Off-by-none: Issue #260

January 2, 2024

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

Welcome to 2024! 🥂

In our previous issue, we shared the most popular links of 2023, learned how to make better serverless third-party API calls, and even gave Cognito another look. This week, Aurora Serverless v2 (kinda) gets a new Data API, Lambda functions get alarmed, and containers might become the de facto Lambda packaging format. Plus, we have lots of amazing content from the serverless community!

News & Announcements 📣

The biggest AWS serverless news from the end of last year was that Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL now supports RDS Data API. This means that we can (finally) use "a" Data API with Aurora Serverless v2. Before you get too excited, there are some limitations. Most notably, you can only connect to "write" clusters, so this won't help with "read" use cases (yet). And, it only works with Postgres (for now). Also, it was announced shortly thereafter that Aurora Serverless v1 is being discontinued. 😐 Here are some more takes on this release.

In other AWS news, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose now supports zero buffering, which seems strange, but I'm guessing there are use cases for it. Also, Amazon CloudWatch alarms added AWS Lambda as an alarm state change action, making it much easier to automate custom actions in response to alarms. And for you GenAI junkies, AWS announced Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL integration with Amazon Bedrock for Generative AI. Again, I'm sure there are valid use cases here.

In Ampt news, we shared another case study about Modern Musician, and AntStack demonstrated an AI Use Case with Ampt in a guest post.

Concepts 🏗

The case for containers on Lambda (with benchmarks)
AJ Stuyvenberg is starting the year off with a controversial (?) post about packaging Lambda code with containers. He makes a compelling argument, and he brought receipts.

Can we implement asynchronous circuit breakers with serverless architecture?
Marcos Henrique offers some thoughts on how you might accomplish this. There really is no difference IMO, other than implementing a retry/redrive mechanism using a queue.

Async Flow Control using Queues in Practise for Web Applications
Speaking of queues, Lakindu Hewawasam outlines a "queue-based load leveling" technique to relieve pressure on downstream services. I've given a number of talks on this. It's a very useful pattern.

5 Ways to Share Code Between Lambda Functions
Chameera Dulanga offers several options for solving this very common problem. Not all of them are great options, but being aware of them can't hurt.

Event Streaming: Tips for Event-Driven Apps | Capital One
I love reading posts from the Capital One Tech team, and this one is no exception.

Why not to deploy Express JS REST API using Serverless
The tide is actually turning towards consolidating workloads into Fat Lambdas versus single-purpose functions, as Hitesh Chawla advocates for in this post. Considering that we now know that containers on Lambda can be faster than zip files, well colocated functions might make sense.

Lessons from Netflix’s Video Play Strategy — Alarms on Minimum Success Requests Per Minute
Lee Gilmore shares an uncommon but highly useful technique for monitoring and alerting on success metrics. Definitely take the time to read this.

Tutorials 👷‍♀️

The serverless community is always hard at work creating amazing tutorials. Here are some that stood out:

• Serverless Site Health Check Notification System by Darryl Ruggles
• How to Perform Unit Testing on your AWS Bedrock AI Lambda by Martin Mueller
• Customize Cognito Access Token with Rust by Benjamen Pyle
• Take StepFunctions' TestState API one step further with samp-cli by Lars Jacobsson
• Auto-Generated AWS CloudWatch Dashboards using the AWS CDK by Lee Gilmore
• Web API with Rust and Fargate by Benjamen Pyle
• “Rustifying” Serverless: Boost AWS Lambda performance with Rust by Efi Merdler-Kravitz
• Automating CloudFront Cache Invalidation: A Seamless Workflow by Andrey Norin
• Direct Access for Frontend Apps to AWS Services: Secure and Cost-Effective by Yan Cui
• Serverless Idempotency with Powertools for AWS Lambda by Lee Gilmore

Reads 🤓

The crypto bros are coming for AI
Ugh. If you want a depressing read to start 2024, this is it. Let's hope they don't keep getting funded. 🙄

JavaScript in 2023: Signals, React's RSC, and Full-Stack JS
Insightful post from Loraine Lawson about the adoption of Signals versus RSCs. Also, JavaScript has been, still is, and will continue to be, a full-stack language accessible to a wide swath of developers.

Year-in-Review: 2023 Was a Turning Point for Microservices
I also enjoyed this post by Joab Jackson. Building modular codebases that can make the deployment architecture an implementation detail (as Kelsey Hightower noted), is the exact direction we've been heading with Ampt.

Become An Invisible Influencer!
Sheen Brisals is amazing, and if this post doesn't convince you of that, then you might be broken. 🙂

Amazon's Silent Sacking
Justin Garrison wrote a highly critical piece about AWS's current policy that seems to be forcing people out. I don't have anywhere near the insight that he does, but Adrian Cockcroft echoed the sentiment with a follow up outlining signs that it's time to leave a company.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

ElastiCache vs. ElastiCache Serverless Bake Off: Handling Spikes
Khawaja Shams from Momento discusses the scaling behaviors of the different flavors of ElastiCache and why you may want to consider alternative options.

Invoke External endpoints from AWS Step Functions
Marcia Villalba explains the new HTTP task state in Step Functions, letting you invoke third party endpoints from your workflows (without a Lambda function).

New from AWS 🆕

I didn't expect there to be much happening at the end of last year with AWS, but they managed to push out a few announcements that caught my attention:

• Announcing SSH support for Amazon CodeCatalyst Dev Environments
• Amazon CloudFront now supports 4096-bit RSA TLS certificates
• Amazon Aurora for PostgreSQL now supports h3-pg for geospatial indexing
• Amazon Route 53 Resolver Endpoints now supports DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH)
• Announcing Amazon CloudWatch metrics support in AWS CodeArtifact
• AWS AppSync provides additional configurations to manage GraphQL API usage
• CodePipeline supports GitLab self-managed

Serverless Tools 🛠

schedule_athena_queries
A Serverless, User-Centric Framework: Automating Athena Query Execution

ChatWithCloud
ChatWithCloud is a CLI allowing you to interact with AWS Cloud using human language inside your Terminal thanks to generative AI.

Ember: The Future of Warming Serverless Functions
Ember provides an end-to-end solution for monitoring and warming serverless functions to maximize cost benefits and minimize the impact of "cold starting" these functions. 😬

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

January 17, 2024 - Build a #GenAI Application with Ampt (webinar)

Star of the Week ⭐️

This week's star is Pete Naylor (@pj_naylor). Pete has recently launched his own DynamoDB consulting service called High Bar Solutions. He is a DynamoDB savant, plus we have a soft spot for entrepreneurs like Pete that take the solo leap into new ventures! If you need help with any and all things DynamoDB, tell Pete Off-by-none sent you!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I'm excited to start off a new year with all of you. As always, I've got way too many ideas to bring to fruition, but my primary focus this year is to spend more time writing. I've been so busy with Ampt these past 18 months that finding extra time has been a challenge. I don't expect things to slow down, but I hope to do better balancing my time.

Here's to 2024! 🍾
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.