Off-by-none: Issue #250

October 10, 2023

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When communities matter the most. 😞

Before we get started, I wanted to take a moment to extend my sympathies to the families and victims of the most recent attacks in Israel. I know many believe that in times of tragedy and suffering, things like email newsletters seem unnecessary in the moment, perhaps even a bit disrespectful. When the world inevitably tells us how awful it can be, I always struggle as to whether opining on the latest updates to EventBridge is appropriate and worth adding noise that could drown out more important dialogue.

It’s too easy to dehumanize people we don’t know, or don’t understand, or are separated from by something as simple as geography. The power of diverse communities (like the serverless one) is that we connect across cultures, and regardless of religion, race, gender, and all the other things that make us so wonderfully different, we get to know each other for the individual, complex human beings we all are, sharing this experience together.

I have a difficult time understanding how others don’t feel the slightest bit of empathy when they see a 3 year old climbing under razor wire, or the bodies of civilians after a bombing, or a teenager struggling with their identity. I consider myself a humanist, and while I’m certainly not free of biases, meeting people through the serverless community has helped me better understand the human condition and (I hope) made me a better person.

This newsletter may seem like just a collection of links, but it’s really a collection of people who are sharing their ideas and passion for serverless with the world. If that helps you understand their perspective a bit better, or helps you solve a problem, or maybe even connects you with them to dig deeper on a topic, then hopefully you can share that bridge with others. Perhaps that’ll help make the world a little smaller and easier to see what binds us all together.

In our previous issue, Cloudflare raised the bar again, AWS made Bedrock GA, and MongoDB hired a new CTO. This week, EventBridge gets wild(cards), MySQL takes a new vector, and we rethink the mighty Lambdalith. Plus, we have a bunch of amazing content from the serverless community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

AWS had a couple of exciting announcements last week, including Amazon EventBridge announcing support for wildcard filters in rules. This is a very cool feature that makes pattern matching events a lot easier. Also, Lambda test events are now available in AWS SAM CLI, which means you can share these events with other teammates, hopefully making it easier to test your serverless apps.

In other cloud news, Thomas Aribart continues to work on DynamoDB Toolbox v1, and has made a new v1 beta available.

And finally, PlanetScale is forking MySQL to add vector support.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Node.js Worker Threads & AWS Lambda
Kevin Dico explores what happens when you use multiple threads with Node.js in Lambda functions.

Real-Time Data Aggregation Using DynamoDB Streams — Deliveroo’s System Design
Mahesh Saini explains how Deliveroo uses the power for DynamoDB streams to deliver real-time favorite counts to users.

Improving CloudWatch Alarms for Lambda Errors
Marko from serverlesslife.com shares a way to have alerts send you an email when something goes wrong.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

There were lots of great tutorials from this past week, but one that really caught my eye was Serverless File Uploads: A Journey from Perplexity to Clarity by Adefemi Oseni. This line says it all, “It also underscored the importance of testing in a production-like environment, as local plugins like serverless-offline may not always mimic the behavior of AWS Lambda accurately.” Truer words have never been spoken.

And here are some other excellent tutorials.

• Easily Deploy Serverless SPA Apps With Custom AWS CDK Constructs by Lee Gilmore
• Learn serverless on AWS step-by-step: Strong Types! by Pierre Chollet
• Protecting a Static Website with JWT and Lambda@Edge by Jimmy Dahlqvist
• Building a real time chat application with Next.js on Ampt by Educloud Academy
• URL Shortener using AWS Gateway, Lambda and DynamoDB by Nischal Shakya
• EventBridge with AppSync JavaScript Resolvers by Eric Bach
• Analyzing and Correcting Errors with Advanced SQS Redrive by Benjamen Pyle
• Help! How do I set DeletionPolicy to Retain for production only? by Yan Cui
• WebSocket with AWS API Gateway by Benjamen Pyle
• Using Lambda@Edge IP Whitelisting in Serverless by Lee Gilmore

Serverless Reads 🤓

Test-Driven Development with AI: The Right Way to Code Using Generative AI
Allen Helton says developers should write the unit tests and let AI generate the code to satisfy them. Is this what cloud development will look like in the future?

Should you use a Lambda Monolith, aka Lambdalith, for your API?
Rehan van der Merwe makes a very compelling case for the Lambdalith for API workloads. I’m 100% with him on this.

The Future of Alexa Skills
Brian Tarbox wrote up some thoughts on the current state of Alexa skills, which I think translates into the broader Voice Assistant market. I’ve always been fascinated by voice-as-an-interface, but even though my house has an Alexa in just about every room, the only thing it seems good for (when it works) is setting timers and alarms.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Governance in depth for serverless apps | Serverless Office Hours
Heeki Park, Debasis Rath, and Pallavi Srivasatava join Julian Wood to explore a new learning guide, “Implementing Governance in Depth for Serverless Applications.”

Build Applications with Bedrock and Lambda
Marcia Villalba shows you how to connect Bedrock to your Lambda functions and use it to build applications.

Ready, Set, Cloud Podcast! #20 The Secret Power of Feature Flags
Allen sits down with Steve Rice to discuss the types of feature flags, common anti-patterns, and how to implement them in your code.

Enterprise-scale Serverless Adoption Essentials
Excellent presentation by Sheen Brisals and Lee Priest from the LEGO Group at the recent AWS Community Summit. There are a lot more great videos from that event available here.

Real-World Serverless podcast #84 – Deploying on Fridays
Yan chats with Charity Majors to discuss all things observability and, of course, why having good practices lets you deploy on Fridays.

New from AWS 🆕

And here are some more AWS announcements you may have missed:

• AWS launches more encryption options for AWS AppConfig feature flags
• Announcing Amazon SQS binding extension support in CoreWCF
• AWS Glue now supports GitLab, BitBucket in its Git integration feature
• Amazon OpenSearch Service announced Amazon OpenSearch Service Integrations
• AWS Control Tower releases 22 proactive controls and 12 AWS Security Hub Detective controls
• Amazon Location Service adds bounding box search for device positions
• Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports alerting and anomalies on dashboards
• New updates to the AWS Well-Architected Framework
• AWS Amplify’s GraphQL API capabilities now available as AWS CDK construct
• AWS App Runner launches improvements for using custom domains

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

Final Thoughts 🤔

Hopefully my intro said it all. We’ll be back next week with a full issue.

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.