Off-by-none: Issue #259

December 19, 2023

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

Looking back at a very serverless 2023! 👀

In our previous issue, AWS Lambda started scaling 12x faster, Ampt added serverless Postgres, and we wondered where all the cloud-native developers are. This week, we share the most popular links of 2023, learn how to make better serverless third-party API calls, and even give Cognito another look. Plus, we have some new content from the awesome serverless community to wrap up the year!

This is the LAST ISSUE OF THE YEAR. I’m looking forward to spending plenty of time with my family and friends this holiday season, and I hope you’re able to do the same. We’ll be back in January with more amazing serverless goodness!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Just a few bits of news to get to before we jump into the 2023 recap.

Amazon Cognito user pools now support the ability to customize access tokens with custom attributes in the form of OAuth 2.0 scopes and claims. I gave up on Cognito a long time ago, but maybe now it’s worth another look?

Also, AWS Lambda added support for Python 3.12. This runs on Amazon Linux 2023 and is also supported in Lambda@Edge and Powertools.

Matthieu Napoli released sqlite-s3, a serverless dev database that uses SQLite backed by S3. He’s very clear that this is not for productions, but having isolated SQL for every developer in serverless environments is a long time dream of mine. 😉

Empowering Innovation: How Flowops Revolutionized Its Service Delivery with Ampt. This case study features a small startup from Nigeria that was able to use Ampt to quickly iterate on their MVP to find product market fit and start bringing in revenue. I really love helping startups launch their new ideas!

Top Links of 2023 🏆

I shared over 2,500 links with all of you this year! Here are the ones that were the most popular based on our email subscribers unique clicks.

Designing Event-Driven Architecture by Santhoshkumar Ravi
There was no surprise that articles about EDAs got a lot of views this year.

Understanding AWS Lambda Proactive Initialization by AJ Stuyvenberg
Apparently people still care a lot about cold starts. This was a great post by AJ detailing his discoveries.

About Amazon EventBridge Scheduler by Awedis Keofteian
The EventBridge Scheduler launched in late 2022, and Off-by-none readers were quite interested to learn more about it.

The “End of Programming” will look a lot like programming by Ben Kehoe
Every developer was both excited and extremely nervous when they realized the power of ChatGPT and other AI systems that could potentially replace them. Ben’s post was a great rebuttal to another article that added to the FUD of AI programmers.

The AWS Serverless Badge by Conor Shirren
People had been wanting an AWS Serverless certification forever. Unfortunately, a badge will have to do.

Is EventBridge Pipes the Missing Piece in Your Event-Driven Puzzle? by Mario Bittencourt
A lot of popular links were to articles with detailed reviews of re:Invent 2022 launches. Quick note to aspiring authors: Off-by-none readers really like these types of posts.

Stop using Lambda Layers (use this instead) by AJ Stuyvenberg
Well, isn’t AJ mister popular this year? Seriously, though, he’s put out some great content around Lambda performance that’s worth checking out.

Using SQS to Throttle Writes to DynamoDB by Guille Ojeda
This was an interesting pattern that caught people’s attention. If you have spikes of high write throughput to DDB, SQS could be a cost saver.

AWS Step Functions adds integration for 35 services including EMR Serverless
Interest in serverless orchestration with Step Functions continued to ramp up this past year as well. AWS SDK integrations was launched way back in 2021, but continued investments in new features and better authoring experiences are really resonating.

So many bad takes by Adrian Cockcroft
Remember that AWS Prime Video story? Ugh. Luckily Adrian was able to inject some sanity into the discussion.

Serverless Patterns by Jimmy Dahlqvist
Everyone loves a good pattern. 😉

Serverless AWS CDK Pipeline Best Practices & Patterns — Part 1 by Lee Gilmore
Building software delivery pipelines is hard, and people seemed very interested in how Lee was tackling it.

Amazon RDS simplifies connectivity between an RDS or Aurora database and AWS Lambda
Yes, even serverless developers still want to use RDBMS.

Decoupling Microservices with AWS EventBridge Pipes by Christian Bannes
Another article about EventBridge Pipes that sparked our readers’ interest.

Introducing samp-cli for local lambda debugging by Lars Jacobsson
This was another trend that we saw this year. Lots of people interested in making the local Lambda development experience better.

Avoiding the Serverless Workflow Antipattern by Matt Morgan
Speaking of Step Functions, readers gravitated towards Matt’s post that explains why too many “choreography” steps can get you into trouble.

Amazon EventBridge: The missing piece to your app by Jones Zachariah Noel N
This was a short post, but I think the title just made readers want to click.

Stop using AWS Lambda for everything! 🛑 by Rahul Ladumor
Another catchy headline that drove some extra clicks. The article focuses more on replacing Lambda with containers (which makes sense in some cases), but I think reflects the overall interest in direct integrations of AWS services.

Should you use a Lambda Monolith, aka Lambdalith, for your API? by Rehan van der Merwe
I’m surprised this article wasn’t more popular. I tried so hard to be a single-responsibility purist with Lambda, but after years of building serverless apps, I lean towards combining similar routes/actions into a single Lambda.

Serverless Concepts, Tutorials, and Reads 🆕

There was lots great serverless content this past week, but I was hoping to avoid making this week’s newsletter too dense (mission failed). Anyway, here are some that I had to share:

Hexagonal Architectures
Not specifically serverless, but Adam Rice from McDonald’s explains his team’s implementation of Hexagonal architecture, and there’s a lot to be learned from this.

The Unseen Price of AWS Serverless
Nivel Epsilon shares my (and many other’s) frustration about AWS’s casual use of the term “serverless”. While I agree that “scale-to-zero” is an important tenant, I’m more interested in the multi-tenancy aspect.

Transaction Isolation in Postgres, explained
Also not specifically serverless, but Gwen Shapira’s detailed piece is fascinating for all us data nerds out there. 🤓

Is S3 Express One Zone the real ElastiCache Serverless?
Khawaja Shams and Daniela Miao of Momento propose S3 Express One Zone as a potential alternative serverless cache. Very, very interesting.

How to perform database migration for a live service with no downtime
Simple, straightforward approach from Yan Cui on how to orchestrate a database migration.

The single-tenancy to multi-tenancy spectrum
I really enjoyed this article from Luc van Donkersgoed. Scale and multi-tenancy are inextricably linked, with all that inflexibility to boot.

AWS SnapStart – Part 11 Measuring cold starts with Java 21 using different deployment artifact sizes
It would feel strange not to share Vadym Kazulkin’s SnapStart tests at this point. Plus, I’m still enjoying seeing the different test results.

Refactoring a serverless application to use Step Functions third-party API call integration
I hate that you have to pay for idle Lambda functions waiting on third-party API calls, but through some refactoring and Step Functions, Arpad Toth shows how that could be a thing of the past.

The Energy Drink Episodes 4: The Return Of The Lambda Functions
I’m also really enjoying these articles by Lee Priest. I don’t even like the CDK. 😀

Serverless Challenge: Is scaling achievable using Momento as a cache-aside pattern?
Another interesting post by Daniele Frasca in his series on Serverless Latency. We’ve been using Momento at Ampt for quite some time now and the results have been very good!

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Test State API for Step Functions
Marcia Villalba shows you how to use the new test state API in Step Functions to test different states of your state machine without deploying it.

2023 Year in review | Serverless Office Hours
With Anton Aleksandrov, Heeki Park, Brian Zambrano, Adam Wager, and Julian Wood discussing everything to do with serverless at AWS in 2023, I’m sure you won’t want to miss this.

Tech Lead Journal #157 – Platform Strategy: Innovation Through Harmonization
Gregor Hohpe returns for a second episode to discuss his latest book “Platform Strategy”.

AWS Bites 108. How to Solve Lambda Python Cold Starts
Eoin and Luciano discuss how you can use Python for data science workloads on AWS Lambda, including the pros and cons compared to other AWS services.

New from AWS 🆕

AWS still had plenty of other announcements as well. Here are some that you might find interesting:

• Amazon CloudWatch Logs announces streaming API support for Live Tail
• Amazon OpenSearch Service adds multimodal support for Neural Search
• Amazon DynamoDB local adds support for two DynamoDB API features
• Introducing managed package repository support for Amazon CodeCatalyst
• Amazon CodeCatalyst Dev Environments now supports Virtual Private Cloud
• Connect GraphQL APIs to existing MySQL and PostgreSQL databases with AWS Amplify
• Cost Anomaly Detection extends CloudFormation region support
• Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose supports delivery of decompressed CloudWatch Logs to destinations
• AWS Cloud9 now supports Amazon Linux 2023
• AWS Control Tower Landing Zone updates managed policies and controls
• Announcing AWS CloudFormation template generation for Amazon EventBridge Pipes
• Amazon CloudWatch Logs data protection now supports custom data identifiers

Serverless Star of the Week ⭐️

This week’s star is Janki Patel Westenberg (@jpatel3). Janki is Head of Growth at Momento where she works to help developers build faster with innovative serverless products. You can find her amplifying serverless developers on Twitter and LinkedIn, where she celebrates and supports all things serverless. Thank you for helping to spread the serverless word, Janki!

Final Thoughts 🤔

It’s been a crazy year. I’m sure you all know that I’ve been busy working on my startup, Ampt. It’s been very time consuming, and I haven’t been able to write, share, and interact with you all as much as I wanted to. I did get to speak at ServerlessDays ANZ in Melbourne and ServerlessDays Cape Town this year, which was amazing. Plus, I met up with many of you at re:Invent. We shared stories, talked about serverless, and even danced a little (but probably still too much).

Being part of this amazing community and getting to learn from all of you is my favorite thing to do. I’ve set some goals to dedicate more time to this moving forward. Here’s to an exciting new year! 🎉

Happy holidays,
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.