Off-by-none: Issue #255

November 14, 2023

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Fumbling with AWS 🏈

In our previous issue, we saw lots of pre:Invent announcements, OpenAI killed a bunch of startups with their AI assistants, and a new “serverless” database embraced steady-state pricing. This week, AWS Lambda upgrades to Amazon Linux 2023, AWS messaging services get even better, and developers continue to fumble with AWS. Plus, we have plenty of serverless content from the community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Well, pre:Invent is definitely here now! Here are some of the most exciting announcements (for me at least 😉).

AWS Lambda added support for Amazon Linux 2023 which is actually quite a big deal. The older one had out of date versions of GCC and other libraries preventing you from using a number of binaries in the latest runtime versions. Also, Amazon CloudFront announced a unified security dashboard which makes it easier to manage your security settings in one place.

AWS Lambda got some other major upgrades including enhancing auto scaling for Kafka event sources, making it easier to troubleshoot errors and timeouts of Init and Restore phase, and a new single pane view of metrics, logs, and traces in the console.

Amazon SQS announced support for JSON protocol, which will dramatically reduce latency as Danilo Poccia explains here, Amazon SNS increased default FIFO topic throughput by 10x to 3,000 messages per second, which is rather insane, and Amazon EventBridge now supports over 20 new Amazon CloudWatch Metrics for event buses, taking that service one step closer to the observability capabilities it needs.

And if you're around today at 1pm ET, Serverless Office Hours is featuring Ampt with me as their guest. Jump on the livestream or watch the replay. We always love your feedback.

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 🏗

Stop using Lambda Layers (use this instead)
AJ Stuyvenberg debunks some Lambda Layer myths and shares the why, why not, and when to use them in your serverless applications.

Serverless Security: Protecting Functions in the Cloud
I always love a good serverless security post. Probably nothing new in here for most of us, but a good reminder from Himanshu Mahajan.

Cloud Functions Combed
Not saying this approach is “right,” but I do love seeing how others, like the article’s author Nino Handler, think about organizing their serverless code bases.

The Energy Drink Episodes 2: The Rise of the Amazon API Gateway
Lee Priest shares part 2 of his introduction to the AWS CDK.

Amazon Bedrock For JavaScript and TypeScript Developers
Bookmark this post by Matteo Depascale if you want a handy reference that shows you how to use all the different AWS Bedrock models with JavaScript and TypeScript.

Using Web-standard API Frameworks with Ampt
Russ Schick explains how some of these new Web-standard API frameworks like Hono, ElysiaJS, and itty-router work. Plus, he shows how you can drop them right into your Ampt projects for super fast and performant routing.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Once again we are flooded with an amazing batch of serverless tutorials. Here are a few that you might want to take a look at:

• An Event-Driven Architecture for a Pizza Delivery Events Flow by Gabriel Gomes, PhD
• When ChatGPT met AWS Serverless by Debasis Rath
• Real-time Image Analysis with AWS Step Functions and Amazon Rekognition by Awedis Keofteian
• AWS App Runner — for folks who like to just write code and don’t like to manage ops, and deploy in mins
• Export CloudWatch Logs to Third-party Observability Tools with Serverless by Ran Isenberg
• Learn serverless on AWS step-by-step: Upload files on S3 by Pierre Chollet
• Deploy your first Node 20 Lambda function on AWS! by Pierre Chollet
• Securing an AWS Lambda function URL with Amazon CloudFront and Lambda@Edge by Mudassir Hafeez
• Serverless Scheduled Reporting Service with AWS EventBridge, Lambda, SNS, and CDK
• Debugging custom ApiGateway authorizers by Luciano Mammino

Serverless Reads 🤓

Fumbling with AWS
Mike Rapin shares his (not at all uncommon) experience as a developer trying to deploy a project to AWS. TLDR, it’s not all sunshine, rainbows, and lollipops.

Read the docs like a book
I whole-heartedly agree with Aaron Francis here. Tutorials and videos are great, but the details are in the docs, and reading through them will give you super powers (well, sort of).

Enhancing Loyalty rewards: How McDonald’s leverages AWS Lambda for microservices
API Gateway -> Kubernetes -> SNS -> SQS -> Lambda. Kevin Nguyen shares McDonald’s Loyalty rewards architecture and Big Mac recipe.

Reducing Cold Starts on AWS Lambda with Java Runtime – Future Ideas about SnapStart, GraalVM and Co
Vadym Kazulkin has spent months testing SnapStart with different configurations, frameworks, and techniques. Now he offers up some ideas how to improve this feature even more.

Serverless: Are you seeking confidence from the wrong place?
Mark White shares some thoughts (or rather, his thought process) on testing serverless applications. The inevitable conclusion really shouldn’t have to be “mock stuff.”

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Stream responses back from Bedrock using Lambda Response Streaming
Marcia Villalba has another great video that shows you how to use Lambda Function URLs to stream results from Bedrock directly to your browser.

Building Low-Code Applications with Serverless Workflows • GOTO 2023
Ben Smith delivers a really interesting talk advocating a “Step Functions-first” approach to building serverless applications.

Bring chaos into serverless | Serverless Office Hours
André Stoll and Kensuke Shimokawa join Julian Wood to show how to implement chaos engineering to stress your serverless apps on purpose.

AWS Bites #103. Building GenAI Features with Bedrock
Eoin and Luciano give a great overview of Amazon Bedrock’s features and discuss how they used it to set up a transcript summarizer to extract chapters for their YouTube videos.

New from AWS 🆕

There are way too many AWS pre:Invent announcements to include them all, but here are some of the ones that caught my attention:

• Database Activity Streams creates Kinesis data streams in on-demand mode
• Amazon CloudWatch Logs announces regular expression filter pattern support for Live Tail
• Amazon RDS Proxy now supports PostgreSQL Extended Query Protocol
• Amazon MSK Serverless now supports all programming languages
• Deploy your stack sets faster with ConcurrencyMode in AWS CloudFormation
• Amazon Bedrock now provides access to Cohere Command Light and Cohere Embed English and multilingual models
• New for Amazon Comprehend – Toxicity Detection
• Amazon Lex introduces Selective Conversation Log Capture for Amazon Lex V2
• AWS App Runner is now available in London, Mumbai, and Paris AWS regions
• AWS Lambda runtime management controls are now available in 6 additional regions
• Amazon Bedrock now provides access to Meta’s Llama 2 Chat 13B model
• Amazon Redshift launches MaxRPU, a new compute cost control setting for Redshift Serverless
• AWS announces general availability of Amazon Aurora MySQL zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift
• Amazon Kinesis Video Streams WebRTC Ingestion is now generally available
• Amazon Comprehend launches new trust and safety features
• Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports idempotency for task launches
• Amazon RDS Proxy now supports RDS Multi-AZ Deployments with two readable standbys
• Amazon Aurora Global Database for PostgreSQL now supports write forwarding
• Amazon OpenSearch Service introduces Neural Search

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

December 1 – December 17, 2023 – Serverless Holiday Hackathon

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

Serverless Star of the Week ⭐️

This week’s star is Anton Babenko (@antonbabenko). Anton is the CEO at Betajob and an AWS Community Builder. He also produces a weekly video on his YouTube channel giving you a weekly dose of Terraform. If you’re planning to attend re:Invent later this month, be sure to check out his presentation on Terraform and AWS Modules. Thank you, Anton, for being an active contributor in the serverless community!

Final Thoughts 🤔

How is AWS re:Invent less than two weeks away!?!?! 🤯 So much do to before I head to Vegas. If you’re going to be there, be sure to message me if you’d like to chat.

Until 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.