharing your wealth of serverless knowledge with others!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Another week another Twitter fiasco. I’ve always loved Twitter and I plan on continuing to use it as long as I’m still getting some value. I did do the whole Mastodon thing (you can find me here), though I honestly am not a big fan. I also recently joined Bluesky (I’m @jeremydaly.com, which is pretty cool). So far it seems quite good, but that could be because it’s not overrun by bots just yet. I’m hoping they open it up to everyone soon.

See you 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.