Off-by-none: Issue #267

February 20, 2024

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

There are People Behind Serverless 👥

In our previous issue, JavaScript got another new runtime, CodePipeline finally added support for branch-based development, and we learned what to expect from serverless. This week, Cloudflare slays a troll, we dive deeper into LLRT, and compare Lambda containers versus zip packaging. Plus, we have a lot of awesome serverless content from the community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

It was a relatively quiet week, but there were still some noteworthy announcements from AWS. This may seem small, but Amazon Data Firehose enabled selecting a time zone for bucket prefixes when delivering streams to Amazon S3. This gives you that tiny extra bit of control that can save you a lot of extra processing on the backend.

Also, API Gateway now supports TLS 1.3, which should have happened a long time ago.

Finally, there's still plenty of buzz around LLRT. Steef-Jan Wiggers shares his round up of reactions.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Data API for Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 with AWS SDK for Java - Part 2 Executing SQL statements
Vadym Kazulkin shares part 2 of his deep dive into the new Data API.

How to secure CI/CD roles without burning production to the ground
Yan Cui explains the ins and outs of using dedicated CI/CD roles for each deployment pipeline.

Designing Events: Event Driven Architecture EDA
Robert Bulmer shares some thoughts on event design and the best practices that come with it.

Comparing Container and Zip Lambdaliths with Thin Functions
Ryan Cormack ran some experiments to test the performance of different packaging formats on multi versus single purpose functions.

Serverless API Documentation with Powertools for AWS
Auto-generating documentation that developers will never read anyway is the dream, right? 🤣 But seriously, check out this post by Ran Isenberg.

AWS Lambda Request Timeline
David Behroozi helps clarify what Lambda is actually doing on every request, how that shows in the logs, how to measure latency, and what you can optimize.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

There are so many excellent serverless tutorials published every week. Here are some of my favorites:

• Unlocking Sentiment: Harnessing YouTube API and AWS DynamoDB for YouTube Comment Analysis with HuggingFace’s LLM Sentimental Models by Harish Ahamed
• Migrating from API Gateway V2 to V1 to get REST API features by Guillaume Égée
• A Guide to Task Tokens and Callbacks Using Lambda in AWS Step Functions by AliBin Farooq
• Building a log search service for under $7/month by Rémi Dettai
• Adding Amazon DynamoDB Memory to Amazon Bedrock using LangChain Expression Language (LCEL) 🦜️🔗 by David Min
• Implementing Lambda Triggers for DynamoDB Events by Nagarjun Nagesh
• Blazing Fast Change Data Capture with DynamoDB Streams and Rust by Benjamen Pyle
• How to Set Up Amazon SES to Receive Emails and Store Them in S3 by Olga Shabalina
• Advanced Serverless Techniques IV: AWS Athena for Serverless Data Analysis by Miguel Ramirez
• Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases with Private Data by Lee Gilmore
• AWS StepFunctions HTTP Endpoint demystified by Jimmy Dahlqvist
• Serverless Simplified: Integrating Docker Containers into AWS Lambda via serverless.yml by Miguel Ramirez
• Use S3 event notifications to generate thumbnails by Andre Lopes

Serverless Reads 🤓

Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial
Not about serverless, but important work is being done by Cloudflare and their Project Jengo. Stifling innovation was never the intent of patents.

AWS Lambda Runtime Debate
Omid Eidivandi shares some interesting insight into this debate. Interestingly, the new LLRT runs at about the same cost because it's currently a custom runtime. 🤔

People Matter more than Technology when Building Serverless Applications
I really enjoy Benjamen Pyle's technical writing, but his posts on being a manager and looking past the tech to focus on the humanity behind it, especially resonate with me. And yes, I do like Perl. 😀

The Wrong Way to Use DORA Metrics
Great post by Nočnica Mellifera that reiterates why you might be optimizing DORA metrics for all the wrong reasons.

12 Places Microservice Architecture Doesn’t Work
As much as I like microservices, I also appreciate when people justifiably rail against them. They are not a silver bullet, and often introduce unnecessary complexity.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Refactoring Java applications to serverless | Serverless Office Hours
Mark Sailes and Max Schellhorn join Julian Wood to discuss how serverless is more than just a run-time for your code.

Create your AWS Step Functions workflows with AWS SAM
Marcia Villalba shows you how to create your workflows with AWS SAM.

Ready, Set, Cloud Podcast! - S2E3: How math can change the way we write software forever
Allen Helton chats with Jeremiah Dunham about using math to test the correctness of your code.

Real-World Serverless podcast - E95: How Dunelm went from on-prem to serverless while going faster
Yan Cui speaks with Mark White about Dunelm's journey from on-premise infrastructure to serverless and how they stayed agile while migrating their systems to this new paradigm safely.

AWS Bites #114. What's up with LLRT, AWS' new Lambda Runtime?
Eoin and Luciano share their thoughts on the new LLRT including the good, the bad, and whether a new runtime from AWS is necessary.

Ampt Live: Building “Progressively Enhanced” Eleventy sites on AWS with Ampt (Part 2)
If there's one thing I've learned about live coding, is that it takes way longer than you think! Here's part 2 of me showing how to build and iterate on an Eleventy site with Ampt, add progressive enhancement and interactivity with HTMX, and deploy it to AWS using Ampt.

New from AWS 🆕

Not much from AWS serverless this week, but here are a few announcements that caught my eye:

• Announcing Amazon EMR Serverless in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
• Introducing pull request approval rules in Amazon CodeCatalyst
• Amazon DocumentDB now supports vector search with HNSW index
• Amazon OpenSearch Serverless now supports TLS 1.3 and perfect forward secrecy
• Amazon OpenSearch Service now lets you update cluster volume without blue/green

Serverless Tools 🛠

Shear: A Lambda Optimization Tool
An AWS Lambda cost optimization tool designed to help you find the ideal balance between function runtime, memory usage, and cost efficiency.

Visualize your AWS app like never before with sls-mentor
Visualize a graph snapshot of your AWS app, rank Lambdas/DynamoDBs by stats, edit the graph, and more!

Thoughts from Social 🐦

Here are 20 blogs that will help you get better at AWS & serverless.

Serverless Landhttps://t.co/IkDZXYlgpV@jeremy_daly's bloghttps://t.co/1sOomtB0ad@LeeJamesGilmore's bloghttps://t.co/MxqVUfAkEd

Ready, Set, Cloud by @AllenHeltonDev :https://t.co/gY5C55tcUU… pic.twitter.com/XEnlHgjYgs

— Yan Cui (@theburningmonk) February 20, 2024

You want some awesome serverless content? This is quite the list!

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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 Miguel Ramirez (@MiguelAramis). Miguel, aka The Saas Enthusiast, keeps himself busy blogging on Medium writing lots of articles about serverless that you’ve probably seen featured here in Off-by-none lately. If you’re interested in learning more about cloud technologies, serverless architectures, or business strategy, you’ll want to follow along, too. Thank you, Miguel, for your ongoing contributions, posts, and insights!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I really love combing through all this amazing serverless content every week. It always amazes me to see the different ways people apply it to solve business problems.

As an aside, I've been working on a new open source package called Fraglates that lets you dynamically render compiled Nunjucks templates in microseconds to build SSR websites. It works great with serverless backends, and with template fragment support (aka partials), it's a powerful companion to frameworks like HTMX. I'm currently adding support for Suspense-like streaming, and it's blowing my mind! 😀

Anyway, I'd love some feedback if you get a chance to check it out.

Until next time,
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.