Off-by-none: Issue #238

June 13, 2023

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The State of Edge Functions 📊

In our previous issue, AWS DMS went serverless, we got a lesson in packaging formats, and Neon predicted a serverless future for Postgres. This week, AWS gives us programmatic DLQ redrives, we learn about the State of Edge Functions, and we meet some new heroes. Plus, we’ve got lots of awesome content from the serverless community. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s jump right in!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Lots of interesting serverless announcements from AWS recently. First, Amazon SQS announced support for dead-letter queue redrive via AWS SDK or CLI. This was something I pointed out a year and a half ago when this functionality was released as an AWS Console feature, so I’m very glad this has been enabled via the API. There’s an official blog post here with more info on how it works.

AWS also announced Live Tail in Amazon CloudWatch Logs to examine logs in real-time. Looks like a great feature, though as with the DLQ redrive stuff, this is restricted to the console. Looking forward to a WebSocket implementation of this.

Plus there were announcements for the preview of the AWS Database Encryption SDK for Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda support for Ruby 3.2, and a new batch of AWS Heroes including some amazing Serverless Heroes like AJ Stuyvenberg, Danielle Heberling, Michael Walmsley, and Ran Isenberg.

And for those of you looking to join the AWS Community Builders program, applications will reopen in July 2023, so stay tuned for that.

In other cloud news, PlanetScale joined AWS ISV Accelerate Program, CockroachDB launched on Azure after a five-year mission, and our good friends at CloudZero landed a $32M investment.

Deno released The State of Edge Functions 2023 report that contains some predictable results, such as complexity around debugging and integration. Tim Anderson wrote up a great summary and analysis that’s worth a quick read.

Finally, The DynamoDB-Toolbox v1 beta is here thanks to the incredible work of Thomas Aribart. There have been a number of changes and improvements with more exciting things to come.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Learn serverless on AWS step-by-step – EventBridge
Pierre Chollet has put together an excellent series of tutorials that make it very easy to understand and implement AWS serverless services.

No, you don’t need to test every line of your CDK application
Yan Cui is 100% correct here. There’s definitely a need for guardrails, but if you’ve created a massively convoluted and tangled web of CDK that requires endless tests to give you confidence, something has gone horribly awry.

Private, cross-account GraphQL APIs with AppSync Merge APIs
Antonio Lagrotteria gives us a quite comprehensive tutorial here. There’s a lot of ClickOps in there, but I’m guessing that’s because it’s lacking CloudFormation support.

AWS SQS, SNS, Kinesis, EventBridge : How to choose ?
Always a great question. Meidi Airouche gives a great overview of each service and when you should choose one over another.

Implementing Data Resolvers with Node.js
Tanja Bayer shows you how to use AWS Lambda functions and Apollo Server to write custom data resolvers.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Taking a turn in my career
Massimo Re Ferrè had an “aha” moment with generative AI, and is now pivoting from compute with containers and serverless into this new world. This post gives an interesting perspective on the transitions in what he calls “geological areas.”

10 principles for your event driven architecture
This list by Fabien Portes makes a lot of sense to me.

The Implications of Serverless Architecture: Beyond the Hype
Luis Ezcurdi shares some opinions about serverless. There are plenty of good arguments in there worth considering, even if I don’t fully agree with his conclusion.

The Next Generation of Serverless is Happening
Apologies to those of you who have already criticized this piece on Twitter (you know who you are), but I thought it was worth including. Stateful serverless isn’t new (Nimbella and others were doing this years ago), but there is an evolution happening, even if past technological comparisons might be less than apt.

When are containers or serverless a red flag for a cloud project?
I don’t fully agree with David Linthicum’s assumption that serverless/container use cases are as limited, so much as I do think he’s right about technology decisions being brought in (and bought into) too early in the process.

Tune if you want to go faster
Pretty great learnings recap from Ryan Cormack about Moonpig’s Lambda tuning work. We need more of these shared with the community.

Utilizing AWS Serverless stack for webhook delivery at scale
Another excellent learnings recap, this one from Solaris Engineering.

Tested: Database Providers on Lambda
What databases are fastest with Lambda? Taylor Beseda ran some tests to find out. Looks like regions may have affected the methodology a bit, but I think DynamoDB would still win. 🤷‍♂️

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Are VPCs an anti-pattern?
What do you think? On AWS Bites episode #84, Eoin Shanaghy and Luciano Mammino discuss.

Getting started with Amazon Kinesis
Marcia Villalba has another amazing video that teaches you the basics of Amazon Kinesis, what it’s good for, and when to use it.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some other announcements from AWS you may have missed:

• Amazon Redshift Serverless now supports query scheduling and Single sign-on support
• AWS Control Tower adds 10 new AWS Security Hub controls
• AWS introduces container image signing
• AWS announces AWS Payment Cryptography (detailed post here)
• Amazon CloudWatch Logs data protection account level policy configuration
• Amazon Timestream now supports Customer Defined Partition Keys
• Amazon Athena for Apache Spark now supports Apache Hudi, Apache Iceberg, and Delta Lake
• AWS Lambda now supports SnapStart for Java in 7 additional AWS Regions
• AWS CloudFormation StackSets skips suspended accounts for faster deployments
• AWS Glue Data Quality is now generally available
• Amazon EventBridge Archive and Replay now in additional regions
• Amazon Athena for Apache Spark now supports custom Java libraries

Serverless Tools 🛠

Parana-Games/tinymo
Simple AWS DynamoDB wrapper for Node/TypeScript

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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 star is Ken Collins (@metaskills). Ken is a Principal Engineer at Custom Ink, an AWS Serverless Hero, and an AWS Certified Developer. Ken was my guest on Serverless Chats episode #32 way back in 2020 focused on customizing and adopting serverless, and 3 years later, he continues that important work. Ken is the creator and maintainer of Lamby, an AWS Lambda web adapter for Rack applications. He’s also created a number of supplementary projects including a Tailscale Lambda Extension for Containers. Thank you, Ken, for your continued dedication to the serverless community.

Final Thoughts 🤔

Another busy week for serverless!

FYI, I’ll be participating in a Platform Engineering Workshop this Friday to talk about Ampt. There is a pretty good line up of speakers, so if you’re interested, you can apply to join.

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.