Off-by-none: Issue #245

September 5, 2023

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The State of Serverless 🌥️

In our previous issue, AppSync killed VTL, HashiCorp made a bunch of friends, and we got a round up of serverless opinions. This week, we learn about the State of Serverless, see how properly naming a service works wonders, and get ready for a big launch. Plus, we have two weeks worth of serverless content for you!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

It was another busy couple of weeks, so let’s get right to it.

Let’s start with the The State of Serverless report from Datadog. There’s already been quite a bit of reporting on this, so I’ll try to keep my commentary brief. I really appreciate that Datadog does this, but I didn’t see any major surprises this year. The big three are seeing serverless adoption increase, though this seems mostly due to hybrid workload adoption (which is fine), Google Cloud Run is the better serverless container service right now, Node.js and Python are still dominate runtimes, and Java cold starts are slow. Also, somewhat predictably, ARM adoption is still slow (mostly due to availability in different regions).

Perhaps the most interesting fact was that Terraform dominates AWS Lambda deployments for larger orgs, though this also seems a bit obvious (due in large part to hybrid workloads). And finally, the fact that Frontend development is driving the creation of new serverless platforms just goes to show that cloud providers still haven’t figured out the DX for these services.

And speaking of DX, AWS continues to work on improving the serverless developer experience. They announced that AWS AppSync now provides an improved module and functions for JavaScript DynamoDB resolvers, continuing on their mission to eradicate VTL from the planet (I hope). They also streamlined the authoring experience in Workflow Studio to make building AWS Step Functions even easier. And AWS Lambda Functions powered by AWS Graviton2 are now available in 6 additional regions, which is great, because that’s been holding back adoption.

AWS also Introduced Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink, which isn’t anything new, just a renaming of Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics because, apparently, nobody knew what the old service was.

Also, Fig has joined AWS. If you’re not familiar with Fig, they provide a pretty cool command line with lots of great built in features. Does this mean AWS will be releasing their own command line? Maybe we’ll hear something by re:Invent 2024. And speaking of re:Invent, Luc van Donkersgoed created a serverless re:Invent session tracker that you probably want to take a look at.

And finally in AWS news, it looks like they are scrapping their low-code service Honeycode. It seemed more “no-code” to me, but either way, it didn’t seem to be meeting developers “where they were.”

In other cloud news, Deno had a denial of service attack that’s since been resolved, Fauna released a TypeScript inspired version of FQL (their query language), Momento released HTTP support for publishing to Topics, and Google Next 2023 happened, further confirming that we won’t stop hearing about AI anytime soon.

It’s Launch Week for Xata, the much anticipated serverless data platform. There have been a few interesting announcements as well, including a very cool file attachments feature.

And speaking of launches, we just announced that September 20th is Ampt Launch Day! The team has been working for months to get ready for this, and we’ve got some great new features like Improved Task Management in Ampt Environments and Ampt Templates that were just released. And if you want to see how some awesome companies are using Ampt, we released new case studies for Sight Consulting and BlokSec.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

What’s the most serverless way to wait for a slow HTTP response?
Yan Cui answers an incredibly important question for all serverless developers. While his answers are accurate, most people probably won’t like the options.

AWS re:Invent 2023 – My Selection Of Serverless Sessions
It’s a little early for me to be thinking about this, but Ran Isenberg put together a list of re:Invent sessions that he’s recommending.

AWS — Amazon EventBridge — Event Bus Explained
EventBridge is insanely powerful and Ciaran O’Keeffe gives a high-level overview of its features and capabilities.

Event-Routers and Brokers in AWS. Navigating the Event-Driven Landscape
Jimmy Dahlqvist takes a deep dive into the AWS event-driven ecosystem.

Understanding AWS Lambda Versions and Aliases and Blue-Green Deployments With AWS Lambda
Muhammad Abutahir shares details about how you can create some pretty resilient systems with deployment safety in these two posts.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

• RAGs To Riches – Part #1 Generative AI & Retrieval & Part #2 Building On Lambda by Ken Collins
• Implementing item-level access control to DynamoDB tables by Arpad Toth
• DynamoDB Streams EventBridge Pipes Enrichment by Benjamen Pyle
• How to Create AWS Lambda Layers most efficient way by Mayank Sharma
• AWS Lambda with tRPC and separate repos using OpenAPI by Rehan van der Merwe
• Handling Errors and Retries in StepFunctions by Maurice Borgmeier
• AWS Step Functions Callback Pattern by Benjamen Pyle
• Combine Standard and Express workflows for fun & profit by Yan Cui
• Full Text Search in AWS without the Price Tag: Server-less Full Text Search with Persistent Indexes using AWS Lambda and AWS EFS! by Christopher Whitney
• Debug failed invocations for AWS EventBridge rules by Morne Snyman

Serverless Reads 🤓

How we built Momento Topics, a serverless WebSocket service
Allen Helton walks you through the architecture of Momento’s new serverless Topics service.

Serverless API without AWS Lambda
Marcin Sodkiewicz shares a case study on how they migrated their API to a serverless “API” with multi-region support and saved money along the way.

Why serverless platforms will unlock a new era of low-code development [Q&A]
Ian Barker’s interview with Briana Frank from IBM Cloud hits a nerve, I think, with a lot of developers who get bogged down with a lot of shift-left work.

Is Coding On Its Way Out?
Allen Helton shares his thoughts on the impact of AI and other technologies like IfC (Infrastructure from Code) on how developers will code in the future.

Don’t Build Microservices, Pursue Loose Coupling
Interesting post by Chris Bertinato that points out the potential flaws in designing microservices, especially for small or early projects.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Serverless Patterns Workshop | Serverless Office Hours
Giedrius Praspaliauskas and Luca Mezzalira join Eric Johnson to talk about the Serverless Patterns Workshop.

Modernising ecommerce using serverless EDA | Serverless Office Hours
Vandana Venkatesan and Alexander Vladimirov join Eric Johnson to go through a serverless design journey with an interactive demo of an event-driven retail store application.

Step Functions versions and aliases!
Marcia Villalba demonstrates Step Functions’ recent support for versions and aliases.

Create powerful data pipelines with Amazon Kinesis and EventBridge Pipes
Marcia Villalba shows you how to create production-like data pipelines using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and EventBridge Pipes.

Overview of AI development with LangChain
Yan Cui chats with Matt Carey about LangChain and demos some AI applications that he has developed with it.

Ready, Set, Cloud!
Allen Helton also chatted with Matt Carey about how completion models work, the differences between GenAI and “regular” AI, and what’s possible in the near future.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some more interesting AWS announcements that you may have missed:

• Amazon SES now offers email delivery and engagement history for every email
• Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion now supports ingesting streaming data from Amazon MSK
• Amazon SNS now supports additional usage metrics in Amazon CloudWatch
• AWS Amplify supports time-based one-time password for MFA on Android, Swift, Flutter
• Amazon OpenSearch Serverless now supports AWS User Notifications
• App Runner adds support for Bitbucket source code repository
• Amazon S3 now supports multivalue answer in response to DNS queries
• Service Quotas adds support to increase the instances per domain quota for Amazon OpenSearch Service

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

Currently working on something 🧑‍💻… Providing capabilities to set hard limit budgets on @awscloud resources with #CDK using Aspects. All child nodes of supported resource types become self-limiting. No more surging cloud bills 💸. 👀 ~ Frédéric Barthelet

Um, yeah, very cool. Too bad AWS didn’t just have this built in. 🤷‍♂️

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 Chris Williams (@mistwire). Chris is a Developer Relations Manager at HashiCorp and has been an AWS Community Hero since 2019. He is also a certified AWS Solutions Architect Professional, blogs about all things virtualization and design at Mistwire, and hosts and presents on the vBrownBag podcast. Thank you, Chris, for continuously finding ways to share with, inspire, and support fellow IT professionals!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Another long one, but we’re back to our weekly issues starting this week! If you made it this far, congratulations, you are a true hardcore serverless fan, and I, for one, appreciate you for it. 😉

Let’s do this again next week,
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.