Off-by-none: Issue #246

September 12, 2023

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Serverless Bun? 🧅

In our previous issue, we learned about the State of Serverless, saw how properly naming a service works wonders, and started getting ready for a big launch. This week, we look at Bun’s potential impact on serverless, meet some new heroes, and learn to stop thinking about old compute. Plus, we have lots of amazing content from the serverless community for you!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Let’s start with some AWS news. AWS SAM CLI announced local testing and debugging support on Terraform projects last week. Some folks seemed excited about this, and I get the strategy behind supporting what seems to be the most popular IaC tool with your primary serverless developer workflow product, but it seems off to me. AWS has enough of a DX problem and the more they try to accommodate everyone, the less developers they actually do.

Also, AWS Step Functions launched enhanced error handling, which is pretty cool. Detailed error messages in Fail states, more control over retry intervals and retry strategies, and most importantly, the addition of jitter to randomize your retry intervals. 👍 from me!

And, AWS introduced some new AWS Heroes, including our good friend Nick Triantafillou.

Now let’s talk about Bun. Unless you’ve been living off the grid for the last year or so, you’ve likely heard about the recent release of Bun 1.0. Bun seems very cool and the early benchmarks are impressive. What does this hav to do with serverless, you ask? Well, lots of folks are wondering if Bun’s exceptional speed (and tooling, testing, etc.) would outperform the Node.js runtime on AWS Lambda. It’s an interesting proposition.

Mitchell Kossoris did some initial benchmarks on Serverless Bun vs Node, plus Boris Tane did some last year as well when Bun was still a bit early. The results are, unfortunately, unsurprising since Bun needs to use a custom runtime, which is going to be a bit slower, especially on cold starts. But even without official AWS support, the benefits of shaving off a few milliseconds here and there on warm invocations could add up to both cost savings and other performance games. I know I’ve been experimenting with it as well. Either way, it’s clear that Bun is disrupting JavaScript land, and maybe serverless land too!

In other cloud news, the team at Serverless Guru have launched CloudGTO, which helps developers build AWS serverless architecture quickly and with best practices baked in. It’s currently in Public Beta and looks very interesting.

Also, Fermyon is previewing a new spin on Serverless AI via Wasm. If that sounds like a lot of buzzwords, then read the article- they also mention Kubernetes. There are lots of interesting things happening in the AI space (though I think we’re quickly headed toward the trough of disillusionment), but either way, there are use cases here.

And speaking of AI, Momento posted all the talks from MoCon, which focuses pretty heavily on GenAI, Vector databases, and a lot of other AI related stuff you probably should at least make yourself aware of.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Serverless Challenge – Is scaling achievable without the utilization of a cache-aside pattern?
Daniele Frasca explores the design requirements to scale a serverless application to 10,000 requests per second, without a cache.

AWS Lambda Deprecates Go Runtime
Some feedback on the deprecation of the Go Runtime.

Nine Ways to Lose Data Using Serverless Without Even Knowing It
Marko outlines a number of considerations when building serverless apps to ensure that your data doesn’t get lost somewhere in between cloud services.

Static IP for Lambda: ingress, egress and bypassing the dreaded NAT Gateway
Another excellent article by Yan Cui. Managed NAT Gateway costs have been a running joke for years, but it’s time to stop punishing Serverless SecOps and those needing access to VPC resources.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Using SQS to Throttle Writes to DynamoDB
Everything can scale in AWS, but sometimes the need for elasticity is really what will cost you. I like Guille Ojeda’s use of the Storage-First pattern using SQS here. This is a great way to get the cost benefits of provisioning for steady-state without losing burst capabilities.

DynamoDB Streams EventBridge Pipes Multiple Items
Great post by Benjamen Pyle that demonstrates a pattern for handling multiple item types (or entities) in a DynamoDB table that are streamed to EventBridge Pipes.

Enhancing EventBridge Scheduling: How to Achieve Second-Level Precision
Ashutosh Mahajan offers a straightforward pattern for adding additional precision to your one-off schedules.

Using Cognito user ID to set up item-level access control to tables – Authenticated users in Cognito Identity pools, Part 3
Arpad Toth has a very interesting post that show you how to get fine-grained access control on DynamoDB tables items using Cognito.

Building an Async CSV Parser with Ampt
Ben Miner teaches you how to use Ampt to deploy a completely serverless asynchronous CSV parser that’s triggered when files are uploaded to an S3 bucket.

Teaching boto3 to store floats and datetime objects in DynamoDB
Not sure I fully understand why boto3 doesn’t support this out of the box, but Maurice Borgmeier has a fix nonetheless.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Stop thinking in Old Compute!
This might be Mark Henwood’s stream of consciousness, but I like what he’s saying. I know we all care about cold starts, but in modern event-driven systems, always-on resources are very likely unnecessary.

Why is logging so damn hard?
Boris Tane tells you why. He also says that “distributed tracing is the current industry answer,” which is certainly true, but IMO, just a stepping stone to something hopefully better. 🤞

How Vercel Shipped Cron Jobs in 2 Months Using Amazon EventBridge Scheduler
Marcia Villalba shares how Vercel used the Amazon EventBridge Scheduler to add Cron Job functionality to their offerings. Implementing good, reusable patterns on AWS is a good strategy.

LUNA Creatives: Maximizing Cloud Development Productivity with Ampt
I wrote up an Ampt case study for one of our agency customers that shows how Ampt reduced time spent on development-related issues by 95%, which is pretty crazy.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Run any web app on Lambda | Serverless Office Hours
Harold Sun joins Julian Wood to show how you can run familiar frameworks such as Express.js, Next.js, Flask, SpringBoot, and Laravel directly on AWS Lambda.

Ready, Set, Cloud Podcast! – Episode #18: Snap Start, Java, and Cold Starts
Allen Helton chats with Vadym Kazulkin about the optimization techniques developers use to mitigate cold starts like Snap Start, priming, and using GraalVM.

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose – What is this service for?
Marcia Villalba explains what Kinesis Data Firehose is, what it’s used for, what features it has, and how it integrates with AWS Lambda and Amazon S3.

New from AWS 🆕

A few other AWS updates you might have missed:

• AWS WAF Bot Control now protects against distributed proxy-based attacks
• Amazon CloudWatch Logs announces regular expression filter pattern syntax support
• Amazon SES email receiving service expands to 7 new regions
• Amazon Route 53 now supports AWS-managed prefix lists for health checks

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

September 21, 2023 – ServerlessDays Cardiff

September 23-24, 2023 –ServerlessDays Tokyo 2023

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 Damian Olguin (@enlink). Damian is a technology entrepreneur and co-founder of the Teracloud Community. He’s also been an AWS Community Hero since 2020. A true technology enthusiast, you can often find him traveling to and sharing his experiences at tech conferences around the world. Thank you, Damian, for helping to make technology easier and more accessible for others!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Summer is basically over in the northern hemisphere 😢, but that means we’re back to our weekly schedule! September always feels like a fresh start, so if you have any thoughts on how we can make this newsletter better, I’m all ears.

See you 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 X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, or email.