Off-by-none: Issue #26

February 26, 2019

Introducing the new serverless heroes…

Welcome to Issue #26 of Off-by-none. It is great to see you all again! 😃

Last week we thanked IOpipe for supporting open source and explored some helpful serverless architectural patterns provided by AWS and others. This week, we figure out if serverless is really dead, meet some new serverless heroes, and share lots of great content and stories from the community.

It was a busy week for serverless, so let’s get to it. 🚀

When you’re holding out for a hero ’til the end of the night… 👨‍🚀👩‍🚀

AWS announced its latest round of AWS Serverless Heroes, including Ant Stanley, Matt Weagle, Kurt Lee, Shingo Yoshida, and me! ☺️ It is an incredible honor to be welcomed into this remarkable group of people doing amazing things with serverless. And a huge thank you to all of you for reading this newsletter, my blog posts, and my Twitter ramblings. If it wasn’t for you sharing and retweeting, this wouldn’t have been possible. 🙌

I already had quite a few things planned for 2019, and this just makes me want to do more to help the serverless community learn and grow.

When you hear a rumor that Serverless is Dead… ☠️

Chris Munns of AWS gave the closing keynote at ServerlessDays Austin and proclaimed that Serverless is Dead! Don’t worry, “Modern application development using managed services that provide opinionated event-driven interfaces” isn’t going away. This was about the death of the term by “extreme buzzword trauma,” as he called it. I had tried to tell people to Stop Calling Everything Serverless, but I think Chris is right, our enemies were too many. 🧟‍♂️

So what do we do now that the term “serverless” is being applied everywhere to everything? We could try to ignore it, or as Chris said, “we should instead be focusing on what we’re seeing to be the new way of doing modern application development.” This is an important point. While confusion is sure to abound, and perhaps have a short term impact on adoption, eventually, “serverless” will just be the way to build applications in the cloud.

In Paul Johnston’s most recent post, Cloud 2.0: Code is no longer King — Serverless has dethroned it, he argues that code is a liability. The evolution of the cloud will be in understanding what services to use and when, and perhaps more importantly, when not to write code. This allows teams to build faster and solve problems that actually impact customers, as opposed to unnecessary problems they bring on themselves.

Okay, so maybe it’s too late to salvage the term “serverless”, but the vision and the evolution is just beginning. To quote Chris again, “Long live serverless!” ✊

When you’re looking for the latest serverless announcements… 🔈

Serverless Framework v1.38 has been released, now with support for WebSockets. So that’s pretty cool.

Last week, we mentioned that IOpipe was sponsoring my Lambda API and Lambda Warmer open source projects. This is actually part of their New Serverless Open Source Sponsorship Program, so look forward to more generous sponsorships in the future.

Stackery just announced their new pricing plans, which includes a free developer tier. If you’d rather use a visual interface instead of going cross-eyed writing YAML files, give them a look.

For those of you that love to get your Java on, Microsoft announced the general availability of Java support in Azure Functions. Even cooler, you can use the Azure Functions Maven plugin to create, build, and deploy your functions from any Maven-enabled project.

When you want some expert advice… 👩‍⚕️

ServerlessDays Boston is in 2 weeks! Tickets are only $49 and include breakfast, lunch, drinks at the happy hour, and an insane amount of serverless knowledge from an amazing lineup of speakers. Please spread the word to your friends and colleagues.

James Beswick joins a webinar with Stackery on February 27th to teach you how to Save time and money with AWS Lambda using asynchronous programming.

If you want to know How to Accelerate Serverless Adoption, sign up for this webinar on March 7th with Shannon Hogue from Epsagon and Avner Braverman from Binaris. Should be interesting.

If you want more from Epsagon, you can also sign up for the Best Practices to Monitor and Troubleshoot Serverless Application webinar on March 7th as well.

The AWS Serverless Webinar: Unleash Innovation & Enable Legacy (Four-Part Session) is scheduled for Thursday, March 21st. AWS’s Steve Liedig will be joined by new AWS Community Hero, Aileen Smith, and others, for what’s sure to be a very educational series of sessions.

A Cloud Guru announced that Serverlessconf 2019 will be held from October 7th through the 9th in New York City. Definitely looking forward to this.

When you want to hear some interesting Serverless Stories… 📖

There certainly is a learning curve for serverless, and even those of us with a lot of experience tend to scratch our heads now and again. In Dear deployment diary: serverless is f**king hard, the author points out the challenges that larger companies face when the line between developer and operations become blurred.

On the subject of serverless not always being easy, Pavol Fulop gives us some Takeaways from using AppSync, which entails a lot of struggles. It’s always interesting to hear where people are getting stuck.

For those of you that have been putting off building that side project, here’s another example of how a developer created a MVP in 1 week for $10 while working a full-time job. It’s not the most complex app, but it goes to show how quickly serverless can get you up and running.

Benedikt Eckhard’s piece, My First Alexa Skill — Lessons Learnt, is an in-depth look at how he went about designing, building, deploying, and testing an Alexa skill. Some really good lessons in here.

Jeff Lu explains how his team took a serverless approach to Weather Underground in order to generate Intellicast radar maps.

And, Things about serverless I wish I used from the start by Antonio Terreno is a quick hit list of some simple tips that can save you quite a bit of time.

When you’re wondering what’s going on around the AWS universe… 🤓

Simon-Pierre Gingras published a very helpful AWS S3 Batch Operations: Beginner’s Guide for us to start thinking about all the amazing things we’ll be able to do with this. S3 Batch is still in preview mode, but when it goes GA with Lambda support, the possibilities will be endless.

Last week, we mentioned the new AWS Solutions catalog that contains vetted, technical reference implementations that can help you solve
common problems with prebuilt CloudFormation templates. Kira Hammond built this useful AWS Solutions Update Feed that you can subscribe to, triggering an email, SQS message, or Lambda function when new solutions are added. And of course, it’s 100% serverless. 😉

Jerry Hargrove (aka @awsgeek) has some new visual notes on Amazon Transcribe. As more and more people move to audio and video on the web, I think they’ll find this to be an incredibly handy service.

If you’re curious how Jerry Hargrove keeps producing these amazing pieces of content, check out his How I Create Visual Notes at awsgeek.com — My Step-by-Step Process.

And if you like visual things, the newly released AWS Architecture Icons are available for download.

Finally, If you need your weekly dose of snark, check out Corey Quinn’s guest appearance on What’s New with AWS – Week of February 11, 2019 with Jeff Barr. Nothing serverless in here, but always good to see AWS having a little fun.

When you want to be inspired by some serverless use cases… 🗺

Alex Casalboni’s new post, Design patterns for high-volume, time-series data in Amazon DynamoDB, is a great example of how breaking with best practices sometimes creates a better solution. Beyond just this use case, there are likely several other practical reasons to auto-provision DynamoDB tables.

Nikolay Nemshilov has a fascinating read on building a Serverless Genetic Algorithm. Genetic algorithms are an extremely powerful problem solving mechanism and Nikolay demonstrates a quick and dirty solution using parallelization with Lambda functions.

Scott Ringwelski from Handshake has a post that explores Serverless Use Cases At Startups. I think he offers a fresh perspective on how mid-size startups could take advantage of serverless and how implementing odd jobs and internal automation might be a great place to start.

Lambda@Edge: Why Less is More is a good introduction to get you thinking about how powerful computing at the edge can be. There are a lot of use case around this concept, and Nuatu Tseggai from Stackery, points out a whole bunch.

When you’re looking for serverless brain candy… 🍬

Why serverless is revolutionary for product managers by James Beswick is 20 years of software development wisdom wrapped up into a 9 minute read. There is so much to unpack here, I think you just need to read it yourself.

John Demian from the Dashbird is Getting down and dirty with metric-based alerting for AWS Lambda in his new post. There are some helpful definitions in this post that explain the metrics captured by CloudWatch as well as how to set up alarms. There’s also a nice chart that shows you how observability platforms like Dashbird can extend the basic metrics and search capabilities of CloudWatch.

Making AppSync Easier with Thundra gives some more insight into how observability platforms can make monitoring and debugging your serverless applications so much easier. Using Lambda as an AppSync datasource is obviously incredibly powerful, but as this piece points out, debugging it can get a bit tricky.

Nader Dabit had some thoughts on the new Serverless paper from the folks over at Berkeley. Cloud Programming Simplified: Simplified points out a few key points from the paper and offers some of Nader’s thoughts.

Mikhail Shilkov’s new Evergreen Serverless Performance Reviews has taken his fantastic posts and made them even better. He’s now tracking the performance of serverless functions from various cloud providers and has automated them so they’re always up-to-date.

Alex DeBrie has another excellent post entitled, AWS API Performance Comparison: Serverless vs. Containers vs. API Gateway integration. Which one should you use for your workload? It depends, but Alex has some recommendations for you.

In Chaos test your Lambda functions with Thundra, Yan Cui shows us how to use an observability platform to inject errors into our serverless application and then trace them to make sure the proper fallbacks are in place. Great advice and an excellent use of these third-party tools.

When you just want to build something serverless… 🏗

Marcia Villalba has another great video that shows you how to build a Simple application with API Gateway Websockets. This is an incredibly powerful feature of API Gateway that opens up some really great use cases (and no, it’s not just chat). 💬

How to Use AWS Lambda to Send High Volume Emails at Scale outlines a serverless architecture that could give you some ideas of your own. Definitely a useful pattern if you want to own your own mass email generation.

Serverless Functions in Depth is a great tutorial for front-end developers looking to get started with serverless. I think using Amplify CLI will resonate with devs familiar with some common build tools.

For something a bit more advanced, this tutorial will show you how to create A predictive engine API deployment with AWS and serverless in minutes.

Building a Serverless Mixpanel Alternative. Part 1: Collecting and Displaying Events is the first part of a tutorial series on building an analytical web application with Cube.js. Lots of useful concepts in here.

How to build a serverless web crawler, another great post by James Beswick, will take you through several different ways to build a classic web crawler using combinations of Lambda, DynamoDB streams, SQS queues, S3 and more.

Serverless Star of the Week ⭐️

There is a very long list of people that are doing #ServerlessGood and contributing to the Serverless community. These people deserve recognition for their efforts. So each week, I will mention someone whose recent contribution really stood out to me. I love meeting new people, so if you know someone who deserves recognition, please let me know.

This week’s star is Ant Stanley (@IamStan). Ant was recently named an AWS Serverless Hero, and for good reason. When he’s not consulting, he’s running the Serverless User Group in London, organizing ServerlessDays London, and helping organizer around the world as part of the global ServerlessDays leadership team. He was also a co-founder of A Cloud Guru and organized the first ServerlessConf event back in 2016. I think he’s done more to spread the word of serverless than anyone else. His blog and Twitter account are also great sources for serverless insights.

Final Thoughts 🤔

I can’t thank you all enough for being a part of this newsletter. I can’t believe it’s already been six months since we started this! I try each week to capture and disseminate important and interesting stories and announcements, but I could always use more help. If there are great stories that need to be heard, or interesting use cases, or people who you feel deserve to be the star of the week, please send them to me. This newsletter is as much yours as it is mine.

I hope you enjoyed this issue of Off-by-none. Please feel free to send feedback and suggestions so I can keep making this newsletter better each week. You can reach me via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or email and let me know your thoughts, criticisms, or how you’d like to contribute to Off-by-none.

And please do me the honor of sharing this newsletter with your friends and coworkers who might be interested in serverless. It would be greatly appreciated. 👍

Until next time,
Jeremy