Off-by-none: Issue #264

January 30, 2024

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

The Cost of Observability 💰

In our previous issue, we got another serverless vector database, AWS Step Functions added more integrations, and Bun angered every jQuery developer by stealing $. This week, we get more serverless patterns, learn why some folks are moving away from the CDK, and learn about the observability cost crisis. Plus, we have a ton of great serverless content from the community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

This doesn't happen often, but there really wasn't anything "Serverless Newsworthy" out of AWS this past week. 🤷‍♂️

So in other cloud news...

Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces the Graduation of CloudEvents. Did it though? I remember being excited by this back in the day, but I honestly thought it was dead. Turns out it ticked enough boxes to get its cap and gown.

Harold Sun announced that Lambda Web Adapter v0.8.1 is now live. It now supports non-HTTP event sources like SQS, SNS, Kinesis, Kafka, EventBridge, and Bedrock Agents.

According to a press release, pgEdge Redefines Distributed PostgreSQL with the Launch of pgEdge Cloud Developer Edition. I took a quick look, and given the pricing alone, I'm not at all excited.

Lee Gilmore (aka Serverless Advocate) launched a Serverless Patterns & Solutions site that indexes all his amazing posts and videos. This is super cool.

And speaking of super cool, Ampt just introduced Enhanced Logging and the New Invocations View. Observability in serverless apps is generally a major pain without a 3rd party service. Imagine if CloudWatch was automatically configured in a way that gave you similar insights, without writing any instrumentation code? 😉

Also, make sure you pick up a copy of Serverless Development on AWS by Sheen Brisals and Luke Hedger. They've been working on this for quite some time, but it was worth the wait! 📖

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Refactoring Applications Visually
Richard Keit explains a roadmap for refactoring AWS apps to EDAs.

Enhancing Workflow Efficiency with Direct HTTP API Calls in Step Functions
Dan C shares how they integrated the new HTTPS endpoints feature to enable more efficient orchestration.

AWS SnapStart - Part 14 Measuring cold and warm starts with Java 21 using different compilation options
Vadym Kazulkin revisits measuring cold and warm start times with different Java compilation options, both without SnapStart enabled and with SnapStart enabled.

Embracing and understanding the Hexagonal Architecture in Serverless Environments
Daniel Abib explains why he thinks Hexagonal Architecture is a good fit for serverless.

Exploring aws-lite, a Community-Driven JavaScript SDK for AWS
Pat Patterson shares why aws-lite (written by Brian Leroux and his team) might be a better JavaScript SDK for AWS alternative.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Plenty of great serverless tutorials to pick from again this week.

Cognito Starter Kit with Rust and Lambda
Benjamen Pyle is trying to convince you to finally give serverless Rust a try, and he's not leaving you with many excuses (looks in mirror).

Power Chat Messages Search with DynamoDB & Amazon OpenSearch
I really love this post by Marko Djakovic because it points out such an important serverless pattern.

Build a Simple URL Shortener with CloudFront KeyValueStore
A URL shortener entirely at the edge. Pretty cool, Elias Brange, pretty cool. 😎

And here are some of my other favorites:

• Orchestrating long running ECS tasks by Ryan Cormack
• AWS Lambda Serverless Processor : Rust, Fargate by Darryl Ruggles
• Navigating PWA Development: How I Chose AWS Textract and Serverless for a Political Campaign App by Miguel Ramirez
• AWS Serverless Made Easy: Building with Application Composer by Ran Isenberg
• How to add CI/CD to my SAM project by Alejandro Lazaro
• Call APIs from Step Functions using SAM by Andres Moreno
• How would you reprocess Lambda dead-letter queue messages on demand? by Yan Cui

Serverless Reads 🤓

Moving away from CDK
Jay V from SST explains the reasoning behind building ion, a new deployment engine that uses Pulumi and Terraform Providers instead of compiling to CloudFormation. There are a lot of reasons why I don't like the CDK (and most flavors of IaC for that matter), so while I'm not 100% sold on this approach, I certainly appreciate the candor.

AWS Console-to-Code: Generating Code for Console Actions
I totally forgot about the Console-to-Code thing AWS is (finally) doing. Renato Losio has a round up on some feedback from folks in the industry.

The Cost Crisis in Observability Tooling
This is a great post by Charity Majors that explains why we need to start moving away from the crippling costs of Observability 1.0.

Bill Gates Interviews Sam Altman about OpenAI’s Speedy Rise
AI is definitely coming for your programming job! Well, at the very least it's going to make it much easier.

Monoliths: A Space Odyssey to Better Developer Experience
Even though this is a vendor-sponsored post, Sarah Morgan makes some really great points as to why monoliths should be the default starting point.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

The Rise of the Serverless Data Architectures
I'm a big fan of Gwen Shapira and in this talk she shares some interesting insights into scalable data architectures.

Events and Workflows AWS Badge | A new certification to validate your Serverless knowledge
Marcia Villalba walks you through how to get this new AWS Learning Badge.

API Gateway private integrations | Serverless Office Hours
Lior Sadan and Anandprasanna Gaitonde join Julian Wood to discuss and compare architecture options for scaling your API layer without compromising security and performance.

Should You Run An Entire Web Application in AWS Lambda?
James Eastham jumps on the "maybe single purpose functions aren't the best approach" train. As I've said before, I've moved into this camp as well.

Event Driven Architecture on AWS – Course for Beginners
Check out this free course from Matt Martz and Matt Morgan that teaches you how to transform traditional apps into modern EDAs.

AWS Bites #111L How we run a Cloud Consulting business
Eoin and Luciano discuss how they work as a cloud consulting company, including their principles, engagement process, sprint methodology, and focus on agile development to deliver successful projects. Great episode for anyone looking to get into cloud consulting.

Ampt Live: Learning about Ampt Data (Part 2)
I did another live stream to dive deeper into Ampt's Data module and how to use it to build applications backed by Amazon DynamoDB.

New from AWS 🆕

Scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to find interesting AWS releases this week. This is the best I could find:

• Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) adds support for provisioned capacity mode for Multi-Region Replication tables
• Provisioned capacity for API limits now available in Amazon Cognito
• Introducing IPv6 instance bundles on Amazon Lightsail

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 Miguel Calles (@ServerlessCISO). Miguel is a Senior Systems Engineer/Security Analyst at Iris Technology and volunteer CISO at Secjuice. A serverless specialist, Miguel’s article Six Costly Findings in AWS Serverless Computing was the #2 most popular link in last week's Off-by-none newsletter. Thank you, Miguel, for writing, learning, and sharing about all things serverless.

Final Thoughts 🤔

It was quiet on the AWS front this week, but lots of exciting stuff happening in the space. I'm really interested in the direction SST is taking with ion, I love that Sheen and Luke's new book is finally published, and I'm still blown away by the wizardry that made the new invocations view with Ampt possible. 🤯

Serverless in 2024 is not going to let you down!

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.