Off-by-none: Issue #244

August 22, 2023

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Death to VTL, long live JavaScript!

In our previous issue, AWS became an AI company, vector databases were all the rage, and AWS started charging for public IPv4 addresses. This week, AppSync killed VTL, HashiCorp made a bunch of friends, and serverless opinions get summarized. Plus, we have another two weeks of amazing serverless community content for you!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

It wasn’t quite as busy a two weeks as it was in our last issue, but still plenty of awesome serverless stuff happening.

In AWS news, AWS AppSync now supports JavaScript for all resolvers in GraphQL APIs. This is such a breath of fresh air, and the day they replace VTL in all of their services should become a national holiday. They also launched an enhanced AWS Startups experience featuring AWS Build.

Perhaps not relevant to most of you just yet, but Amazon OpenSearch Serverless expanded support for larger workloads and collections. Now with up to 6TB scan capacity and an increase to 100 OCUs. This is good in the sense that as a shared resource you can certainly benefit from a multi-tenant approach, but I’d still like to see them provide a multi-tenant OpenSearch service like DynamoDB.

In other news, a new version of EventCatalog is now out, Yan Cui announced his online courses to learn Lambda and Step Functions are now FREE, Deno’s Fresh v1.4 with faster page loads, layouts and more was just released.

This newsletter was mentioned as one of The Best Cloud Newsletters To Sign Up To 🎉, and for another shameless plug, Ampt published a few more customer stories including Suamusica: Empowering Indie Artists with Next.js and Ampt.

Finally, I’m sure you’ve all heard about HashiCorp’s licensing change to BSL (Business Source License), and for many, it isn’t going over well. In response, Craig Dunn announced OpenTF, a project that pledges to ensure the continued survival of Terraform as an open source tool. If you’re into Terraform and you think HashiCorp overstepped, it’s worth a look.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Amazon SQS Dead Letter Queues and Failures Handling Best Practices
Ran Isenberg has another great post, this time sharing his thoughts and experience on dealing with DLQs with SQS.

Why Are WebSockets So Hard?
Allen Helton shares some great background context on WebSockets and why they’ve traditionally been difficult to use in serverless environments. Luckily, Momento could provide some much needed respite.

Serverless Monitoring: Best Practices
Chameera Dulanga lays out several in-depth takes on what are the must dos when hoping to successfully monitor serverless apps.

Building Serverless Applications with AWS – Observability
And on that same subject, Benjamen Pyle completes his summer serverless series with a deep dive into observability, the built-in tools you can use, and how to utilize the information to ensure performance.

Simple AWS: 20 Advanced Tips for Lambda
These are just some quick tips from Guille Ojeda, but they are good reminders of things you need to be aware of.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Always lots of handy serverless tutorials to choose from!

• How to build a Serverless and cost-effective failover solution using a backup website with traffic monitoring! (part 1/2) by Bachar Hakam
• Amazon S3 Event Notifications with Amazon EventBridge by Swastika Aryal
• HTTP-Modular: My Node.js Library for Converting Server-Side Functions Into ES Modules by Yvo Wu
• AMPLIFY + AWS SAM – Part 1: Introduction (Building a CRUD Application) by Lloyd Marcelino
• Invoke Lambda Function across multiple AWS accounts by Nesma
• How to Sync DynamoDB Changes to SNS | AWS CDK by Florian Sabani
• Handling Large AWS SQS Messages Using Amazon S3 by Fatima Medlij
• Prototype your next idea with Ampt by Emrah Samdan

Serverless Reads 🤓

IxC: Infrastructure as Code, from Code, with Code
Excellent article by Gregor Hohpe that examines the evolution of IaC and IfC and how they fit into the modern SDLC for cloud applications. Definitely worth getting Gregor’s expert take here.

I Reviewed 1,000s of Opinions on Serverless
Dylan Huang clearly did a lot of research for this, and I don’t disagree with his conclusions. Like pretty much anything, nothing is a panacea, and judging “serverless” as an all or nothing proposition is going to leave both sides at a major disadvantage.

Of course monolith infrastructure is cheaper than serverless
But is it? I think James Lane’s argument is more against microservices than serverless (backed by the often misinterpreted Prime Video story), but it doesn’t mean it should be dismissed. I see more and more folks using a monolithic approach with serverless, and it can be successful.

How Modern SQL Databases Are Changing Web Development
Yiming Cao shares some context and thoughts on serverless and edge databases. This is a fascinating space.

The Best Serverless Framework in 2023: A Data-Driven Showdown for AWS Projects
Valentin Beggi shares a comparison of Serverless Framework, CDK, and SST in this in depth post. Do you agree with the recommendations?

Serverless Postgres at the Guardian
This is a great post by Philip McMahon that walks you through the Guardian’s evaluation process, how they ended up with Aurora Serverless, and whether or not it’s really benefiting them.

How an AWS Aurora feature cut our DB costs by 90%
Short read by Greg Foster that explains why they didn’t go with Aurora Serverless, and how they used the Aurora I/O Optimized feature to save a ton of money.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Common Single-Table design modeling mistakes with DynamoDB
This is an long talk by Tyler Walch that does a great job of explaining Single-Table design.

Put and consume events with AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis Data Stream and Event Source Mapping
Marcia Villalba shows you how to put events into a Kinesis Data Stream from AWS Lambda using AWS SDK and AWS CDK.

AWS Bites #93: CDK Patterns – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Always great takes from Eoin and Luciano!

AWS Bites #94: Get the Most out of CloudTrail with Athena
And here’s some more from them!

Ready, Set, Cloud Podcast! #16: DevOps, Generative AI, and Serverless
Omkar Kadam chats with Allen Helton about the human aspect of DevOps as they debate if this will still be something we’re practicing in 5 years.

Real-World Serverless #80: Is AWS Bedrock the OpenAI killer?
Yan Cui chats with Randall Hunt about why tales of AWS’s supposed weakness in AI are far-fetched.

Serverless real-time communication with Momento | Serverless Office Hours
Allen Helton joins Julian Wood to explore how the Momento serverless services work.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams – Shards? Provisoned? On-demand? What does all this mean?
Marcia Villalba explains Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, what are shards, and the different ways to provision capacity to your streams.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some other AWS announcements you may have missed:

• Amazon Timestream releases open-source ODBC driver
• AWS Fargate now supports process ID namespace sharing and kernel parameter configuration
• Amazon Aurora Global Database introduces Global Database Failover
• AWS re:Post launches an enhanced search experience
• Amazon EventBridge API Destinations is now available in additional regions
• Amazon EMR Serverless now makes it easier to specify fine grained log configurations
• Amazon Lex now supports Confirmation slot type
• AWS Glue Studio now supports Amazon CodeWhisperer in additional regions
• Announcing Terraform support for Amazon OpenSearch Serverless deployments
• Amazon CloudWatch Agent adds support for OpenTelemetry traces and AWS X-Ray
• AWS DataSync expands support for copying data to and from other clouds
• Amazon EventBridge Schema Registry and Schema Discovery now in additional regions
• AWS CodePipeline now supports GitLab
• AWS Audit Manager adds integration with Amazon EventBridge
• Amazon Kinesis Video Streams improves image sampling frequency to 5 frames per second
• Mountpoint for Amazon S3 is now generally available
• Amazon VPC Lattice is now available in 4 additional Regions

Serverless Tools 🛠

Serverless Plugin: Exporting Environment Variables and Stack Outputs
Export environment variables and stack outputs from your Serverless project to local files to be used in development or in CI/CD pipelines to set environment variables or use as input for other tools.

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

I’m getting tired of the “how will it scale?” argument. Nearly anytime someone asks a question about self-hosting, using container-based solutions, or anything that isn’t “serverless,” there’s at least one person who responds with “How will it scale?” thereby discouraging people from using tried and tested methods that have been used for years… ~ Shayan

There is a lot to unpack here, but first let me say that I totally agree with the over-emphasis on “scalability” as a premature optimization. It’s true that the vast majority of apps will never need to scale. That being said, “self-hosting” or even managing a VPS, to me, seems more like an ego thing rather than a technical one. If you’re not using serverless or containers or some other form of managed approach to hosting your apps, you’re likely wasting cycles that could otherwise be better spent. It isn’t always about “scale” so much as it is about “undifferentiated heavy lifting.” If you want to argue that it’s easier to deploy a simple app to a VPS than it is to deal with all the complexity of AWS, I probably wouldn’t disagree. But longer term maintenance, cost, performance, and yes, even initial scaling concerns, are often neutralized with a more modern approach.

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 Hiroko Nishimura (@hirokonishimura). Hiroko is an AWS Community Hero and Technical Instructor in areas of cloud computing and coding. She is also the author of AWS for Non-Engineers, published in 2022, and the LinkedIn Learning course Introduction to AWS for Non-Engineers. She’s also the founder of AWS Newbies! Thank you, Hiroko, for working to contribute SO much of your knowledge to get others started with their cloud journeys!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Phew, another long one trying to catch up on two weeks worth of serverless awesomeness. If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been including a lot of criticisms of serverless when possible. I’m doing this for a few different reasons. First, I think it’s important to see multiple viewpoints (it helps you identify your blindsides). Second, the industry continues to morph, and sometimes it’s more about education than it is the technology. And finally, they’re not necessarily wrong. Serverless (or at least the way many providers have implemented it) still has many issues. This doesn’t mean that it doesn’t still have tremendous value, but important to realize that in its current state, hybrid approaches are often still needed.

There are always tradeoffs. As long as we’re aware of them and are willing to make informed choices, I think the arguments against serverless will turn into arguments for more holistic hybrid approaches. Just my two cents.

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.