Off-by-none: Issue #241

July 11, 2023

Only have a few minutes? Check out this week's MOST POPULAR links as chosen by our email subscribers.

Recursive Lambda Loops ♾️

In our previous issue, Step Functions got Versions and Aliases, AppSync gots its own SAM abstraction, and a tech legend retired (from Google). This week, DynamoDB adds some conditional love, Lambda just says no to infinite loops, and we learn serverless lock-in is worth the tradeoffs. Plus, we’ve got two weeks of content from the serverless community to catch up on!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

AWS was quite busy these last two weeks! One of my favorite announcements was that Amazon DynamoDB now simplifies and lowers the cost of handling failed conditional writes by returning the Item in the error object. This may seem small, but it’s a feature that I’ve been wanting for a very long time. I’ve already updated multiple apps to take advantage of it.

Other thing AWS turned on was Lambda recursive loop detection. It only works with SQS and SNS right now, as well as function calls to itself, but it’s a good start to mitigate a very common problem for serverless developers. Interestingly, we have some functions that are recursive by design (don’t worry, we know what we’re doing), so we’ve gotten a few notifications already that required us to turn it off.

In other AWS news, there is a new ODBC driver now available for Amazon Athena (super cool), they announced DynamoDB local version 2.0 (if you’re into that sort of thing), AWS CodeBuild now supports GitHub Actions (a nice cross-platform standardization), AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store increased API throughput limit (awesome for rapidly scaling Lambdas), and AWS Amplify Hosting announced support for monorepo frameworks (how about that?)

And if you want a full recap of AWS serverless releases this past quarter, checkout their Serverless ICYMI Q2 2023 post.

Also, Power Tools for AWS Lambda (Python) v2.19.0 was released, bringing along support for VPC Lattice. Plus, David Boyne’s EventCatalog 0.6.11 is now out, with support for rendering OpenAPI specs.

And finally, we introduced some new features in Ampt’s Data Interface, including conditional checks that use the new DynamoDB failed conditional check errors feature. 😉

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Hopefully you gave your brain two weeks to rest, because here are a whole bunch of serverless concepts coming your way:

• Improving Performance of AWS Serverless Applications with CQRS by Collin Smith
• Demystifying Circuit Breakers in Software Resiliency by Frank Robbins
• Implementing a retry service to handle transient errors in third party API integrations using EventBridge, SQS & Lambda by Vince Quainoo
• Inter-Service Communication in Serverless Micro-Service Architecture by Pranav Tanpure
• Comprehensive Testing of Serverless Solutions: Exploring Integration, E2E, and Unit Testing with AWS CDK and TypeScript (Part 1) by Lee Gilmore
• Best Practices for Python with AWS Lambda: An Essential Guide by Yeldos Tanikin
• AWS Step Function Versions and Aliases by Benjamen Pyle
• Building Serverless Applications with AWS – Data by Benjamen Pyle

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Narrowing down two weeks worth of serverless tutorials is not for the faint of heart. Here are several that stood out to me:

• Leveraging LaunchDarkly SDK in AWS Lambda by “Blogger AJ”
• Build a Serverless Application for Audio to Text conversion by Abhishek Gupta
• Speed up new serverless application development with SAM customized templates by Andres Moreno
• Encrypting objects with dual-layer server-side encryption using Lambda functions by Arpad Toth
• Securing Your Serverless GraphQL API – Part II by Tanja Bayer
• Reduce archive cost with serverless data archiving by David Ramirez & Rostislav Markov
• Local Lambda Testing Workshop by Efi Merdler-Kravitz
• Building a Serverless AI Content Detector by Stephen Sennett
• AppSync Merged API as Code by Seth Orell

Serverless Reads 🤓

The conundrum of serverless lock-in & spiraling complexity: Is it all worth it?
Lee Gilmore says that serverless is worth the hype with the correct guardrails in place. I agree. Also, this is a wonderful read.

Are we getting infrastructure all wrong in the Serverless era?
Yan Cui asked an interesting question, but I’m not sure he asked the right question. Here’s my take.

I built a 3.75-million subscriber chat system in an afternoon
Ellery Addington-White and Ankita Patil did something rather amazing with Momento and the timeframe they built it in should blow your mind.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Honeycomb: How We Used Serverless to Speed Up Our Servers
Jessica Kerr’s presentation takes a deep dive into Lambda scaling and costs. I like the line, “if it’s not urgent, you don’t need serverless.” There’s some context to that, but it makes a lot of sense.

Ready, Set, Cloud Podcast! – Episode #13
Allen Helton chats with Alex Kearns about app modernization and cloud migration. Great discussion about strategies for getting into the cloud and how to beat modernization paralysis.

Benchmarking Lambda cold starts | Serverless Office Hours
Julian Wood and Maxime David, a Serverless Software Engineer at Datadog and AWS Community Builder, go deep into cold start benchmarks and the project Maxime built to visualize them.

The Business of Serverless with Yan Cui
Scott and Ody discuss the business of Serverless with Yan Cui. I just discovered this channel, and I like their mission of “encouraging software developers to become more business-savvy.”

AWS Lambda Fundamentals
Julian Wood has a 23 part course on learning the basics of AWS Lambda.

The Evolution of Evolutionary Architecture
Thomas Betts interviews Rebecca Parsons and there are some serious knowledge bombs dropped in here. Highly recommend a listen.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some other interesting AWS announcements you might have missed:

• Introducing the AWS .NET Distributed Cache Provider for DynamoDB
• Amazon Kinesis Video Streams Edge Agent is now generally available
• Amazon CloudWatch now supports dashboard variables
• AWS announces Amazon Aurora MySQL zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift (Public Preview)
• AWS Lambda simplifies copying environment variables in the console code editor
• Amazon OpenSearch Service now lets you update cluster manager nodes without blue/green
• Amazon S3 provides restore status of S3 Glacier objects using the S3 LIST API
• Amazon Location Service now supports API Keys for Maps, Places, and Routes
• Amazon Simple Email Service now supports metric export
• Amazon CloudWatch now supports Cross-Account Service Quotas
• AWS Config now supports 16 new resource types
• AWS announces AWS AppFabric
• AWS App Runner adds support to update and rebuild a failed service
• Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 is now available in Asia Pacific (Melbourne)

Serverless Tools 🛠

rehanvdm/serverless-website-analytics
A CDK construct that consists of a serverless backend, frontend and client-side code to track website analytics.

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

Rolling your own platform has never been easier. All you gotta do is pick 200 items from this list and you’re good to go. https://landscape.cncf.io ~ Kelsey Hightower

Friends don’t let friends emulate the cloud locally ✔️ ~ Lee Gilmore

I worked in a startup that began by operating Kubernetes and 150+ microservices. Can you predict what happened to the startup? And how fast was the delivery speed? ~ Dmytro Krasun

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 Juliette Fournier (@Julietteff1). Juliette is a full stack developer at Theodo where she is part of the Serverless Tribe. She’s also an experienced AWS Community Builder. Recently she presented the talk “Auditing the infrastructure of serverless applications at a glance” at ServerlessDays Paris. Thank you, Juliette, for sharing your passion for serverless!

Final Thoughts 🤔

If you’re in the northern hemisphere like me, I hope you’re enjoying summer. Don’t forget, we’re on our bi-weekly summer schedule (every other week), so no newsletter next week.

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.