Off-by-none: Issue #266

February 13, 2024

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Low Latency Serverless Runtime 🚅

In our previous issue, AWS introduced ClickOps to IaC, Public IPv4 addresses got a free tier, and we explored the post-serverless era. This week, JavaScript gets another new runtime, CodePipeline finally supports branch-based development, and we learn what to expect from serverless. Plus, we have plenty of content from the amazing serverless community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Probably the biggest bit of serverless news last week was the introduction of LLRT (Low Latency Runtime), an "experimental, lightweight JavaScript runtime designed to address the growing demand for fast and efficient Serverless applications." And yes, it is fast, like faster than Go fast. It's experimental, it's missing some Node.js compatibility features, and who knows if AWS will ever officially support this. But I've never been one to bet against JavaScript. 😉

In other AWS news, Amazon Bedrock console gets a modern look-and-feel, but considering the whole thing is only about a year old, I'm really curious what they were thinking when they launched the first "unmodern" version.

AWS AppSync is having a week. It now supports environment variables in GraphQL resolvers and functions, which is a big deal for some folks apparently, and it introduced 12 new Amazon CloudWatch metrics for enhanced monitoring.

Amazon SQS launches the Extended Client Library for Python to support payloads up to 2GB. This is another one of those productized patterns I've been talking so much about. I like these.

I saw that Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now supports text search. I don't use it, so I'm not sure how it compares to the capabilities of OpenSearch, but full-text search is a nice option to have.

AWS introduced Amazon Data Firehose, formerly known as Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. Don't get too excited, they just renamed it.

And finally, CodePipeline supports additional trigger filters and new execution modes. The big news here is that they finally support branch-based development and monorepos.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

First impressions of CloudFormation's IaC generator and CDK migrate Yan Cui shares his thoughts on the new IaC generator. TL;DR good start, but needs work.

Drop the layers, bundle up with ESBuild instead Andres Moreno is rightfully on the anti-Lambda layers train. There are better ways.

Refactoring applications visually using Event Driven Architectures - Part 2
Richard Keit shares his experience and impressions of using the AWS Application Composer.

Boost App Engagement with AWS CloudWatch Metrics & Powertools for AWS
Nathan Hanks' post guides you through personalizing observability by integrating CloudWatch metrics into mobile push notifications.

AWS SnapStart - Part 15 Measuring cold and warm starts with Java 21 using different synchronous HTTP clients
Vadym Kazulkin must have enough for an entire book by now on SnapStart. 😉

Advanced Serverless Techniques II: Streamlining Data Access with DAL
Miguel Ramirez explains why Data Access Layers make a lot of sense.

The Untold Story: Why AWS Lambda Defaults Lack Atomicity in Changes
This is a helpful reminder of something we should all be aware of.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Lambdalith's and Function URLs — A Microservice Match Made In Heaven
I emphatically agree with Lee Gilmore on this one. Lambda FURLs are incredibly powerful, plus putting a CloudFront distribution in front lets you add WAF.

And here are some more amazing serverless tutorials:

• Serverless Chat GPT Assistant by Alessandro Poffa
• Advanced Serverless Techniques III: Simplifying Lambda Functions with Custom DynamoDB Middleware by Miguel Ramirez
• Deploy a Serverless FastAPI App with Neon Postgres and AWS App Runner at any scale by Stephen Siegert
• Streaming data from Postgres to Kinesis using Database Triggers by Dhiraj Mishra
• Leveraging DynamoDB Streams: A Step-by-Step Guide to Real-Time Data Processing by Miguel Ramirez
• Running Selenium on Steroids : The AWS Lambda's Way by Yash Bansal

Serverless Reads 🤓

Rethinking Serverless: The Price of Convenience
I think there is some valid reasoning in this piece. You all know I'm not a fan of added complexity.

My Personal Serverless Rust Developer Experience. It’s Better Than You Think
Benjamen Pyle continues to share his journey with Rust. I'm beginning to suspect he might be on the Rust Foundation's payroll. 😂

What to expect from serverless
Pete Naylor shares some excellent observations here. I’ve been a longtime critic of the "serverless pricing model", both at the introductory level and at scale.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Must know concepts to work with Step Functions | State types, data management, and workflow types
Marcia Villalba does a deep dive into AWS Step Functions, exploring key concepts such as types of states and how they are visually represented.

Perils, Pitfalls and Pratfalls of Platform Engineering
This is a great talk by Charity Majors. Hard not to agree that developers need to own their workloads. So what does that mean for the teams that are enabling them?

Comparing Apache Airflow and Step Functions | Serverless Office Hours
Fernando Gamero joins Julian Wood to talk about how to orchestrate ETL pipelines with Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (Amazon MWAA) and AWS Step Functions.

AWS Bites - How do you revoke leaked credentials?
Eoin and Luciano discuss what to do if you accidentally leak your AWS credentials during a live stream. 🙀 Learn the difference between temporary credentials and long-lived credentials, and how to revoke each type.

What's the hype with Rust and AWS Lambda?
James Eastham shares his view on the current state of using Rust to build serverless applications.

Observing a Serverless Electronic Health Record
Benjamen Pyle shows you how to apply observability techniques into services such as SQS, Kinesis, and more, and how he's seen them play out with a real world Electronic Health Record.

Ampt Live: Building “Progressively Enhanced” Eleventy sites on AWS with Ampt
I didn't get as far as I wanted, but still managed to show what life after React might look like (and why it looks a lot like life before React).

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some more AWS announcements that might interest you:

• AWS WAF announces Captcha improvements
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now supports maintenance notifications
• Amazon Redshift announces programmatic access to Advisor recommendations via API
• AWS Transfer Family now publishes events to Amazon EventBridge for SFTP connectors
• Amazon Redshift announces auto and incremental materialized views for data sharing consumer tables
• AWS Fargate announces a price reduction for Windows containers on Amazon ECS
• Amazon OpenSearch Service now offers improved visibility into domain updates
• Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics releases NodeJS/Puppeteer Runtime versions 6.2, version 5.2 and Python/Selenium Runtime version 2.1
• AWS Transfer Family now publishes events to Amazon EventBridge for SFTP, FTPS, and FTP servers
• AWS Application Load Balancer announces one-click WAF integrations
• Amazon SNS now supports sending SMS from five new regions

Serverless Tools 🛠

danzilberdan/py-durable
Build serverless stateful applications in python with zero complexity.

Thoughts from Social 🐦

Lambda Layers is apparently becoming a villain, the same way a single Lambda function per API was (is?) 🌶️

— Heitor Lessa (@heitor_lessa) February 7, 2024

That is spicy, but accurate.

My tech beliefs:

Serverless.
AWS is incredible.
Laravel. One codebase.
Sustainable, not cheap.
Cloud, never on-premise.
Managed, never self-hosted.

We're doubling down on all of these as we plan for further expansion this year. So much to ship and we are off to an epic start 🥳

— Jack Ellis (@JackEllis) February 6, 2024

Love this kind of thinking. I would swap out Laravel, but you do what works for you.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

February 15, 2024 - RyanAir's Serverless Journey with Marcin Sodkiewicz

February 22, 2024 - AWS Organizations in Practice with Almir Zulic

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 James Eastham (@powerplantjames). James is a Senior Cloud Architect at AWS. But what really caught our eye were the great videos he has been posting to his YouTube channel centered around serverless development and event-driven architecture. It takes a lot of time and effort to go beyond your own learning and actively share it with others. Thank you, James, for doing just that!

Final Thoughts 🤔

This was a long one and we've all got a lot of things to do. 😀

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.