Off-by-none: Issue #254

November 7, 2023

Only have a few minutes? Check out this week's MOST POPULAR links as chosen by our email subscribers.

AI is eating the world, and your startup idea 🤖

In our previous issue, the Serverless Framework announced an upcoming V4, SNS & SQS got more super powers, and GenAI kept getting easier. This week, pre:Invent intensifies, OpenAI kills a bunch of startups, and a new serverless database might finally get it. Plus, we have a ton of serverless content from our amazing community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

It looks like pre:Invent is officially here! AWS announced that AWS Lambda now supports faster polling scale-up rate for Amazon SQS as an event source, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and Amazon SQS now have Amazon EventBridge Pipes console integration, and AWS CodeBuild now supports AWS Lambda compute (which is pretty cool).

James Beswick wrote a detailed post on the faster polling scale-up for AWS Lambda functions configured with Amazon SQS that’s worth looking at.
Nik Pinski also pointed out that since EventBridge Pipes and Lambda EventSourceMapping use the same Serverless Poller Infrastructure, these improvements benefit EventBridge Pipes too!

In AI news, OpenAI’s new models and developer products announced at DevDay yesterday probably killed your new startup idea. But as Scott Galloway and Aswath Damodaran point out, AI is likely just creating a tax that all companies will need to pay to a few major players out there (like OpenAI). I knew full well that many of these “AI wrapper” startups would likely be dead in the water as soon as OpenAI added agents, but given the cost of training (and operating) models, only a select few will have the resources to provide the actual foundation.

In other cloud related news, Diagrid launched a Serverless, Fully-Managed Dapr Offering, French serverless platform startup Koyeb raises $7M, and Angular is trying to make itself relevant again.

Datadog also released it 10 Insights on Real-World Container Use report. Obviously serverless containers are crushing it. 🤷‍♂️

A few smart folks at Google wrote up an academic paper titled Towards Modern Development of Cloud Applications in which they discuss a method for building monoliths that are automatically deployed as distributed components. It was published months ago, but just recently got some buzz. They must be following along with what we’re doing at Ampt. 😉

And finally, Timescale introduced Dynamic PostgreSQL, another entrant to the serverless database space race. The difference here (I think) is that they are positioning this as “Buy the base, rent the peak.” I’ve been saying this for a very long time, but this is the missing piece of serverless that cloud providers need to embrace.

Need help building your serverless apps? Check out Serverless Guru, your guide to cloud excellence helping you on every step of your serverless journey including team training, pattern development, mass service migrations, architecting and developing new solutions. SPONSORED

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Understanding in depth how AWS Lambda layers work
This is great deep dive into AWS Lambda layers.

Let’s CDK: The Energy Drink Episodes
If you don’t know all the core CDK concepts, Lee Priest can help you out.

Adding HTTP Security Headers Using Lambda@Edge
Quick and simple overview by Wilmo Martinez

Amazon DevOps Guru for the Serverless applications – Part 5 Anomaly Detection on Lambda invocations
These tests by Vadym Kazulkin are really interesting to me. Very cool stuff.

Supercharge Your AWS Lambda Game With Lambda Powertools
James Matson overview of Lambda Powertools and what it can do to up your serverless game.

AWS Lambda did not invent cold starts! It just made you realize that you have them.
Khawaja Shams explains in an X thread that cold starts are nothing new. It’s probably important to understand this nugget from Rehan van der Merwe as well: “If you care about AWS Lambda cold starts, you just don’t have enough traffic.”

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

So many amazing tutorials. Here are the ones that I had to share:

• 3 ways to catch all the events going through the EventBridge Event Bus by Pubudu Jayawardana
• Filter and Enrich all your events with EventBridge Pipes by Eric Bach
• Unlocking FAISS: Vector Indexing and ANN with Serverless Architecture by Akash Mathur
• Serverless Image Labeling by Bat Lamjav
• Tame Long Running Tasks with Web Sockets! by Michael Walmsley
• How to Test Serverless Applications on AWS by Matthew Wilson
• [Hands-On] AWS Lambda function URL with AWS IAM Authentication type by Chirag (Srce Cde)
• How I implemented web analytics reporting with Timestream by Yan Cui
• Consuming an SQS Event with Lambda and Rust by Benjamen Pyle
• How I Used Amazon Bedrock to Write, Schedule, and Post My Tweets by Allen Helton
• Controlling access to API endpoints with Cognito groups, Part 2 by Arpad Toth

Serverless Reads 🤓

The reckoning on cloud container and serverless security
So much responsibility now falls on the “serverless developer” that security is often overlooked. James Cambell points out some things to consider.

So you want to go Serverless, or do you?
Prashant Bhardwaj’s stream of consciousness might strangely line up with your own thoughts on the matter.

Leveraging AIOps to keep pace with cloud-native complexity
I’ve got some more thinking to do on this before I share more of my own thoughts, but Amir Krayden’s piece isn’t wrong about the explosion of complexity.

AIaaP: AI as a Platform
And speaking of AI, Lee Gilmore has a fascinating piece on how enterprises should be enabling teams with a centralized AI platform. I’m curious how the OpenAI announcements might impact his thinking here.

Serverless Is Not All You Need
Yinjun Wu shares an interesting analysis from both the consumer and vendor perspective on choosing serverless.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

AWS Bites #102 – Future of AWS and Serverless
Eoin and Luciano chat with me (I was honored to be their first ever guest) about my journey into AWS, the current state of serverless, and what we’re building with Ampt.

Visually build AWS applications | Serverless Office Hours
Carl Caum and Paras Jain join Julian Wood to show how to use App Composer’s interactive canvas to visually create application designs.

Lambda Response Streaming
Marcia Villalba shares another excellent video that shows you how to get faster responses from AWS Lambda using Lambda Response Streaming.

How Powertools for AWS Lambda Grew via 40% Volunteers
Two solutions architects from AWS share how Powertools for AWS Lambda is seeing increased adoption with the open source community backing it.

Ready, Set, Cloud Podcast! -Episode #22 – The Dirty Truth About Developer Advocacy
Michael “Focus Otter” Liendo chats with Allen Helton about what makes developer advocacy unique and relevant, and how companies should think about implementing it.

What is Amazon File System (EFS) and should you use it with Lambda?
Yan Cui teaches you how to connect ECS, EC2 and AWS Lambda functions to a file system and share files between all the connected parties.

Real-World Serverless podcast – Episode #87 – Serverless.TF and the Terraform licensing fiasco
Yan Cui speaks with Anton Babenko (creator of the Serverless.TF framework) about serverless development with Terraform and the problems that Serverless.TF aims to solve.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some other pre:Invent announcements that might interest you:

• Amazon EMR Studio adds support for interactive analytics on Amazon EMR Serverless
• AWS Fargate now enables Amazon ECS tasks to selectively leverage SOCI
• AWS App Runner now supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) for public inbound traffic
• Amazon MSK adds check for too many partitions to AWS Trusted Advisor
• AWS Global Accelerator extends IPv6 support to dual stack NLB endpoints
• Announcing cross-account support for AWS Global Accelerator
• IAM Access Analyzer policy generation now extends coverage to over 200 AWS services
• Amazon SES now offers 60 days of metric history in Virtual Deliverability Manager
• Amazon S3 Object Lambda now integrates with Amazon Athena
• Amazon Translate introduces brevity customization to reduce translation output lengths
• AWS Lambda supports IPv6 for outbound connections in VPC in 6 additional regions
• Amazon Athena announces one hour reservations for Provisioned Capacity

Thoughts from social

The single most expensive phrase in software engineering: “Maybe we should just build it ourselves instead?” ~ Sebastian Bille

This post was from over a year ago, but randomly surfaced the other day for me. If you are building anything that doesn’t add value for your users, you are wasting valuable human resources.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

Know of any upcoming events related to serverless? Be sure to send them my way!

Serverless Star of the Week ⭐️

This week’s serverless star is Pierre Chollet (@PierreChollet22). Pierre is a software engineer at Theodo as well as an AWS Community Builder. He also speaks and writes about serverless. In June, he was a speaker at ServerlessDays Paris on the topic “Auditing the infrastructure of serverless applications at a glance.” You can also find regular blog posts by Pierre in his 14-part series “Learn serverless on AWS step-by-step.” Thank you, Pierre, for your ongoing contributions to the serverless community!

Final Thoughts 🤔

This was another long one, but I hope the theme here is quite clear. AI is accelerating innovation at a pace we’ve never seen before. If you thought serverless got rid of a lot of undifferentiated heavy lifting, wait until you see what AI will do. I’m not an AI maximalist. It won’t solve all of our problems. In fact, it’ll probably create a whole bunch of new ones. However, code generation, optimization, and automation are here to stay. Embrace it, and prepare yourself accordingly.

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, LinkedIn, or email.