Off-by-none: Issue #235

May 23, 2023

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

Cloudflare is coming for you, AWS!

In our previous issue, AI got on everyone’s roadmap, we thought about DynamoDB costs, and we had a conversation about conversational programming. This week, we recap Cloudflare’s Developer Week, see lower latency from EventBridge, and get 7 hours of serverless innovation. Plus, we’ve got lots of awesome serverless content from the community.

I’m jumping on a plane in a few hours to head to GlueCon to give my talk on Reimagining the Cloud Developer Experience, so I’m going to try and make this (sorta) brief.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Last week was Cloudflare’s Developer Week, and let’s just say that a lot of stuff was announced! Some of the really exciting ones are the Cloudflare Secrets Store, Cloudflare Queues, and the new database integrations.

They also made quite a big deal about AI, which was a little buzzwordy for me, but still loaded with lots of useful capabilities. Here are a few other interesting posts to check out:

• D1: We turned it up to 11
• The S3 to R2 Super Slurper is now Generally Available
• Announcing connect() — a new API for creating TCP sockets from Cloudflare Workers
• Using LangChainJS and Cloudflare Workers together

I’m not sure AWS is quaking in their boots just yet, but obviously Cloudflare is making some pretty serious moves to compete with some of their core services. Even so, AWS keeps making their services better and the recent announcement of improved end-to-end latencies for Amazon EventBridge Event Buses is pretty big. According to the post, message delivery is now 80% faster, and it was already quite fast!

AWS also announced that they are retiring the AWS Documentation on GitHub. I think this is the right choice. While it’s nice to have community contributions to documentation, it shouldn’t become a bottleneck for internal review and deployment processes. Any don’t worry, you’ll still be able to complain about it, er, I mean, submit feedback.

In other news, PlanetScale is now available on Google Cloud Marketplace and CockroachDB Serverless now supports Microsoft Azure, multicloud deployments.

Also, Miguel A. Calles is launching his “AWS CDK Serverless Cookbook” eBook on Medium. He’s posted a few chapters already, so make sure to follow along.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

As always, there were plenty of amazing tutorials this week. Here are a few that you’ll definitely want to check out:

• Breaking Bad Practices with CDK Aspects by Matt Martz
• Caching with Momento and Golang by Benjamen Pyle
• A step-by-step guide to cross-account and cross-region events with EventBridge by Antonio Lagrotteria
• Using Plop to improve our Serverless Developer Experience by Lee Gilmore
• Level Up Your Blog With Writer Analytics and Text-to-Speech by Allen Helton
• Lambda@Edge & DynamoDB for React Rich Social Media Sharing by Andy O’Sullivan
• Deploy Serverless Generative AI on AWS Lambda with OpenLLaMa by Sean Bailey
• Building URL Shortener from Scratch: Part 1 by Shrishty Chandra
• Lambda Optimizations 101: Everything You Need to Know by Matan Cohen Abravanel

Serverless Reads 🤓

Economists Show AI Bringing Positive Impact to Workplaces
David Cassel has a great piece that shows how recent research found that AI isn’t eliminating jobs, but instead is increasing worker productivity, improving customer sentiment, and reducing employee turnover.

History and future of Infrastructure as Code
Adam Ruka discusses the major phases of IaC and how the “Fourth generation” (known as Infrastructure from Code) is attempting to solve the current problems of primitive granularity and the bifurcation of infrastructure and application code.

DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity
Great paper co-authored by Abi Noda, Margaret-Anne Storey, Nicole Forsgren, and Michaela Greiler about how to measure and improve the developer experience.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

AWS On Air ft. AWS Serverless Innovation Day
7 hours of awesome serverless talks and information!

Testing Serverless Applications | Serverless Office Hours
Dan Fox joins Julian Wood to discuss testing techniques and gives some helpful guidance to improve app quality, reliability, and development speed.

Real-World Serverless podcast – Episode #78
Yan Cui speaks with Eduard Bargues, a Principal Engineer at Ohpen, about their cloud-native open banking platform.

Ready, Set, Cloud! Podcast – Episode #10
Allen Helton chats with Taylor Jacobsen, Program Manager of the AWS Heroes Program, to discuss what it’s like working with this group of experts and enthusiasts and how she helps them stay connected and motivated.

DynamoDB Streams – THE most powerful feature from DynamoDB for event-driven applications
Marcia Villalba shares one of my favorite DynamoDB features and shows how it can be an invaluable trigger for powering your EDAs.

Serverless Craic Ep45 Bringing Mapping to your Org
The Serverless Craic team answers some common questions of teams trying to bring Wardley Mapping into their organization.

New from AWS 🆕

And here are a few more AWS announcements:

• AWS WAF enhances rate-based rules to support request headers and composite keys
• Amazon Neptune announces AWS CloudFormation support for Neptune Serverless
• Amazon Omics adds integration with Amazon EventBridge
• Amazon Athena now supports IPv6 endpoints for inbound connections
• AWS Backup now supports restoring resources with tags
• Amazon Rekognition launches eye gaze direction detection in Face APIs
• Amazon CloudFront now supports stale-while-revalidate and stale-if-error cache control directives

Serverless Tools 🛠

Efficient bulk writes to Momento Cache from Redis, CSV, JSON, and more
Momento must have read my mind when they launched this. Super handy for warming a cache after an unforeseen outage or even to prime it for some expected spike in traffic.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

May 24-25, 2023 – GlueCon 2023 🗣️

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 Benjamen Pyle (@benjamenpyle). Benjamin is the CTO at Curantis Solutions and an AWS Community Builder. When he’s not leading his team in the building of electronic health & medical records, you can find him speaking at events like AWS Smart Business Day about the challenges of complexity in data with AWS and writing on his blog about his experiences with serverless. Thank you, Benjamen, for being an active member of the serverless community and sharing your knowledge with others!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Whoa, that was a lot from Cloudflare last week! If one thing is clear, it’s the fact that the serverless-first mindset is driving the innovation behind all these new tools and services. I’ve got to find some time to play around with all this new Cloudflare stuff, but right now I have to get on a plane to Denver!

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.