Off-by-none: Issue #242

July 25, 2023

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Lambda Proactive Initialization 🤯

In our previous issue, DynamoDB added some conditional love, Lambda just said no to infinite loops, and we learned serverless lock-in is worth the tradeoffs. This week, AWS Lambda gets proactive on its initializations, local Lambda debugging takes a huge step in the right direction, and AWS Powertools gets an official thumbs up. Plus, we’ve got another two weeks of awesome serverless content from the community to share. Let’s jump right in!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Okay, brace yourself for the firehose. Quite a bit happened in the last two weeks!

Last issue we mentioned AWS Lambda recursive loop detection, but now they officially announced it. If you’re curious as to whether or not it really works, Pubudu Jayawardana put it to the test. And somewhat related, he also pointed out that Amazon EventBridge has some built in recursion detections as well.

In other AWS news, AWS Lambda and Amazon EventBridge Pipes now support enhanced filtering, AWS Amplify JavaScript library enhances the performance of Auth, Storage, Notifications, and Analytics, and AWS Fargate enables faster container startup using Seekable OCI. The last one is really cool, and the official blog post gives some more depth.

Also, according to Heitor Lessa, Powertools for AWS Lambda is now an official AWS team. It’s a pretty great project, and this means long-term project sustainability, feature parity across languages, a new project page,
and plans beyond Lambda!

In mind blowing cloud news, AJ Stuyvenberg stumbled across AWS Lambda Proactive Initialization, reached out to the Lambda team, and discovered this pretty insane new feature. Oh, and Lamby already reports on it for you.

And as soon as you’re done picking tiny pieces of your brain off the walls, check out samp-cli for local lambda debugging from Lars Jacobsson! All I can say is…

In other cloud news, Wing Cloud raised $20M to build its open source, unified cloud programming language, Lumigo introduced Trace Endpoint Mapping, and Momento Cache is now accessible at the edge with Cloudflare.

And, my startup had a few announcements of its own.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Building Serverless Applications with AWS – Compute
Benjamen Pyle gives a thoroughly in depth breakdown of Lambda and Fargate and when and why you might choose one over the other.

SNS to Lambda or SNS to SQS to Lambda, what are the trade-offs?
Yan Cui (aka theburningmonk) explains why SQS might not be necessary anymore in your SNS to Lambda workflows.

Best practices for implementing event-driven architectures in your organization
Emanuele Levi has a pretty great article on best practices for your EDAs.

Serverless and event-driven design thinking
And if you’re interested in EDAs, let Jimmy Dahlqvist give you a nice intro into changing your thinking.

Demystifying permissions within AWS SAM resources
If you think IAM permissions aren’t hard, then you’re probably doing something wrong (unless you’re an IAM savant). Alan Blockley helps shed some light on them for you.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Always lots of great tutorials. Here are a few that seem quite useful:

• Registering AWS Lambda Function as the target for AWS ALB using serverless framework by Anjali Modi
• How to import CSV data to DynamoDB new table by Reo Togashi
• Returning large objects from Lambda functions using stream responses by Arpad Toth
• Adopting Hexagonal Architecture in Serverless by Ivano García
• Guardian of the Functions: Keeping an Eye on your Galaxy of AWS Step Functions with Custom Metrics on CloudWatch by Monica Colangelo
• Automatically create Amazon Fargate tasks when uploading objects to an S3 bucket by Aniruddh Fataniya

And two of my favorites:

• Decoupling event publishing with Amazon EventBridge Pipes by Gregor Hohpe, Sr.
• Effective Amazon SQS Batch Handling with AWS Lambda Powertools by Ran Isenberg

Serverless Reads 🤓

Is Serverless Going to End DevOps As We Know It? 🤔
Karam Majdi asks the question and gives (what should be) an obvious answer.

3 Reasons Why Teams Move Away from AWS Lambda
I don’t know anything about this author, but this ridiculous “cook your own meal” versus “order takeout” mindset is the reason why so many projects take forever and ultimately fail. PSA: Stop doing undifferentiated heavy lifting!!

Lessons Learned from My First Two AWS Amplify Projects: Navigating the Ups and Downs
Bryson Meiling recounts his experience using AWS Amplify. I won’t spoil it for you, but let’s just say their DX still needs some work.

An AI Pause Is Humanity’s Best Bet For Preventing Extinction
Okay, nothing really to do with serverless, but this piece from Otto Barten and Joep Meinderstma asks a lot of the questions that the recent hype tends to overshadow. An “AI pause” is implausible, but to ignore these questions isn’t an option.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Ready, Set, Cloud Podcast! – Are Cold Starts Gone Forever
Allen Helton chats with AJ Stuyvenberg for a bonus episode that discusses a newly published service enhancement from the AWS Lambda team that pre-warms execution environments of on-demand functions.

AWS Bites – Should you simulate AWS locally?
No! 😉 Well, maybe sometimes. Eoin and Luciano discuss this “age old” question and I agree with their conclusions.

AWS Bites – Ideas that would Skyrocket AWS to New Heights
Eoin and Luciano share some ideas to make AWS better.

Using DynamoDB global tables | Serverless Office Hours
Jason Hunter joins Julian Wood to explain primary use cases, write models you should consider, request routing choices you might implement, and how to think about throughput capacity planning.

Lambda testing: Remote invoke | Serverless Office Hours
Mehmet Nuri Deveci speaks with Julian Wood about speeding up local development and cloud testing using AWS SAM remote invoke to invoke your functions in the cloud from your local development environment.

Feature Flagging – WHY and HOW you can use and enable them for your projects – Part 1
Ran Isenberg discusses the concept of “Feature Flagging,” how to use them for your benefit, and how to manage their lifecycle.

New from AWS 🆕

Lots happening at AWS. Here are some things you might have missed:

• Amazon SNS can now deliver mobile push notifications in twelve new regions
• AWS DMS now supports Amazon Redshift Serverless as a target
• Amazon Location Service now supports publishing device position updates on EventBridge
• AWS Control Tower launches additional proactive controls
• Amazon S3 Inventory can include ACLs as object metadata in inventory reports
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) launches index improvements
• AWS WAF now supports URI path aggregation key for rate-based rules
• Introducing Analytics on Amazon Lex
• Amazon CloudFront announces support for 3072-bit RSA certificates
• Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics announces new Synthetics NodeJS runtime version 5.0
• Access resource and stack drift information directly in AWS CloudFormation StackSets
• AWS simplifies writing .NET 6 Lambda functions
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now supports document compression

Serverless Tools 🛠

mattzcarey/code-review-gpt
Your personal code reviewer powered by LLMs (OpenAI GPT-3.5/4, Llama, Falcon, Azure AI) & Embeddings. Improve code quality and catch bugs before you break production.

theapexlab/serverless-icebreaker
The serverless Icebreaker is a utility designed to analyze pre-built AWS Lambdas and mitigate cold start duration.

Learn 30 serverless best-practices with sls-mentor
We’ve mentioned sls-mentor a few times, but if you haven’t checked it out, now would be a good time. 🙂

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

July 26, 2023 – AWS Summit New York 2023

August 3, 2023 – MoCon by Momento

September 21, 2023 – ServerlessDays Cardiff

September 29, 2023 – CDK Day

October 20, 2023 – ServerlessDays Cape Town

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 Michael Walmsley (@walmsles). Michael is a Lead Technology Architect in the myWizard Automation Group at Accenture and was recently named an AWS Serverless Hero. Based in Melbourne, Australia where he is involved in the AWS Programming and Tools Meetup, Michael also holds multiple AWS licenses and certifications. He also shares knowledge about AWS Serverless technology on his blog, serverlessdna.com. Thank you, Michael, for being an active voice in the serverless space!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Wow, what a week to be a serverless fanatic! Proactive initialization is a great example of how cloud providers can upgrade serverless infrastructure and performance behind the scenes without you needing to do anything. This is why we can’t stop talking about cold starts, because even though they have a minimal impact on many workloads, they are still an issue and an easy target for serverless naysayers. I love that AWS hasn’t given up on this, and this makes me even more excited about the future of serverless compute.

Don’t forget, we’re still on our summer schedule, so we’ll see you in two weeks with more serverless goodness.

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.