Off-by-none: Issue #239

June 20, 2023

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An AWS Snow Day? ☃️

In our previous issue, AWS gave us programmatic DLQ redrives, we learned about the State of Edge Functions, and we met some new AWS heroes. This week, AWS recovers from a major outage, permissions can now be verified, and re:Invent opens registration. Plus, we have plenty of serverless content from our amazing community. Let’s get to it!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

In case you didn’t notice, AWS had a big outage last week Tuesday. It was in their flagship us-east-1 region, which basically means everything was affected (including this newsletter). Was it painful? Yes. Does it mean you should put all your engineering effort towards making your app multi-region? Probably not.

In other AWS news, Amazon Verified Permissions is now generally available,they released the new Amazon S3 Dual-Layer Server-Side Encryption with Keys Stored in AWS Key Management Service (DSSE-KMS) option, and AWS re:Invent 2023 registration is now open.

Cloudflare continues to grow, with their global network now spanning 300 cities with connections to 12,000 networks. It’s also “Speed Week” this week, so we’ll see what interesting announcements they come out with.

Finally, Ken Collins shared “The Elusive Lambda Console; A Specification Proposal” which outlines some ideas on building a universal CLI input to run shell commands and interact with Lambda functions (not just Ruby ones). Give it a look.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

There are always way too many great serverless tutorials! Here are a few that I thought covered some interesting use cases.

Cloud run jobs, your parallel tasks solution
I know we mostly cover AWS, but Thierry Njike shares how to run parallel tasks using Google Cloud Run.

Reducing Lambda bundle size with EsBuild and Lambda layers
Lambda’s bundle size limitation is great to create the restraint, but also extremely frustrating when need libraries are just overly bloated. See if this article might help you figure out a way around that.

Automate DynamoDB Migration with AWS Serverless Services
Great tutorial by Dania Refaie showing how to use Step Functions to create a cross-region DynamoDB migration.

Tutorial: Using Lambda Functions with Weighted Aliases and Function URLs
This quick tutorial shows you how to use the Weighted alias feature of Lambda functions to split test traffic.

SQS Re-Drive with Golang and Step Functions
Benjamen Pyle shows you how to build an auto-re-drive State Machine that puts messages back on a queue protected by an API Gateway or Event Bridge Scheduler.

Lambda Extension with Golang
Benjamen Pyle shares another great tutorial explaining how to build, use, and test a Lambda Extension.

Stay compliant with AWS Step Functions — IAM Users’ Access Key Age Notification
Pubudu Jayawardana shares a simple implementation to ensure your developers are rotating their IAM access tokens.

Testing Step Functions: how to skip time when testing Timeout and Wait states
Yan Cui shares a very helpful tip for bending time when testing Step Functions with timeouts or wait states.

OpenAI Streaming from AWS Lambda
Everyone loves AI, so why fight it?

Serverless Reads 🤓

Why I stopped using OpenFaaS
Goncalo Oliveira shares some frustrations over the practical adoption of Open Source software. He calls out OpenFaaS here, but I don’t think this is the only example.

Dependency Injection for Serverless Applications
Thor Chen explains the concept well but, perhaps without realizing it, makes the case as to why testing in the cloud can reduce a lot of overhead.

How GoDaddy Implemented a Multi-Region Event-Driven Platform at Scale
And since everyone’s talking about multi-region, why not let Marcia Villalba show you how GoDaddy does it?

How to re:Invent: 10 Things You Need to Know Before Attending AWS re:Invent 2023
Are you thinking about going to re:Invent 2023? Here are some things to know if you’re a first timer.

In the Great Microservices Debate, Value Eats Size for Lunch
Anoop Balakuntalam shares his perspective on the microservices debate. There are a lot of things to like about his approach.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Ready, Set, Cloud! Podcast #12: Finding Your Niche in the Tech Community
Allen Helton is joined by Jonah Andersson to discuss how being part of a tech community is much more than just networking or acquiring new skills.

AWS Bites – Episode #85: Tips for Attending AWS Events
Eoin and Luciano share their insider tips on how to get the most out of in-person AWS events like summits, re:Inforce, or re:Invent.

Integrating EventBridge and Kafka | Serverless Office Hours
Julian Wood is joined by Michael Gasch and Jeff Oriecuia to explain how to combine event streaming and event-driven integrations using Amazon EventBridge connector for Kafka Connect.

Multi-Region CockroachDB Serverless | Why Regional Tables are useful
Came across this quick demo and I was pretty impressed. Might have to give CockroachDB Serverless a real try.

How to Upgrade from Redis to Momento Cache
I love how Momento lets you use existing Redis interfaces with their service. Kirk Kirkconnell has a great video that shows you how it’s as easy as swapping the connection string. No other code changes needed.

New from AWS 🆕

In case you missed them, here are a few other announcements from AWS that you might be interested in:

• Amazon AppFlow announces 4 new data connectors
• Amazon Location Service now supports geofence metadata
• Skip unavailable clusters during cross-cluster search in Amazon OpenSearch Service
• AWS Step Functions adds integration for 7 services including Amazon VPC Lattice
• AWS WAF Fraud Control launches account creation fraud prevention and reduced pricing
• Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose adds support for data stream delivery to Amazon Redshift Serverless
• Amazon S3 announces dual-layer server-side encryption for compliance workloads
• Well-Architected introduces Profiles
• Amazon Inspector announces the general availability of Code Scans for AWS Lambda function
• Amazon Rekognition improves face search accuracy with user vectors
• Amazon Location Service adds support for place categories

Serverless Tools 🛠

skeet-cli
Full-stack Serverless Framework for auto-scaling apps on Firebase.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

June 22, 2023 – ServerlessDays Zurich

September 21, 2023 – ServerlessDays Cardiff

September 29, 2023 – CDK Day

October 26, 2023 – EDA Day Nashville

October 26, 2023 – Serverless Summit Hamburg

November 27 – December 1, 2023 – AWS re:Invent 2023

Serverless Star of the Week ⭐️

This week’s star is Julian Wood (@julian_wood). Julian is a Principal Developer Advocate at AWS and a staple in the serverless community. If you missed his talk last week at ServerlessDays Paris, don’t worry, because there’s no shortage of amazing serverless content from Julian. Besides all the great talks he does (like this amazing one from re:Invent 2022), he’s also a regular host of Serverless Office Hours, a weekly livestream helping developers learn about building serverless applications. Thank you, Julian for everything you do for the serverless community!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Hope you all had a great week. I’ve been mostly heads down working on (and in) my startup, and looking forward to sharing some exciting updates soon. Anyway, I always love hearing your thoughts on the challenges developers face when building serverless applications in AWS. Feel free to reach out to me if you’d like to share.

Until 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.