Off-by-none: Issue #253

October 31, 2023

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Serverless Framework V4! ⚡️

In our previous issue, CodeWhisperer got customizable, Werner apologized, and Ampt added new AI capabilities. This week, the Serverless Framework has an upcoming V4, SNS & SQS get more super powers, and GenAI keeps getting easier. Plus, we have lots of great content from the serverless community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Big news from the Serverless, Inc. team announcing Serverless Framework V4. There are a lot of changes coming, including charging companies making over $2M USD per year. There are still some questions around the pricing, but Yan Cui thinks that starting to charge users is a good thing.

In AWS news, Amazon SNS message data protection now supports custom data identifiers, letting developers filter out additional data formats. Also, Amazon SNS now supports in-place message archiving and replay for FIFO topics eliminating the need to set up a separate service. And, Amazon SQS announced increased throughput quota for FIFO High Throughput mode giving you 18,000 transactions per second per API action. Which is a lot of TPS.

In AWS unforced error news, apparently the AWS Ambassador program no longer recognizes organizing meetups as a valid contribution. I’m not 100% sure what is to be gained by this, other than turning highly engaged folks off to the program.

Also, Bref turned 6 years old, which is kind of crazy to think about, plus a new serverless database, Nile, billed as Serverless Postgres for modern SaaS, was just announced. I’ve lost count at this point.

Last week I mentioned Ampt’s new AI module. We also published a blog post, Introducing Ampt AI: The easiest way to build applications powered by GenAI, and shared an Ampt AI demo on YouTube.

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Serverless Concepts 🏗

How big is a Microservice in Serverless?
Lee Gilmore shares a lot of information in here that should give you plenty of thinking to do on how you organize and size your serverless apps.

Measuring Lambda cold starts with AWS SnapStart – Part 8 Measuring with Java 17
If you’re still building Java apps on Lambda, Vadym Kazulkin shares some updated cold start numbers after an AWS fix.

Decoding Lambda Handler Architecture: How AWS Lambda Functions Work
Vignesh Dayalan shares some animated diagrams to refresh your memory on how Lambda functions work.

Unleashing the Power of Generative AI with AWS Bedrock, AWS CDK, TypeScript
Rushi Patel shares some details on how to work with AWS Bedrock.

Leveraging Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for AWS Lambda: A Comparative Analysis of AWS SAM, Terraform, and Serverless Framework
Kasun de Silva shares his evaluation of these three IaC frameworks.

DynamoDB is the most magical AWS Service
Khawaja Shams and Alex DeBrie share an X thread with some interesting insights into DynamoDB.

If you give a dev a lambda
Sharib Jafari shares what happens when you start to rely on a Lambda Authorizer.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Way too many amazing serverless tutorials this week to share them all. Here are some of my favorites:

• Step Functions distributed map and cross account S3 access by Zied Ben Tahar
• DynamoDB Incremental Export with Step Functions by Benjamen Pyle
• Implement custom retry logic with SQS & Lambda - Part II - using EventBridge Scheduler by Pubudu Jayawardana
• Learn serverless on AWS step-by-step: Master DynamoDB! by Pierre Chollet
• AWS Lambda Invocation from RDS PostgreSQL with DLQ Integration by Shubham
• Build Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards with AWS CDK for Serverless Services by Ran Isenberg
• Serverless API Gateway Ingress for AWS Fargate, in CloudFormation by Nathan Peck
• An efficient way to build your serverless microservices. Part 3. CI/CD with AWS SAM. by Andrii Melashchenko
• Test Event-Driven Architectures with AWS EventBridge and Momento Topics by Elias Brange
• Effortless Scalability: How Asynchronous Lambda Invocation Transforms AWS Workflows by Akash Mathur

Serverless Reads 🤓

Why Running Apps on Your Cat is the Ultimate in Serverless Computing
I’m assuming this was written by AI, but it’s nonetheless a fun poke at serverless from Ryan Peden.

Optimism vs Pessimism in Distributed Systems
When Marc Brooker writes something, you read it. I don’t make the rules.

WebAssembly increasingly used for plug-ins and serverless, but needs better tools
Everything needs better tools, but thought the fact that JavaScript seems to be dominating WASM is pretty hilarious.

Monolith vs Microservices vs Serverless and what to choose for your business needs
Not sure what you’ll take away from this exactly, but Abdessamad Idboussadel does a good job laying out these different approaches. I still think “serverless” is just another microservices approach, but easy to get way too “micro” if you’re not careful.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

AWS Bites #101: Package and Distribute Lambda Functions for fun and profit
Eoin and Luciano discuss different options for sharing your AWS resources with others, including with the Serverless Application Repository (SAR), CloudFormation templates, GitHub publishing, Terraform modules, and container images.

Expert Reveals Secrets to His Serverless Design Process
Sam from Serverless Guru explains his process for developing serverless applications.

Serverless Craic Ep 47: Developer Productivity
The Serverless Craic team discusses how to think about developer productivity in terms other than just writing lines of code.

Build Applications with Generative AI and Serverless – Amazon Bedrock and AWS Lambda NodeJs
Marcia Villalba shows you how to connect Bedrock to your Lambda functions and use it to build applications.

Building GenAI apps | Serverless Office Hours
Veda Raman joins Julian Wood to show how to use Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker with large language models.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some other AWS announcements that might interest you:

• AWS CodePipeline supports triggering on git tags
• Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports efficient vector query filters for FAISS
• Amazon Kinesis Data Streams increases On-Demand write throughput limit to 2 GB/s
• Amazon OpenSearch Serverless now supports automated time-based data deletion
• AWS X-Ray now supports W3C format trace IDs for distributed tracing
• AWS CodePipeline supports parameterized pipelines
• Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

November 27 – December 1, 2023 – AWS re:Invent 2023

Serverless Star of the Week ⭐️

This week’s serverless star is Arpad Toth (@arpadt). Arpad is a software developer, cloud enthusiast, and an AWS Community Builder. He’s been consistently publishing excellent AWS and serverless related articles on his blog for quite some time, most of which you’ve seen featured in this newsletter. Thank you Arpad for sharing your learnings with the community!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Another busy week for serverless and super interesting to see the announcement about Serverless Framework V4. We’ve seen lots of mixed feedback about charging for open source software and I think quite a bit of it is valid. On the other hand, the work that goes into maintaining OSS is significant, and not every sustainability story is a simple as we think it is. All I know is that I’m rooting for the Serverless Framework and the team working on it. It’s had a huge impact on the industry and the community and I think it still has much to offer.

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.