Off-by-none: Issue #237

June 6, 2023

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Serverlessly migrate your databases 💿

In our previous issue, AppSync merged APIs, Momento enabled a Web SDK, and thanks to grandma, ChatGPT became uncool. This week, AWS DMS goes serverless, we get a lesson in packaging formats, and Neon predicts a serverless future for Postgres. Plus, we’ve got some amazing serverless content from the community. Let’s get to it!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

It was relatively quiet last week on the serverless front, though AWS did announce the general availability of AWS Database Migration Service Serverless. I’m actually a really big fan of AWS DMS, so having a more on-demand version of it could be very useful. I’m always skeptical of the pricing models with these things, and best I can gather, it’s billed in hourly increments. There are some cost controls built in, but I think this will be another service that devs will need to understand cost tradeoffs. There’s also an official blog post with more information.

Another (minor but notable) announcement is that Amazon SNS now supports AWS X-Ray active tracing for FIFO topics. I feel like lack of tracing support in AWS services is the new lack of CloudFormation support on new service launches. Maybe it’s just me. 🤷‍♂️

And finally, Renato Losio put together a handy round up on Cloudflare’s updates to their serverless database, D1. I really love how much innovation is going into serverless databases.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Power up your serverless application with AWS Lambda extensions
Corentin Doue provides a helpful tutorial to show you how to use extensions to create your own monitoring tool for Lambda functions.

AWS Lambda Concurrency when SQS FIFO Queue as Trigger
Pubudu Jayawardana explains how Message Group Ids are used to determine Lambda function processing concurrency. It’s important to understand this to make sure you’re getting the right throughput.

Easy serverless ETL with Momento and AWS Step Functions
Interesting use case by Lorenzo Panzeri that uses a serverless cache to temporarily hold data between Step Function state changes. I think I can see a few situations where this would make sense.

There is no right or wrong, as long as it works – Actually how you use DynamoDB makes a lot of difference!
Davide de Paolis argues that there’s a lot you can do wrong when utilizing DynamoDB. There’s some good advice in here.

Should you use Lambda containers?
This is a really great post by Samuel Durand that outlines the pros and cons of using the different packaging formats for Lambda.

Serverless Caching with Momento and MongoDB
I’ve been playing around with MongoDB quite a bit lately, and put together some optimization tips and examples that use a serverless cache in front of your cluster.

Serverless Reads 🤓

4 Security Risks That Make Your Unsecured Lambda Functions Vulnerable
I like to include useful serverless security posts when I can. This one by Tricia Nagar starts off well enough, but became a bit less actionable at the end. Any way, the 4 risks outlined are worthy of consideration, so skim this if you need a refresher.

Cloud conundrum: The changing balance of microservices and monolithic applications
I know, I know, this is another story about the whole Prime Video serverless debacle, but I actually really liked David Strom’s framing here.

Serverless is the future of PostgreSQL
As I said, I’m a big fan of the serverless database space race, and it was interesting to read Matt Asay’s take on Neon’s positioning.

Embracing the ‘Serverless First’ Approach through Progressive Decomposition
I like this idea of “progressive decomposition” from Daniel Vaughan. Even with a serverless first mindset, this makes a lot of sense.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

How to filter messages based on the payload using Amazon SNS
Marcia Villalba shows you how to augment attributes to offload filtering logic to SNS and further reduce your application integration costs.

Ready, Set, Cloud Podcast – Episode #11
Allen Helton chats with Dax Raad about building serverless the right way. Dax shares his thoughts on structuring serverless projects, domain-driven design, and having the right data boundaries.

The Serverless Cult Podcast – Episode #3
Matt Martz’s podcast is truly a joy to listen to. The episodes are around 10 minutes long, so if you haven’t yet, do yourself a favor and give them a listen.

Serverless networking with VPC Lattice | Serverless Office Hours
Tim Dormer, Nipun Chagari, and Serverless Tech Leader, Josh Kahn, join Julian Wood to show how VPC Lattice allows you to connect services across VPC and account boundaries, while simplifying the underlying networking.

Real-World Serverless podcast – Episode #79
Ben Kehoe joins Yan Cui to discuss the meaninglessness of serverless as well as a number of other hot button serverless topics. Ben also conveyed his thoughts on “infrastructure from code” (of which he’s not a fan). There are a lot of misconceptions around what IfC means and what it actually does, so I’ll need to take Yan up on his invitation to share my thoughts.

New from AWS 🆕

Here some other interesting AWS announcements to check out:

• AWS CloudFormation StackSets launches APIs to allow programmatic trust access with AWS Organizations
• AWS Pricing Calculator now offers visibility of point in time cost estimations
• AWS CloudTrail Lake now supports selective start or stop ingestion of CloudTrail events
• Amazon Route 53 now integrates with Amazon GuardDuty threat intelligence
• AWS Shield Advanced now supports AWS CloudFormation
• Amazon Polly launches two new female NTTS voices in Irish English and Danish
• Amazon Fraud Detector announces Event Orchestration with Amazon EventBridge
• Amazon EventBridge announces open-source connector for Kafka Connect
• AWS WAF now supports Header Order match statement for request inspection
• AWS Database Migration Service now supports enhanced homogeneous migration capabilities
• AWS Lambda supports Kafka and Amazon MQ event sources in four additional regions
• Announcing Multi-Region Replication for Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

June 7, 2023 – ServerlessDays Paris

June 22, 2023 – ServerlessDays Zurich

September 21, 2023 – ServerlessDays Cardiff

September 29, 2023 – CDK Day

October 26, 2023 – Serverless Summit Hamburg

Serverless Star of the Week ⭐️

This week’s start is Naor Peled (@thehecticbyte). Naor is a Full Stack Developer at Finaloop, a serverless enthusiast, and an active contributor to several open source projects. In addition to his consulting work and contributions to other popular projects, Naor has been instrumental in keeping several OSS projects that I created maintained while I’ve been actively engaged with my current startup. If it wasn’t for Naor, projects like the DynamoDB Toolbox, Lambda API, and Serverless MySQL would have fallen by the wayside. Thank you, Naor, for your continued contributions to the serverless community.

Final Thoughts 🤔

Even though there wasn’t a lot of serverless news last week, it’s still amazing to see how many things are happening and evolving in the ecosystem. As I’ve said many times, the serverless database stuff is fascinating, and the competitive offerings from Cloudflare, Planetscale, Neon, Tigris and others, are really pushing the limits on both innovation and cost. It feels like we’re finally at a point where we’re pushing past the idea of just modernizing the “old way” of building applications, and truly embracing the power of cloud to reinvent app development. It’s very exciting.

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.