Off-by-none: Issue #236

May 30, 2023

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Federated Serverless GraphQL 🌐

In our previous issue, we recapped Cloudflare’s Developer Week, got lower latency from EventBridge, and watched 7 hours of serverless innovation. This week, AppSync merges APIs, Momento enables a Web SDK, and thanks to grandma, ChatGPT is no longer cool. Plus, we’ve got plenty of awesome content from the serverless community.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

This past week, AWS announced AWS AppSync Merged APIs for GraphQL federation allowing teams to share up to 10 AppSync schemas through a single endpoint. This has been a big complaint for some time, so I’m curious to hear feedback from others once they put it into practice. More details about it here.

In other cloud news, they now support Node.js built-ins on Deno Deploy, letting you run existing Node.js apps at the edge. Also, PostgresML raised $4.7M to launch serverless AI application databases based on Postgres, whatever that means, and Ampt shared some recent updates.

For you PHP fans, Matthieu Napoli introduced a Lambda cold starts analysis tool on the Bref dashboard that you’ll want to check out.

Momento introduced the Momento Web SDK last week, and I’m pretty excited about it. You can now issue short-lived, tightly-scoped access keys directly to client applications to allow direct access to client/server shared caches and topics. This lets you create things like real time chats with zero overhead on your systems once you establish the connection. This opens up a lot of use cases.

Finally, Gunnar Grosch created a list of AWS folks, Heroes, Community Builders, etc. that have profiles over on Bluesky. If you’ve made the move and want some great people to follow, here’s the list.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Build AWS Serverless Scheduled Tasks with Amazon EventBridge and CDK
Ran Isenberg teaches you how to leverage Amazon EventBridge to create scheduled tasks as well as the newer EventBridge scheduler.

Customizing error handling in Step Functions
Arpad Toth explains how to customize error handling in Step Functions using the built-in Retry and Catch fields.

DynamoDB: Data partitioning is the secret sauce
Deepti Mittal gives us a lesson on what DynamoDB partitions are, some tips on how to use them, and how they scale.

Ramping AWS Lambda Using Docker Images
Hassan Jalil shares a quick tutorial on how to deploy Docker images to AWS Lambda functions.

Deploy Hugging Face Models on Serverless GPU
Dhanush Reddy shares a bunch of cool things you can do with Serverless GPUs.

Taking the Next Leap with AWS Lambda: Advanced Optimization Techniques
Great list from Andreas Kihlberg that outlines the main things to be thinking about when trying to squeeze the best performance out of Lambda.

Thawing your Lambda Cold Starts with Lazy Loading
AJ Stuyvenberg shares a technique for lazy loading dependencies instead of having them impact the initial cold start. I can see some value in this, but I’m not sure this is a particularly useful or necessary optimization.

Enrich DynamoDB stream (List/Map) using EventBridge Pipes and Step Functions
Rakesh Sanghvi shows you how to utilize EventBridge enrichment for processing complex JSON structures.

Build on Momento: IoT device status
Allen Helton shares a great serverless cache use case that uses TTLs to track the current status of IoT connected devices.

Serverless OpenAPI & Amazon API Gateway with the AWS CDK — Part 1
Lee Gilmore explains how to utilize an “OpenAPI first approach” with Amazon API Gateway using AWS CDK TypeScript.

How I Use OpenAI’s GPT-4 To Stay In Touch With My Mum More Consistently
Anna Geller shares a tool she built to automatically initiate a text conversation with her mother every Sunday. Please nobody tell her mum, because I know mine would probably not appreciate being AI automated!

Serverless Reads 🤓

Cloud Dependencies Need to Stop F—ing Us When They Go Down
Bit of a rant here by Jeff Martens, but he makes a lot of good points. The more dependencies we add (especially without transparency into them), the more fragile our applications can become.

Amazon Prime Video’s Switch to Monoliths: What You Can Learn
Yes, people are still talking about this, and I thought Murat Ardahan Aşık’s take was levelheaded and worth a share.

8 Hot Takes: Will We See a Monolithic Renaissance?
And while we’re on the subject of the Prime Video thing, Ericka Chickowski shared a round up of thoughts from some prominent cloud folks.

Platform as a Runtime (PaaR) — Beyond Platform Engineering
Super interesting post from Aviran Mordo, the VP of Engineering at Wix.com, about how they build their own custom runtime to speed up development and make interoperability between services much easier.

ChatGPT: No Longer Cool, Thanks to Grandma!
Ran Isenberg’s amusing take on the current and future state of ChatGPT. But in all seriousness, his commentary on the dark sides of ChatGPT is spot on.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Serverlesspresso: Building a Scalable, Event-Driven Application
Julian Wood’s GOTO 2022 talk just dropped on YouTube.

What’s new in Serverless?
Marcia Villalba sat down with Deepika Kumar and Trevor Kennedy to discuss recent AWS serverless launches.

Track Application Events with DynamoDB streams and Email Notifications using EventBridge Pipes
And Marcia Villalba teaches you how to integrate EventBridge pipes into your DynamoDB streams.

The Serverless Cult Podcast – Episode 1: Celestial Dance of Serverless
Matt Martz started a new podcast all about serverless. Give it a listen, because the title is apt, and the content is hilarious.

Build faster with Amazon CodeCatalyst | Serverless Office Hours
Doug Clauson and Ryan Bachman join James Beswick to explain how Amazon CodeCatalyst provides a unified software development service.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some other interesting AWS launches recently:

• Amazon Translate launches real time document translation
• Amazon Redshift announces support for auto-commit statements in stored procedure
• Amazon SES adds new enhancements to its dedicated IPs (managed) feature
• Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL improves availability of read replicas
• AWS Amplify announces Authenticator UI Library for Swift and Android
• Amazon Athena updates data source connectors to improve performance and reduce cost
• AWS Copilot announces Static Site pattern to host single-page web applications
• Amazon Cognito launches an improved console experience for identity pools
• AWS Shield Advanced is now available in four additional AWS Regions
• Amazon ElastiCache for Redis data tiering now supports auto scaling
• Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports Rust to build high performance database functions

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

June 7, 2023 – ServerlessDays Paris

June 22, 2023 – ServerlessDays Zurich

September 21, 2023 – ServerlessDays Cardiff

October 26, 2023 – Serverless Summit Hamburg

Serverless Star of the Week ⭐️

This week’s star is Lars Jacobsson (@lajacobsson). Lars is the Head of Infrastructure at Mathem.se, Sweden’s leading online grocery store, where he focuses on building serverless architectures. He holds multiple AWS certifications and has been an AWS Community Builder since 2020. You can find him regularly contributing to open source tools on GitHub and sharing this thoughts about cloud and serverless on Twitter. Thank you, Lars, for your contributions to the serverless community.

Final Thoughts 🤔

I had a great time in Colorado last week at Gluecon. Lots of amazing speakers and, of course, a huge focus on AI. There was a really interesting keynote from Adrian Cockcroft about the need to optimize for an AI operated world (e.g. changing roads and signage for self-driving cars). This will apply to a lot of things to ensure AI is successful more often than not. The talks weren’t recorded (unfortunately), but I’m sure we’ll see this content out in other forms soon.

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.