Off-by-none: Issue #251

October 17, 2023

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Standing on the shoulders of giants 🗿

In our previous issue, EventBridge got better wildcards, Planetscale forked MySQL to add vector support, and we gave a thumbs up to mighty Lambdalith. This week, OpenSearch adds Pipelines, CloudWatch helps you set alarms, and Ampt adds support for Next.js 13.5. Plus, we have lots of serverless content from our amazing community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

It was a surprisingly quiet serverless week at AWS, but there were still a few announcements that stuck out. They announced AWS Lambda’s support for Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) for outbound connections in VPC. I’m not sure who was asking for this, but it’s there now. Another step to prepare us all for $3.75/mth IPv4 addresses.

AWS also announced Search Pipelines for OpenSearch. This isn’t specifically a serverless announcement, but this idea of bringing “compute” to the database (rather than data to compute) is something Ben Kehoe talked about years ago that’s becoming more and more common. “Dumb pipes” was once a mantra, but it seems as though the continued bifurcation of business logic across different components isn’t slowing down. Efficient, yes, but I still worry about the management of it.

I do wonder if this trend is what creates the need for things like the new CloudWatch out-of-the-box alarm recommendations for AWS services. The more places business logic is running requires more robust monitoring capabilities.

Finally, Ampt introduced support for Next.js 13.5. If anyone is building with Next.js, it’s probably important to note that it’s getting increasingly more difficult to support it outside of the Vercel platform. Dig through the source of Open NEXT to get a sense of some of the hoops you need to jump through.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

A Web Socket Primer
Michael Walmsley gives you a great overview of the why, what, and how of WebSockets on AWS API Gateway.

Empowering Enterprises with Serverless Generative AI: Amazon Bedrock
We’ve been experimenting with Amazon Bedrock, and the “serverlessness” of it is no joke. Matt Carey explains why this is a huge advantage.

Lambda functions over URLs
Jones Zachariah Noel N gives you a quick overview of how to use this great feature, and how to get around a few gotchas.

Efficient Event Orchestration: Uniting Salesforce with AWS EventBridge
I feel like the partner integrations are an under-appreciated feature of EventBridge. When it first launched I was hoping this was the end of webhooks. We’re not there yet, but we probably should be.

Amazon DevOps Guru for the Serverless applications – Part 3 Anomaly Detection on DynamoDB
Vadym Kazulkin shares part 3 of his series on Amazon DevOps Guru. I appreciate these articles, because I’ve yet to have the time to even look at this service.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Lots of great tutorials this week, including some really fascinating ones using AI with serverless. I wanted to call out the Deploy a Lambda with a static IP for FREE post by Guillaume Duboc. I didn’t realize this was possible, but could develop into a nice pattern for people who still think IP addresses can’t be spoofed. 🤷‍♂️

And here are some more amazing tutorials:

• How I built an affiliate tracking system in a weekend with serverless by Yan Cui
• Modernizing Serverless Workflows Adopting AWS CDK: A Journey from Serverless Framework by Gabriel Torres
• Easy serverless user validation: id + selfie by Lorenzo Panzeri
• Implement custom retry logic with SQS & Lambda - Part I - using SQS delayed messages by Pubudu Jayawardana
• Generate Image from Text Using Amazon Bedrock’s Stable Diffusion XL Model via AWS CLI by Jimmy
• AI Clean Code Generation through a Plop CLI using TypeScript & Amazon Bedrock by Lee Gilmore
• Running an LLM inside an AWS Lambda Function by Martyn Kilbryde

Serverless Reads 🤓

When the shoulders of giants are offered, you’d do well to stand on them
Luc van Donkersgoed wrote a great piece that shares his thoughts on the most common serverless objections.

Raising the Serverless Bar: Infrastructure APIs Unleash More Value for Enterprises
This is a puff piece for Fauna by Tyson Trautmann, but his reasoning is sound, and I fully agree that infrastructure is ready to be completely abstracted away.

To be serverless or not…an honest and opinionated comparison of Azure Functions and AWS Lambda functions for the modern software developer
Boris Janischevsky shares some pretty detailed thoughts on the evolution and vendor support of these two FaaS offerings. It gets into the weeds, but it is an interesting perspective that goes well beyond surface-level talking points.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Kinesis Data Streams and Lambda in productions | What to do when something fails?
Marcia Villalba is joined by Anahit Pogosova to discuss failure strategies Kinesis Data Streams and Lambda, including how to troubleshoot your event producer and consumer to figure out where the problem is.

AWS Bites 99. The fears of adopting AWS (and how to fight them)
Eoin and Luciano have another great conversation about fears concerning AWS costs, balancing complexity with capability, and, of course, the dreaded vendor lock-in.

Baselime: Serverless observability | Serverless Office Hours
Boris Tane joins Julian Wood to show how the Baselime observability platform combines logs, metrics, distributed tracing and wide-events to let you discover, prioritize and resolve errors in real-time. It’s very cool.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are a few more AWS announcements that might interest you:

• AWS Entity Resolution launches records matching with data service providers
• AWS Step Functions launches Optimized Integration for Amazon EMR Serverless
• Enhance accuracy of pre-trained Rekognition moderation model with Custom Moderation
• Announcing new AWS Network Load Balancer (NLB) availability and performance capabilities
• Amazon Textract launches Custom Queries to improve information extraction for business-specific documents

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

Serverless Star of the Week ⭐️

This week’s star is Sam Williams (@SamCompleteCode). Sam is the creator of Complete Coding, a YouTube channel and blog that helps people learn to build with AWS and Serverless. He is also an AWS Community Builder and has produced over 100 videos to help developers learn serverless and navigate their cloud careers. Thank you Sam for helping to educate the next generation of serverless and cloud developers.

Final Thoughts 🤔

I’m off to Cape Town, South Africa tonight to speak at the ServerlessDays Cape Town conference on Friday. I’m super excited, but also a bit nervous given all the current turmoil in the world. Wish me luck. If you’ll be there, let’s connect! I’ll be at the conference all day.

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.