Off-by-none: Issue #265

February 6, 2024

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From ClickOps to IaC in minutes 📸

In our previous issue, we got more serverless patterns, heard why some folks are moving away from the CDK, and learned about the observability cost crisis. This week, AWS throws ClickOps a lifeline, Public IPv4 addresses kinda become free again, and we explore the post-serverless era. Plus, we have lots of awesome content from the serverless community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Some interesting news out of AWS Land this past week! They announced the ability to Generate AWS CloudFormation templates and AWS CDK apps for existing AWS resources in minutes. Which is pretty cool and has been at the top of my #awswishlist for a very long time. While I believe that cloud development is evolving beyond IaC, it is imperative that organizations leverage the right tools to provide automation, safety, and scalability for their workloads. Here's a deeper dive on how to migrate existing apps to the CDK and one for CloudFormation.

AWS is also adding something that used to be free to their free tier. It now includes 750 hours of free Public IPv4 addresses, which is likely due to the less-than-enthusiastic response from the AWS community now that they're charging for them.

Also, Amazon EventBridge Event Bus event matching now runs on Open Source Event Ruler v1.50. I'm genuinely curious if anyone is using Event Ruler. 🤷‍♂️

Thanks to David Behroozi, it seems like cold starts with the AWS Javascript 3.502 SDK just got faster. And the next version of sls-mentor will let you visualize your AWS app like you've never seen it before. 👀

In other cloud news, Gcore launched another WASM-based Serverless Edge Computing Product, Inngest raised $6.1M as it expands its workflow engine, and Nile raised $11.6M in seed funding to build a Postgres-powered data layer for SaaS applications.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Open Telemetry and Lambda
Benjamen Pyle shares some insights to help you build your next Lambda with solid telemetry.

AWS SQS: Detect slow processing
Oleksandr Hanhaliuk reminds us of the ApproximateAgeOfOldestMessage metric and how we can use it to help optimize SQS to Lambda processing.

Should You Use Amazon API Gateway in 2024? Consider Function URLs Instead!
Lakindu Hewawasam is asking the right question, though he leaves out using CloudFront as the top-level router.

Serverless & Rust: A Frugal Choice?
Steve Morland has an excellent post that compares the performance and cost of Node.js versus Rust. Rust has some clear advantages, but he also points out an important tradeoff that is "bringing another programming language into the platform, one that developers [have] to learn and support."

Elevating Orchestration: Navigating AWS Step Functions' Latest Features
Chloe McAteer shares why she loves Step Functions, the benefits they provide, and introduces some new features that will impact future projects.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

There's never a shortage of amazing tutorials by the serverless community. Here are a few of my favorites from last week:

• Leveraging Lambda@Edge for Optimized Application Behavior by Dania Refaie
• Using Amazon Textract to gain personal financial insights by Greg Biegel
• Effortless & Serverless File Uploading: Unleashing the Power of AWS S3 presigned urls with Lambda by Adrien Mornet
• Serverless redirect with CloudFront Functions by Jimmy Dahlqvist
• AWS: Retrieve AppConfig Feature Flag using Lambda by Itsuki
• Mastering Serverless with Adv Techniques: Do Not Repeat Yourself by Miguel Ramirez
• Building scheduled workflows using native integrations and intrinsic functions by Heeki Park
• How to create a Slack workflow with webhooks in Momento Topics by Allen Helton
• Serverless EventBridge Pipes by Lee Gilmore
• Data API for Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 with AWS SDK for Java - Part 1 Introduction and set up of the sample application by Vadym Kazulkin
• Event-Driven Architectures: Real-time Data Across Decoupled Applications by Michael Liendo
• A Primer on Idempotence for AWS Serverless Architecture by Ohav Almog
• Solve AppSync's Lambda Resolver N+1 Problem with BatchInvoke by Rich Buggy

Serverless Reads 🤓

Serverless Development on AWS by Sheen Brisals and Luke Hedger is an absolute gift to the community and the future generation of serverless builders. This two-part article from Sheen Brisals narrates the process that he and Luke went through to bring this book to life:

• The Making Of The Serverless Book — Part 1
• The Making Of The Serverless Book — Part 2

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Introduction to AWS Step Functions - what is this service for? Use cases? Benefits?
Marcia Villalba teaches about AWS Step Functions and what their main benefits and use cases are.

Connecting to Salesforce using EventBridge | Serverless Office Hours
Aniket Bulbule and Nick Smit join Julian Wood to talk about connecting Salesforce to your AWS applications with EventBridge.

Why the fuzz about serverless?
Yan Cui shares his slides from a recent talk about why you should care about serverless and some tips on how to do it right.

Ready, Set, Cloud Podcast! S2E1: Moving into a post serverless era
I got to chat with Allen Helton about what a post-serverless era looks like and what we need to do to get there.

AWS Bites #112: What is a Service Control Policy (SCP)?
Eoin and Luciano provide a friendly intro to SCPs, how they work, common use cases, and tips for troubleshooting them.

Ampt Live: Debugging Apps on Ampt with the New "Invocations" View
In this live stream, I walk through Ampt's enhanced logging features and the new "Invocations" view that gives developers better insights into their AWS workloads.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are a few more announcements from AWS that caught my eye:

• Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports PostgreSQL major version 16
• AWS announces support for logging AWS AppConfig data events in AWS CloudTrail
• Amazon Cognito adds signing, encryption, and Identity Provider-initiated SSO for SAML federation
• Amazon Rekognition adds new moderation labels and improves accuracy of content moderation for images
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) Elastic Clusters are now available in 4 additional regions
• Announcing Single sign-on (SSO) support for JetBrains IDE within Amazon CodeCatalyst

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

February 8, 2024 - Observing a Serverless Electronic Health Record with Benjamen Pyle

February 15, 2024 - AWS Organizations in Practice with Marcin Sodkiewicz

May 21, 2024 - ServerlessDays ANZ - Sydney, AU

May 24, 2024 - ServerlessDays ANZ - Auckland, NZ

June 13, 2024 - ServerlessDays Milano 2024 🗣️

Please send me your serverless events!

Star of the Week ⭐️

This week's star is Jimmy Dahlqvist (@jimmydahlqvist). Jimmy is Head of AWS at Sigma Technology Cloud and is an AWS Ambassador & Community Builder. You can find Jimmy regularly blogging about serverless architecture patterns and more. He is also an AWS Certification SME and regularly gives talks at conferences and events. Thank you for being such an active member of our vibrant serverless community, Jimmy!

Final Thoughts 🤔

It was announced last week that I'll be the keynote speaker at ServerlessDays Milan in June! 5 years ago I gave the opening keynote and I'm pretty excited about heading off to Italy again.

If you get a chance, give the latest episode of the Ready, Set, Cloud Podcast! a listen. I'm curious to know what you all think about the idea of productized patterns and how they help bring us into a post-serverless era.

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.