Off-by-none: Issue #258

December 12, 2023

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

Where are all the cloud-native developers? ☁️

In our previous issue, we recapped re:Invent, looked at some of the interesting AWS releases, and shared my favorite re:Invent sessions. This week, AWS Lambda scales 12x faster, Ampt adds serverless Postgres powered by Neon, and we wonder where all the cloud-native developers are. Plus, we have lots of serverless content from our amazing community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

The week post re:Invent was bound to be a bit quieter, but there’s still plenty of interesting things happening in the world of serverless and cloud!

AWS announced that AWS Lambda functions now scale up to 12X faster. I was almost positive this was announced AT re:Invent, but sometimes it’s hard to keep track. Anyway, with a scale up rate of 1,000 concurrent executions every 10 seconds, those are some mighty bursting capabilities.

AWS also announced that AWS Lambda now simplifies connectivity to Amazon RDS and RDS Proxy via Lambda console. I would much rather a simple serverless RDBMS solution on AWS that didn’t need a VPC or cluster provisioning, but I guess that’s not on the menu.

In other database / AI hype news, Fauna introduced Fauna’s new AI Assistant that is designed to help developers more easily find and consume relevant resources. I actually really like these types of use cases, but I also hope there is some serious RAG to avoid sloppy, hallucinated responses.

Ampt just introduced Ampt SQL, a fully managed serverless Postgres database service powered by Neon. This is just the first step, but seamlessly integrating serverless relational databases into isolated developer sandboxes (with schema migrations, preview environments, etc.) was quite a challenge.

And finally, after many years of rounding up data related news and adding his much appreciated context and commentary, Todd Hoff is putting Highscalability up for sale. I was always excited when I got a mention in there. Hopefully someone will pick up the mantle.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

There were a ton of really great posts this week that detail the important nuances of implementing serverless solutions. Here are some of my favorite ones:

• Elasticache Serverless — is it bad or just not for you? by Marcin Sodkiewicz
• Step Functions re:Invented by Matthew Venne
• A serverless solution for on-demand subtitle generation by Flavio Maggi
• AWS Lambda SnapStart -Part 10 Troubleshooting Errors and Timeouts of Init and Restore Phase by Vadym Kazulkin
• 10 things you need to know about AWS event-driven architecture by Gias Uddin
• The one mistake everyone makes when using Kinesis with Lambda by Yan Cui
• 5 Serverless Best Practices to Become a Skilled Cloud Architect by Pierre Chollet
• Exploring Advanced Logging Controls for AWS Lambda by Martyn Kilbryde
• Explain AWS Lambda to your EC2 guy in 5 steps by Siri Shamendra
• Functionless First… Do you need that Lambda function? by Steve Morland
• Building Scalable Serverless Applications with Node.js and Twelve-Factor Principles by Roberto Minelli

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here is another batch of excellent serverless tutorials to keep you busy:

• The Energy Drink Episodes 3: The Step Function Awakens by Lee Priest
• Serverless and event-driven translation bot by Jimmy Dahlqvist. (and yes, I love that this highlights the use of more “traditional” AI services)
• AWS Bedrock Claude 2.1 – Return only JSON by Martin Mueller
• Testing Individual AWS StepFunction States by
  Sebastian Bille
• API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB and Rust by Benjamen Pyle
• Call external APIs with OAuth within Step Functions by Pubudu Jayawardana
• How to update Lambda Functions from Common JS to ECMAScript by Andres Moreno
• Override the 500 resource limit of AWS CloudFormation templates with Serverless Framework by Anaïs Schlienger
• Lightweight Clean Code: Containers to Lambda Functions (and back again) by Lee Gilmore

Serverless Reads 🤓

The Serverless Mindset and Infrastructure as Code
Danielle Heberling shares her thoughts on the power of integrating visual experiences into IaC workflows. I would agree that the drag-n-drop interface helps with generating boilerplate, but I’m curious how much time this saves beyond scaffolding if you still need to look up and configure settings beyond the basic defaults?

Souring on Serverless
You know I like to include differing opinions, so here is Levi Nunnink’s. Yes, for small workloads with low traffic, cold starts are an issue. A low-cost, always on solution might be a better fit. But once you get more than a few requests per second, the cold start starts to become trivial. For me, it’s an acceptable tradeoff for that amount of elasticity.

Lessons from migrating a microservice from AWS SAM to CDK
Stephen Smith shares his team’s experience migrating from declarative to imperative infrastructure configuration.

AWS re:Invent: The “non GenAI” themes you should know about
Tim Wagner’s excellent recap of re:Invent that looks at the continued push towards “no ops” at AWS.

Where Are all the Cloud-Native Developers?
There is (and probably should remain) a difference between developers and DevOps engineers (or whatever you want to call them). Adrian Bridgwater’s post dances around this a bit, but certainly hits on the fact that the cloud has created a new breed of developer that not everyone’s ready to evolve to.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Step Functions: What’s new! | Serverless Office Hours
Tanya Boiteau and Denise Young join Julian Wood to show new Step Functions features including HTTPS endpoints, TestState, and Bedrock optimized integrations, plus App Composer and Step Functions in VS Code.

Build generative AI apps using AWS Step Functions and Amazon Bedrock
Marcia Villalba demonstrates the new optimized connector integration between Bedrock and Step Functions, plus how to fine-tune foundational models with your own data.

AWS Bites #107 – Expert opinions from re:Invent 2023
Luciano shares re:Invent interviews from AWS community leaders on their favorite announcements from re:Invent 2023.

Here are two more AWS re:Invent sessions that I didn’t share last week but most definitely deserve your attention. 😉

AWS re:Invent 2023 – Advanced event-driven patterns with Amazon EventBridge (COM301-R)
Sheen Brisals dives into the primary elements of event-driven architecture, some of the best practices to use, and real-world use cases to see these patterns put into practice.

AWS re:Invent 2023 – Advanced data modeling with Amazon DynamoDB (DAT410)
Alex DeBrie shows you advanced techniques to get the most out of DynamoDB and how to “think in DynamoDB” by learning the DynamoDB foundations and principles for data modeling.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some more post AWS re:Invent announcements you may have missed:

• Amazon Rekognition launches Face APIs version 7 for improved accuracy and lower latency
• Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams adds support for OpenTelemetry 1.0.0
• Amazon SES now offers notifications for delivery improvement recommendations
• AWS Lambda supports additional concurrency metric for improved quota monitoring
• Amazon Athena now supports user identities for data access and audit
• Amazon SNS now supports configuring delivery status logging with AWS CloudFormation
• AWS Announces Amazon Q is available in preview on the AWS Console Mobile App for iOS
• Amazon Rekognition improves Face Liveness accuracy and user experience
• Amazon Textract announces updates to AnalyzeDocument – Forms
• AWS announces new no-code dashboard application to visualize IoT data
• AWS Secrets Manager announces 99.99% Service Level Agreement
• Announcing Migration Assistant for Amazon OpenSearch Service
• Amazon CloudWatch now supports Cross-Account Metrics Insights

Serverless Tools 🛠

EventNet
A tool for testing EventBridge events.

Serverless Star of the Week ⭐️

This week’s star is Andrew Brown (@andrewbrown). Andrew is CEO at ExamPro, which offers online cloud certification training tools, and is an AWS Community Hero. Andrew is behind the AWS Bootcamp, and you can now access all 100+ hours of it on freeCodeCamp.org. Thank you, Andrew, for doing your part to help those that are just starting out in the cloud community!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Now that we’re over a week removed from AWS re:Invent, I’ve finally had a bit of time to start looking more deeply at some of the recent AWS announcements. There is some very, very cool stuff here. Looking forward to spending more time digging in and sharing my thoughts with all of you!

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.