Off-by-none: Issue #240

June 27, 2023

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Versions, Aliases, and Abstractions 🎭

In our previous issue, AWS recovered from a major outage, permissions became verifiable, and re:Invent opened registration. This week, Step Functions get Versions and Aliases, AppSync gets its own abstraction, and a legend retires. Plus, we’ve lots of great content from the serverless community. Let’s jump right in.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Lots of exciting serverless news out of AWS this past week. AWS Step Functions launched Versions and Aliases, which is pretty cool. Now you can safely deploy and test changes before shifting all your production traffic. More details in the official blog post.

AWS SAM CLI announced a new remote invoke feature for AWS Lambda. As someone who’s been using the Serverless Framework for years, this is a feature that’s easily taken for granted. Glad they finally added it in SAM. Here’s more on how it works.

AWS SAM also launched an AWS AppSync abstraction that lets you specify an AWS::Serverless::GraphQLApi resource instead of needing to use a CloudFormation resource.

AWS Lambda now supports starting from timestamp for Kafka event sources, if you’re into that sort of thing, and Amazon CloudWatch Logs announces new Log Insights dedup command. This is a handy little feature, but I’ve always spelled it “dedupe”, so might not be able to use it simply on principle. 😉

In other cloud news, MotherDuck launched its DuckDB-based cloud analytics platform, Microsoft Azure Event Grid MQTT Protocol Support and Pull Message Delivery are now in Public Preview, and the absolutely amazing Kelsey Hightower announced that he is retiring from Google. I met Kelsey for the first time at ServerlessDays NYC in 2018. He was a huge inspiration to so many of us, even though he was a big Kubernetes fan. 😃

Last week was “Speed Week” at Cloudflare, and as usual, they announced a lot of things. Sam Marsh recaps them all for you.

Ampt just introduced HTTP Response Streaming Support, which is quite exciting. This opens up some new possibilities, including future support for Next.js 13 and React Server Components. 🚀

And finally, Momento is now fully integrated into the LangChain Ecosystem. This integration lets developers efficiently cache the results of their LLMs, allowing them to easily retrieve them when needed. Not sure if you’ve worked with any of these models yet, but multi-step workflows with state is the only way to go. Momento makes this incredibly simple.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Are you using SAM deployments? There is a chance that you have an issue that you are not aware of.
Marcin Sodkiewicz points out a strange bug(?) with SAM that doesn’t update environment variables even after successful deploys.

Enabling Blue/Green, Canary Deployments with AWS Step Functions
Mario Bittencourt explains the importance of canary deployment and shows how you can implement them.

Serverless OpenAPI & Amazon API Gateway with the AWS CDK — Part 2
Lee Gilmore wraps up this series by looking at an “OpenAPI code first” approach versus the “spec first” approach in Part 1.

Monitoring AWS CloudWatch Logs with CDK: Creating Alarms for Specific Error Conditions
And Lee Gilmore shares another great post, this one showing you how to use filters to trigger alarms for certain types of errors.

Revolutionizing Authentication: Embracing Passwordless Security with Cognito (Phone Number-OTP)
Everyone loves remembering passwords, right? Well Devaka Dabare explains a different approach that utilizes Cognito.

Serverless API Idempotency with AWS Lambda Powertools and CDK
Ran Isenberg teaches you some methods for ensuring idempotent API operations. Lots of useful info in here, but if your target is a DynamoDB table and you’re fingerprinting the payload, there are some handy DDB conditions that can be used instead of creating another table.

Building a DynamoDB Data Migration Pipeline
Alexander Smirnoff accidentally deleted a DynamoDB table (we’ve all been there), so they came up with this to restore the data.

Debugging SQS subscription issues to topics
Arpad Toth walks you through the debugging process. I guessed it was a permissions issue before I even read it. It’s always permissions.

Learn serverless on AWS step-by-step – SQS
And speaking of SQS, here’s another awesome tutorial from Pierre Chollet.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Opinion: Why monoliths are not always “bad” even in a cloud-native world
A little heavy on the Kubernetes, but spot on with the rest.

Sneak peek at Immutable’s event liberation pipeline, Part 1
Interesting read from the Immutable team.

Serverless is an idea whose time has not arrived
Vikram Kamath says “Today’s developers need to have full control over how every service is deployed. They need to finely tune each service to handle load and latency.” I disagree. But he also thinks AI is eventually going to change that and make serverless viable.

How I deploy my website using my Apple Watch
This is just plain fun. I love things like this.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Production-ready lambdas with Node.js
Luciano Mammino’s presentation from Sailsconf 2023.

AWS Copilot for serverless containers | Serverless Office Hours
Efe Karakus joins Julian Wood to discuss managing serverless containers and how AWS Copilot makes it easy to build, evolve, and release serverless container architectures with “architecture-as-code”.

AWS Bites: How do you integrate AWS with other clouds? – Episode #86
Eoin and Luciano share six different options for securely and efficiently integrating workloads between clouds.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are a few other AWS announcements you might have missed:

• AWS Lambda adds support for Java 17 in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
• Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion now supports ingesting events from Amazon Security Lake
• AWS Lambda adds support for Python 3.10 in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
• Amazon EFS now supports up to 10 GiB/s of Provisioned Throughput
• AWS CloudFormation accelerates dev-test cycle with new ChangeSets parameter
• Amazon MQ now supports cross-region data replication for ActiveMQ brokers
• Announcing the AWS Amplify UI Builder Figma plugin
• AWS Lambda adds support for Ruby 3.2 in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

“Kubernetes has single handed set our industry back a decade. Companies are going to die because they spend more time ‘managing Kubernetes’ than building a product.” ~ Pete Cheslock

This tweet got a lot of praise and plenty of criticism, but I’m with Pete. Kubernetes is an engineering marvel, but it’s like building and configuring your own race car versus buying a model off the lot. For some specialized use cases it’s absolutely necessary. But for most of us, there are plenty of perfectly acceptable options in the showroom.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

July 26, 2023 – AWS Summit New York 2023

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 Daniela Miao (@dymxzvf). Daniela is co-founder and CTO of Momento. Prior to Momento, she spent four years developing an observability platform at Lightstep and three years working at AWS as a Tech Lead on DynamoDB. Besides her amazing work on Momento’s serverless caching platform, she’s also a regular conference speaker. I was lucky catch her presentation at GlueCon, talking about Avoiding the Observability Black Hole. Thank you Daniela for your contributions to the serverless ecosystem and for sharing your knowledge.

Final Thoughts 🤔

I always love weeks that are filled with great serverless announcements. Just goes to show that there’s always more to do, but with so many amazing vendors working to cross things off the list, things just keep getting better and better!

Starting next week, we’ll be shifting to our bi-weekly summer schedule (every other week). I’m sure there will be lots to write about!

See you in two weeks,
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.