Off-by-none: Issue #262

January 16, 2024

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Serverless Motivation 😓

In our previous issue, Momento Topics went stateless, we learned why serverless and agile are made for one another, and we took a closer look at the importance of DevEx. This week, Amazon CloudWatch gives us account level subscription filters, applications open for AWS Community Builders, and serverless gets rusty. Plus, we have plenty of serverless content from the community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Another relatively quiet week in AWS Serverless announcements, but there was news that Amazon CloudWatch Logs now supports account level subscription filter. This is a dream come true for those of us that wrestle with tens (if not hundreds) of log group subscription filters.

Also, Amazon EventBridge now supports AWS AppSync as a target of EventBridge Buses, letting you forward events to a GraphQL mutation that clients can subscribe to. This will definitely eliminate some Lambda functions.

And finally, Applications are Open for the AWS Community Builder Program 2024! This is a really great program with some nice benefits.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Building a Massively Concurrent SMS Infrastructure on AWS: A Serverless Architecture Pattern Breakdown
Kevin Mesiab shares his thoughts on implementing an actor-based approach to this pattern. My initial impression is that it could be simplified, but I might be missing something.

Development Best Practices (The Ultimate Guide to AWS Lambda Development Chapter 1)
George Mao shares the first installment of his new series on Lambda development. There is a lot of experience behind this post.

Shrimps and versioning with AWS Step Functions
Javier Mendoza explains why versioning your Step Functions is important for maintaining reliability across deployments.

Introduction to Chaos Engineering in Serverless Architectures
Koby Aharon guest posts on Ran The Builder's blog with this informative look at introducing chaos into your serverless apps.

AWS SnapStart - Part 13 Measuring warm starts with Java 21 using different Lambda memory settings
Vadym Kazulkin continues on his SnapStart benchmarking journey to squeeze every ounce of performance out of Java. I think at this point he should just switch to another runtime. 😉

Does Step Function's new TestState API make end-to-end tests obsolete?
Yan Cui shares his thoughts on how the new TestState API changes your serverless state machine testing strategies.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Rust and Lambda
Benjamen Pyle is excited about Rust, and shares some insights about his experience with it over the last 6 months. #rustacean 🦀

How to create Private DynamoDB tables accessible only within a VPC
Yan Cui explains how this is possible, why it's necessary, and what to do when you need emergency access from the console.

Enhancing AWS Lambda with Dynamic Code Loading from S3
Suravi Pubudu explains a technique for dynamically loading code. I think there are potential use cases for this, but I don't think it simplifies function management or adds extra security.

Here are some other tutorials to explore:

• How to Connect AWS Application Composer in VS Code by Shrihari Haridass
• Handle Python Packages in Lambda Environment by Rameesha Khan
• Deploy Nuxt 3 on AWS Lambda by Michael Bouvy
• AWS Step Functions Distributed Map by Omid Eidivandi
• Building a serverless chatbot with Bedrock by Greg Biegel
• Mastering Serverless (Part II): Mastering AWS DynamoDB Batch Write Failures for a Smoother Experience. by Miguel Ramirez
• Building serverless APIs using single table design and test-driven development by Heeki Park

Serverless Reads 🤓

How I refactor my 3-tier application to Serverless Architecture - Part 1 and Part 2
Chee Siong Chan documents the evolution of his application from a PHP monolith to a fully serverless microservices backend.

Low Latency, Fully Serverless, LLM-to-Voice Service
Ashwin Baluja from Convoice shares how and why they chose a serverless implementation for their service.

Monoliths, Microservices and Serverless
Interesting post following the thought process of choosing between different architectural patterns by evaluating their strengths and tradeoffs.

Edge and Fog Computing, Platform Engineering: IT trends that will gain prominence in 2024
Lots of rambling in this piece, but if you can get through it, I think you'll find some interesting insights.

Why DynamoDB Is (Still) My First Pick for Serverless
Me too, Seth Orell. Me too.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

How Lambda made container cold starts 15x faster
AJ Stuyvenberg went all the way to India to make a video explaining all the incredibly fascinating engineering that went into this. 😉

AWS Bites #109: What is the AWS Project Development Kit (PDK)?
Eoin and Luciano discuss the new AWS PDK and whether or not you should give it a look.

Bedrock Agents and Knowledge bases from a developer perspective with Demo!
Marcia Villalba is back with a new video showing you how to create a Bedrock agent using a Bedrock Knowledge Base and a Lambda function.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are few more AWS announcements that might interest you:

• Kinesis Data Firehose supports delivering data to Splunk clusters using ALB
• Amazon Route 53 expands geoproximity routing
• Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports hybrid query score normalization
• AWS Lambda now supports SnapStart for Java functions in 5 additional regions
• Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall now supports query type filtering
• Amazon Location Service now supports additional places content in Maps

Serverless Tools 🛠

DynamoDB Consoles
An application that allows users to query their DynamoDB tables using SQL-like queries.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

June 13, 2024 - ServerlessDays Milano 2024

Please send me your serverless events!

Star of the Week ⭐️

This week's star is Lee Priest (@TheLeePriest). Lee is an Engineer for The Lego Group and also an AWS Community Builder. This post by Lee on LinkedIn caught our eye, especially in a time of year that's always hyper-focused on goals and resolutions. Lee, your articles on Medium are great and always helpful. We appreciate them and we're quite sure many others do, too. We hope this reminder is that "spark" that gets you geared up and continuing to do amazing things in the serverless community!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I hope everyone is settling into the new year and finding their groove. Lots of people seem to be struggling with motivation lately (including this week's star). I'm no stranger to this myself.

Luckily, I've been able to use the new year to muster enough energy to run twelve 5Ks, invest time in becoming a better writer, and put out my first live stream test video.

Motivation often doesn't last long, at least not for me. So for what it's worth, my advice is to take full advantage of it when it comes, and ride the momentum for as long as you can. And hey, if an out-of-shape 45 year old can force himself to run over 3 miles in the New England cold every day, I bet you can finish that blog post. 🙂

I'll 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.