Off-by-none: Issue #243

August 8, 2023

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AI, VIs, IPs, and AWS 🤖

In our previous issue, AWS Lambda went proactive on its initializations, local Lambda debugging got much better, and AWS Powertools became an official AWS team. This week, AWS is now apparently an AI company, vector databases become all the rage, and public IPv4 addresses get pricey. Plus, we have two weeks of serverless community content bursting at the seams!

I’m just about to get on a plane to Seattle for the AWS Heroes Summit. This is a great opportunity for me to complain to AWS product managers on your behalf, so please feel free to air your grievances with me and I’ll pass them along the best I can. 😉

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

It was an incredibly busy two weeks for serverless, so we’ve got a lot of announcements to get to. Let’s start with AWS.

The AWS Summit New York happened at the end of July and there were plenty of keynote highlights. As suspected, it was very heavily geared towards AI. They announced support for agents, which enables generative AI applications to complete tasks in just a few clicks, and a preview of a vector engine for Amazon OpenSearch Serverless.

In other interesting AWS announcements:

• Amazon RDS simplified connectivity between an RDS or Aurora database and AWS Lambda
• AWS Database Encryption SDK for Amazon DynamoDB is now generally available
• Announcing preview of JSON protocol support for Amazon SQS
• AWS Application Composer added Undo and Redo, Export Canvas, and Local Sync Mode
• AWS Lambda adds support for Python 3.11
• Amazon SQS announces increased throughput quota for FIFO High Throughput mode

Plus, Amazon EventBridge Scheduler adds schedule deletion after completion, with a helpful explanation here. And you can now accelerate your CloudFormation authoring experience with the looping function, explained in more detail here.

AWS also announced that they will begin charging for public IPv4 addresses. Corey Quinn agrees.

And we’re still not done! AWS introduced the first AWS Security Heroes, and a new Amazon DynamoDB Knowledge Portal, and that Anna Spies and Richard Boyd are the new hosts on AWS’s Code Corner show.

Now, in other cloud news, Cloudflare has had some issues with Workers KV lately, but they are working to harden it. There’s also a nice example of an RCA in here. But even if you’re not ready to use Workers KV, you can check out the Cloudflare Workers database integration with Upstash.

And while we’re talking about serverless caching, Momento announced a new Vector Index- simplifying vector database management with a truly serverless service. You can sign up for the waitlist.

The serverless database space race continues to heat up, with Fermyon announcing support for Turso and Neon landing a new $46M investment.

Datadog introduces the Datadog Ambassadors program, with Benjamen Pyle rightly being a part of the inaugural group.

And finally, Ampt introduced Long Running Tasks, which is pretty cool as the platform will automatically choose Fargate or Lambda based on the workload. We also released two great case studies, one for VB Media and another for Vestaboard. We have another big announcement coming soon as well. 😉

Serverless Concepts 🏗

There are so many amazing articles and resources these past two weeks, so here are some of my favorites, rapid fire style:

• Let’s Architect! Resiliency in architectures by Luca Mezzalira et al
• Unlocking Serverless Superpowers: Mastering the 8 Crucial Design Patterns Every Engineer Should Know by Lee Gilmore
• Cloud design patterns, architectures, and implementations by Anitha Deenadayalan
• Save money on Serverless: common costly mistakes and how to avoid them by Yan Cui
• Building Serverless Applications with AWS – API by Benjamen Pyle
• Mastering Retries: Best Practices for Amazon SQS by Ran Isenberg
• Building Serverless Applications with AWS – Handling Events by Benjamen Pyle

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here are some tutorials that you might find useful:

• Build a serverless retail solution for endless aisle on AWS by Sandeep Mehta and Shashank Shrivastava
• Get all result Items from the scan method in DynamoDb by Martin Sobrero
• How to Create Amazon Lambda Function with the Container Image (Dockerfile) by Dogukan Ulu
• Building a serverless file manager by Jimmy Dahlqvist
• Returning customized content based on location with S3 Object Lambda by Arpad Toth
• Automating AWS Cost Forecast Notifications with Lambda, CloudWatch & Slack Integration by Rohit Nagose
• Programmatically retrieving secrets from Parameter Store and Secrets Manager by Arpad Toth
• Learn serverless on AWS step-by-step – SNS by Pierre Chollet
• Introduction to Distributed Map for Serverless Data Processing by Uma Ramadoss and Adam Wagner

Serverless Reads 🤓

Navigating Serverless Services: Fargate, Lambda
This is a straightforward, unfiltered look at how developers are approaching Fargate and Lambda. You might not agree with everything, but perception is reality.

A failed attempt at monetizing technical writing
I really appreciate the transparency from Luc van Donkersgoed here. It hopefully sheds some light on just how much work goes into producing great content. Also, monetizing writing is very difficult (trust me, I know).

Prime Day 2023 Powered by AWS – All the Numbers
Jeff Barr recounts just how insane Prime Day is.

Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3
Guest post by Andy Warfield on just how insane a system S3 is.

Testing Event-Driven Applications Using EventBridge — A Four-Year Journey
Interesting read by Steve Morland to see the progression and mindset changes over the years.

Solo SaaS – How I Built a Workout App By Myself
Allen Helton shares how serverless enabled him to create an incredibly robust product all by himself.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Getting started with Data Streaming
Marcia Villalba is back with more videos!

Generative AI and Serverless to create a new story everyday
And here’s another great one with Marcia and David Boyne.

Ready, Set, Cloud! Podcast – Episode #15
Allen talks with Benjamen Pyle about the business side of serverless.

AWS Bites #92: Decomposing the Monolith Lambda
Eoin and Luciano discuss the migration from a complex monolithic AWS Lambda Function to a Step Functions workflow.

Cache-it Episode #3 – Vector databases, single-table design, and beyond
Khawaja Shams talks with Alex DeBrie about the merits of the single-table design and the current state of vector databases.

Easier observability with SLIC Watch | Serverless Office Hours
Diren Akkoc and Luciano Mammino from fourTheorem join Julian Wood to show how SLIC Watch adds well-architected observability to your serverless applications.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are a few additional announcements from AWS you may have missed:

• Amazon EMR Serverless adds API support for Application UIs
• AWS CloudFormation enhances deletion policies to accelerate dev-test cycle
• AWS Amplify Introduces CloudWatch Logger feature for Swift and Android
• Amazon EMR Serverless now supports retrieving secrets from AWS Secrets Manager
• Amazon EFS now supports up to 55,000 IOPS per file system
• Improved AWS Backup performance for Amazon S3 buckets
• Amazon EMR Serverless now supports storing logs in Amazon CloudWatch
• AWS Config now supports 19 new resource types
• Amazon MSK Serverless expands availability to three additional AWS Regions
• AWS Glue Studio now supports Amazon Redshift Serverless
• Amazon Aurora now supports automatic backup of deleted clusters

Serverless Tools 🛠

Speedrun
Not “serverless”, but this is pretty cool to add 🔥 to your documentation.

reinvent-chatgpt-assistant
Use ChatGPT to rank the re:Invent sessions based on your interest

Lambda runtime/version search tool (across regions)
CLI tool to search AWS Lambda runtime and versions across regions

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

Explain to me how a container that runs and incurs cost while waiting for requests is “serverless” ~ Boris Tane

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

September 9, 2023 – ServerlessDays-Ahmedabad 2023

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 Eoin Shanaghy (@eoins). Eoin is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Ireland-based fourTheorem. He is also a certified AWS expert and co-hosts the AWS Bites podcast with previous Serverless Star of the Week, Luciano Mammino. Eoin is the co-author of the book AI as a Service which focuses on serverless machine learning with AWS. Thank you, Eoin, for finding every avenue possible to help spread the serverless word!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Phew! That’s a wrap for this issue. I know it was a long one, but I’d hate for you to miss anything. There are just so many exciting happenings in the world of cloud and serverless right now. And here I was thinking it might be slow over the summer. 🤷‍♂️

We’ve got a few more weeks of our summer schedule left, so we’ll see you in two weeks with another serverless firehose.

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.