Off-by-none: Issue #248

September 26, 2023

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Happy 5 Years to Off-by-none! 🎂

In our previous issue, OpenSearch Serverless got kinda sorta more serverless, SNS FIFO topics got less picky, and AWS tried to stop its AI from hallucinating. This week, Off-by-none celebrates a milestone, AWS spends a few more bucks on AI, and Ampt officially launches! Plus, we have plenty of content from the amazing serverless community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

It’s kind of crazy to think about it, but Off-by-none’s first issue was over FIVE YEARS AGO on September 4, 2018! Serverless has changed a lot in 5 years. Not only has the technology come a long way, but the community has grown into one of the most vibrant, friendly, and amazing communities I’ve ever seen. It’s been quite a journey, and I look forward to what the next 5 years will bring! 🙌

Now onto this week’s AWS news! One of the more exciting announcements was that Amazon SNS message data protection can now de-identify outbound messages via redaction or masking. This is pretty cool because now each endpoint can receive a different payload according to their data access permissions.

Also, AWS App Runner launched improvements for Auto-Scaling configuration management. App Runner is a fabulous service and this just made the automated management of it a lot easier. For those of you that are still using NoSQL Workbench (but are you really?), you can now generate human-readable sample data.

Abinash Kumar reminds us that AWS Lambda end of support for Python 3.7 is coming soon and gives some tips for making a smooth transition.

And in AI news that we can’t seem to get away from, Amazon is investing up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic to show Microsoft that they have more money than they know what to do with, too! If AWS does this right, and by that I mean exposing an Anthropic AI API to every AWS account, then the recent allure of Azure will quickly fade.

In other cloud news, Cisco plans to acquire Splunk in $28B mega deal, and MotherDuck’s serverless analytics platform just got a $52.5M boost.

More importantly than any of this other news 😜, is that Ampt is now available! Go sign up and give it a try. And be sure to check out the Ampt Launch Day livestream. We had a lot of fun.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Robust Architecture for Event Handling
Buddhi Vikasitha lays out a scalable serverless pattern to implement an event handling mechanism.

Supercharge Your AWS Lambda: Accelerate Development with a Low-Code Lambda Layer
Interesting approach here, though I think I agree with Alex DeBrie that sharing code with layers isn’t the best approach.

Solve DynamoDB size max exceeded problem : reduce size until 65%
This is a really cool technique from Achmad Fatoni that allows you to compress your DynamoDB items. Seems very situational, but could be a handy little trick when necessary.

Data Integration Architecture on AWS: API Gateway, Kinesis, Firehose, Lambda, and S3 for Processing 250 Million Monthly Transactions
Not sure if this was implemented, or plans to be, but either way it’s a look at another serverless pattern for high volume processing along with a cost breakdown.

Search your AWS resources blazingly fast ⚡️
I had no idea you could do this! Thanks Chloe Mouret for this tip.

Is the AWS Inspector’s Lambda code scanning feature worth its price?
Samuel Durand asks the question and dives into the details. Security is usually always worth it, but give the article a read before you decide.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Always fun reading through all these amazing tutorials. Here are a few interesting ones:

• Achieving Tag Compliance with AWS Config, Systems Manager, and Lambda by Esteban
• How to build AWS State Machines using AWS CDK – Part II by Peter McAree
• Authenticating users in the load balancer with Cognito by Arpad Toth
• OpenAPI + Zod + API Gateway + SST = Turbo Productivity by Marko
• Automated Video Processing with AWS Lambda and FFmpeg by Nicolas Zamarreno
• The Jitter Strategy for Step Functions Error Retries on the New Workflow Studio by Jones Zachariah Noel N
• Learn serverless on AWS step-by-step: Deploy a frontend! by Pierre Chollet
• Turn Any API Into An Event-Driven Engine by Allen Helton
• EventBridge Emoji Event Patterns by Danielle Heberling

Also, last week I incorrectly credited this Deploy AWS AppConfig Configuration with the New L2 CDK Constructs post. It was written by Ran Isenberg.

Serverless Reads 🤓

State of Serverless 2023 Report Suggests Increasing Serverless Adoption
Renato Losio’s roundup of Datadog’s recent report says what we were all thinking.

Grab’s Database Architecture to Handle Millions of Orders — System Design
Great post by Mahesh Saini that shows the power of the DynamoDB + RDBMS one-two punch.

Attending your First re:Invent
If you’re lucky enough to attend re:Invent this year, Benjamen Pyle has some good advice for you.

Serverless is Bad. Give Monoliths Another Chance.
Emer Kurbegovic writes another post that misconstrues the Prime Video story, with some recycled serverless tropes to boot. He’s not wrong about the complexity though.

What AppSec and developers working in cloud-native environments need to know
There’s some good overall advice in here, but I really liked how Yossi Pik redefines applications in the cloud era: “the definition of an application extends to include the associated runtime environment and the underlying infrastructure.”

Serverless Restructuring — Sometimes more files is a good thing
A good read from Sam Hardern that explains how his team optimized their serverless implementation.

Bun hype. How we learned nothing from Yarn
This is harsh from Jared Wilcurt, but quite a bit of it resonates. I do think that innovation and new ideas tend to work their way upstream, which benefits the entire ecosystem. But hype is hype.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Yan Cui has been a content production machine lately! He has some great recently released videos such as Why Testing Step Functions Is Hard & How I Tackle It and AWS Lambda: Why you should stop using DLQs, use Destinations instead, and another excellent episode of the Real-World Serverless podcast talking about Google’s latest AI announcements with Gerard Sans.

Ready, Set, Cloud Podcast! – Episode #19: Stop Getting Cloud Certifications
Allen Helton chats with Ro Ndimofor about an ongoing topic of debate: Are Cloud Certifications worth it? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Advanced Event Source Mapping configuration | AWS Lambda and Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
Marcia Villalba never fails to disappoint with another excellent video, this time diving deeper into Event Source Mappings (ESM).

AWS Bites #96: AWS Governance and Landing Zone with Control Tower, Org Formation, and Terraform
It’s not the most exciting topic, but Eoin and Luciano jump into a very, very, very important conversation about cloud governance.

Idempotency: exactly once processing | Serverless Office Hours
Jeff Baker, Keven Fuentes, and Andrea Amorosi join Julian Wood to discuss why “exactly once processing” is important in distributed systems so you can safely retry operations.

New from AWS 🆕

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

• Usability improvements and navigation bar enhancements for the AWS Management Console
• Amazon Redshift announces role-based access control support in workload management (WLM)
• IAM Roles Anywhere credential helper now supports PKCS #11 modules
• Announcing general availability of Amazon EC2 M2 Pro Mac instances for macOS
• Amazon CloudWatch adds new Metric Math for RDS Performance Insights
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) supports in-place major version upgrade
• Amazon EventBridge Pipes now available in three additional regions
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now supports JSON schema validation
• Amazon Location Services announces a price reduction of up to 75% for tracking and geofencing

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

September 28, 2023 – Simple and Magical ways to optimize DynamoDB

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 Nick Triantafillou (@xelfer). Nick is an AWS Hero, a Cloud Engineer, and one of the biggest Christmas light enthusiasts anyone has ever seen. He spent 6 years teaching AWS Cloud to people as one of the original instructors at acloud.guru. Nick also runs the Wollongong AWS User group and makes videos teaching people about AWS services at https://www.tiktok.com/@nickexplainsaws. Thanks for teaching the world how to build in the cloud, Nick!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Wow. 5 years. I’m thankful for all of you that have followed this newsletter, whether from the beginning or joining at some point along the way. I hope you’ve found something useful in here over the years, and I hope that this amazing community will continue to inspire you like it has me. I plan on keeping this going, so I hope you’ll stick around for another 5 years. 😉

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 X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, or email.