Off-by-none: Issue #263

January 23, 2024

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

A Post-Serverless Era? 🔮

In our previous issue, Amazon CloudWatch gave us account level subscription filters, applications opened for AWS Community Builders, and serverless got rusty. This week, we get another serverless vector database, AWS Step Functions adds even more integrations, and Bun angers every jQuery developer. Plus, we have lots of amazing content from the serverless community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Still relatively quiet on the AWS Serverless front, but AWS Step Functions did add integrations for 33 services including Amazon Q. Also, Amazon SNS now supports Google Firebase's HTTP V1 API for delivering mobile push notifications, if that helps you in some way. And, GLIDE for Redis, an OSS Redis client sponsored by AWS, is now available in preview. I've heard some feedback that other OSS Redis clients have fallen behind over the years, so maybe creating a new one makes sense. 🤷‍♂️

In other cloud news, Pinecone's vector database got a new serverless architecture. This is touted as "a ‘breakthrough’ to curb AI hallucinations", but given that other major databases are adding vector capabilities as well, analysts say they may see few takers.

Bun introduced the Bun Shell, enraging every jQuery developer by stealing the $ interface. Still pretty cool though.

And finally, Ampt published another customer case study that shows how FACTUREE is Revolutionizing Supplier Management using Ampt.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Serverless Fitness Functions: What they are, and how to use them in the AWS CDK
Excellent article by Lee Gilmore about the importance of automating the maintenance of architectural standards in fast-changing evolutionary architectures.

Build & Deploy Tips (The Ultimate Guide to AWS Lambda Development Chapter 2)
Chapter 2 in George Mao's series on building better Lambda functions.

Lambda-to-Lambda Async Invocation
Dharmendra S Negi gives a quick overview of things to consider when making Lambda-to-Lambda calls.

Six Costly Findings in AWS Serverless Computing
Miguel Calles walks us through six things that should be at the front of every serverless developer's mind.

Rust and Lambda Performance
Benjamen Pyle wanted to prove that serverless could meet the same latency objectives of K8s with less "elbow grease." Here's how he went about it.

What is Scalability Anyway?
Marc Brooker shares his definition of "scalable," and you should definitely read it.

Event Driven Architecture (EDA): Demystifying EDA
Robert Bulmer does an awesome job explaining EDAs and what their benefits and use cases are.

Embarking on the AWS App Runner Journey
I really like App Runner. I wouldn't use it for most workloads, but for some, it really shines. Lilupa Karu explains.

Amazon DevOps Guru for the Serverless applications - Part 9 Supported services and pricing
Vadym Kazulkin shares part 9 in his series on Amazon DevOps Guru. I haven't spent much time with it, so these posts have been super helpful.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

There were so many really great tutorials this week! Here are just a sampling that should elevate your serverless game:

• Creating a serverless migration task with AWS Database Migration (DMS) Serverless and the AWS CDK by Matteo Giani
• Authorize Access to WebSocket API Gateway with AWS Signature V4 by Danila Loginov
• Authorize Access to WebSocket API Gateway with Cognito by Danila Loginov
• Generative (A)IaC in the IDE with Application Composer by Anna Spysz
• Invoke AWS Bedrock model in Lambda by Christina
• Serverless Endpoint Monitoring - check uptime of your app by Harish Aravindan
• Leveraging the SDK to Publish an Event to EventBridge with Lambda and Rust by Benjamen Pyle
• Build Event Driven Workflows with Wait For Callback in AWS Step Functions by Biswanath Mukherjee
• Mastering Serverless and Next.js: A Quick and Easy Manual Configuration by Miguel Ramirez
• Learn serverless on AWS step-by-step - Schedule tasks with EventBridge Scheduler by Pierre Chollet
• Deploying an Express.js MongoDB Application on AWS Lambda with Serverless Framework by Afeef Razick
• Rotating secrets with serverless by Andrew Stump
• Semantic Search API: MongoDB Atlas Vector Search With Amazon Bedrock & AWS Serverless by Andrea Amorosi, Pascal Vogel, and Akash Doshi

Serverless Reads 🤓

Which is Cheaper: Serverless or Servers?
This post by Mikael Vesavuori goes super deep into the pricing comparison including factoring in labor costs. He also provides a handy calculator that you can download and use. It's long, but definitely worth the time.

The ABCs of serverless
My immediate thought was, "There's no way he came up with something for every letter of the alphabet." I was wrong.

The Evolution of the AWS Community Builders Blogs Twitter Bot Architecture
Jeroen Reijn shares how he evolved the serverless architecture and what he plans on doing next.

The ideal DynamoDB capacity mode
Pete Naylor says both capacity modes of DynamoDB are suboptimal. I think his new proposal should be at the top of DDB's roadmap.

Cloud-Computing in the Post-Serverless Era: Current Trends and Beyond
Bilgin Ibryam provides an in-depth analysis of how cloud computing is evolving and where the next major innovations will be made. I agree with a lot of this, though I believe the ultimate deployment target will still be the hyperscalers.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

What's new in AppComposer? Integration with Visual Studio Code and Step Functions Workflow Studio!
Marcia Villalba shows how you can just create your serverless applications visually right from your IDE or use the Step Functions Workflow Studio integration.

Serverless Craic Ep51: Introduction to Modern Software Development Lifecycle
The Serverless Craic team walks you through the phases of the modern software development lifecycle.

AWS Bites #110: Why should you use Lambda for Machine Learning?
Eoin and Luciano cover the tradeoffs between GPUs and CPUs for ML, where they've experimented with ML on Lambda for podcast transcription, medical imaging, and natural language processing, and whether it can be a viable option for certain use cases.

Serverless Containers | Serverless Office Hours
Maish Saidel-Keesing and Olly Pomeroy join Julian Wood to talk about serverless container workloads.

Ampt Live: Learning about Ampt Data
I did my first live stream exploring how to use Ampt's Data module to build applications that interact with Amazon DynamoDB.

New from AWS 🆕

Not much from AWS this week, but here are a few announcements that might interest you:

• Amazon Location Service launches CloudFormation support for API keys and resource management
• AWS CodeBuild announces support for reserved capacity
• AWS announces higher read IOPS for Amazon Elastic File System
• Stream data into Snowflake using Kinesis Data Firehose and Snowflake Snowpipe Streaming (Preview)

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

January 24-25, 2024 - TheJam.dev 2024 - A Free, 2-day Virtual WebDev Conference

June 13, 2024 - ServerlessDays Milano 2024

Please send me your serverless events!

Star of the Week ⭐️

This week's star is George Mao (@georgemao). George is a Senior Distinguished Engineer at CapitalOne where he leads the transformation to serverless strategies. His guide "Development Best Practices (The Ultimate Guide to AWS Lambda Development Chapter 1)" was the #1 most clicked link of last week’s Off-by-none newsletter. But what really caught our eye was this comment on his LinkedIn: "Became a fan of Serverless after attending George’s session at a previous AWS Re:invent. And when George offered help, he meant it 100%." Thank you, George, for being a serverless advocate and more importantly for helping others to do the same!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Interesting times we live in. I've been waiting years for serverless to fade into the background and just become "the way" that cloud applications are built. I think this is happening to some extent, but the co-opted marketing term has blurred the lines between technology, mindset, and implementation. This makes it hard for anyone to see that term for what it really is.

Perhaps it's time to embrace a "post-serverless era" that moves past poorly named, abstract concepts like "serverless" and "DevOps", and instead focuses on the original goal: efficiently delivering customer value.

Until 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.