Off-by-none: Issue #269

March 5, 2024

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

The Mighty Lambda-lith 🗿

In our previous issue, I stood up for single table designs, AWS advanced zero-ETLs, and Lambda added support for .NET 8. This week, AWS makes some meaningful incremental improvements, Mistral goes GA on Bedrock, and Cloudflare announces a Firewall for AI. Plus, we have a ton of amazing content from the serverless community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

There weren't any major AWS serverless announcements this week, but I really appreciate the incremental improvements that make life easier for developers and solve some of those pesky edge cases. For example, this week Amazon EventBridge API destinations added support for content-type header customization. It may not seem like a big deal, but Nik Pinski does a great job explaining why it actually is.

Another example is AWS Lambda improving responsiveness for configuring stream and queue-based event sources. It used to take up to 15 minutes to propagate configuration changes. Now it takes less than 90 seconds.

And, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams added the capability to easily query data in the AWS Management Console. I'm not a Flink user, but being able to quickly run the occasional ad-hoc query without setting up an environment to run them is very handy.

AWS also announced that Mistral AI foundation models are now generally available on Amazon Bedrock (more details here). Check out the prices on this! 👀

In other cloud news, Cloudflare announces Firewall for AI. This is partially in response to a recently discovered vulnerability in an AI collaboration platform that allows bad actors to hijack models and perform unauthorized actions. Super. 👍

In lighter news, Jimmy Dahlqvist recently published his serverless journey on AWS with an accompanying Serverless Handbook that contains a collection of his learnings and experiences working with serverless and event-driven workloads on AWS.

Finally, a new site that collects ServerlessHorrors was recently released. So far these are focused mostly on users accidentally running up large bills on Vercel and Netlify. IMO, this is another misappropriation of the term Serverless. "PaaSHorrors" would have been more appropriate.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

DynamoDB errors: handle with care! (pt 1)
Pete Naylor shares some important information about dealing with DynamoDB errors.

When to use API Gateway vs. Lambda Function URLs
Yan Cui shares the pros and cons of these two architectural choices, when to consider one over the other, and the tradeoffs associated.

Comparing design approaches for building serverless microservices
Luca Mezzalira provides a handy comparison of single responsibility versus Lambda-lith versus read and write approaches to building apps on Lambda functions. What's the best choice? As with most things, it depends.

And here are some more useful posts for navigating the world of serverless:

• Advanced Serverless Techniques V: DynamoDB Streams vs. SQS/SNS to Lambda by Miguel Ramirez
• Advanced Serverless Techniques VI: Building Resilient and Efficient Cloud Architectures With AWS SNS, Lambda, and DynamoDB Streams by Miguel Ramirez
• Navigating the PDF Generation Maze with AWS Lambda by Adefemi Oseni
• Understanding DynamoDB Write Capacity Units: PutItem vs UpdateItem by Manoj Lingala
• A Mental Model for DynamoDB Write Limits by Roger Chi
• Lambda-less AppSync for SaaS by Jason Wadsworth
• AWS SnapStart - Part 16 Measuring cold and warm starts with Java 21 using different asynchronous HTTP clients by Vadym Kazulkin

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

There are always plenty of excellent serverless tutorials to keep you busy:

• Use Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion to migrate to Amazon OpenSearch Serverless by Muthu Pitchaimani et al
• Dynamically routing user requests to multiple CloudFront origins by Arpad Toth
• Serverless APIs: Auto-Generate OpenAPI Docs & CI/CD Protections by Ran Isenberg
• Cross-Account Event Delivery with AWS EventBridge and CodeCommit by Rajit
• Data API for Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 with AWS SDK for Java - Part 3 Executing update and insert SQL statements in batch by Vadym Kazulkin
• Optimising your OpenSearch Ingestion pipeline using AWS CDK by Peter McAre
• How can you upload an image in AWS S3 bucket directly with presigned URL by Tanmoy Bhowmick

Serverless Reads 🤓

A bref AWS PHP story – Part 3
I love a good bref story. Rafael Bernard Araújo shares more detail about his journey.

Migrating from the Serverless Framework to AWS CDK
Amo Moloko gave this presentation at ServerlessDays Cape Town back in October. Learn why his team did what they did and if it makes sense for you.

Embrace that a Career isn’t always Measured by Climbing the Technology Ladder
Benjamen Pyle comes to the conclusion that hopefully most of you will sooner rather than later.

James Gosling Says to Ask One Question About Generative AI
Every once in a while I read something that captures my thoughts exactly. This is one of them.

Death by Cloud or How to Build Brittle Systems
This post by Max Rohde may seem like a criticism of serverless, but honestly, it's just pointing out the obvious. I've been saying the same types of things for a long time. We shouldn't shy away from acknowledging these facts. It's the only way to make it better.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Ampt Live: Building Event-Driven Applications (EDAs) on AWS with Ampt
I walk you through the basics of building Event-Driven Applications with Ampt. Plus we explore the Storage-First Pattern, how to deal with failures, and much more.

Step Functions Service Integration Patterns | FooBar
Speaking of patterns, in Marcia Villalba's latest video in her Step Functions integration patterns series, she explains the Request-Response Pattern that lets you run an asynchronous job and wait for Callback Pattern.

OpenTelemetry For Your Serverless Rust Applications
James Eastham shows you how to use OpenTelemetry alongside Rust and AWS Lambda to generate telemetry data from your Rust applications.

Building well architected API Gateway APIs | Serverless Office Hours
Zac Burns and Daniel Woods join Julian Wood to take you through the stages of building APIs, including endpoint selection for your global client base, authorization options, and much more.

How PostNL Found Success Embracing Serverless in the Enterprise
Luc van Donkersgoed, Principal Engineer at PostNL and AWS Serverless Hero, gives us a peek behind the curtain on PostNL's serverless journey.

Ready, Set, Cloud Podcast! - S2E3 - Learning by fire: taking your side project to production
Allen Helton chats with Luc van Donkersgoed about continuing education as a developer, the benefits of side projects, and the impact taking them to production has on sharpening your skills.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some other AWS announcements you might be interested in:

• AWS Step Functions adds support for Open Workflow Metrics
• Amazon EKS announces support for Amazon Linux 2023
• Amazon Data Firehose adds message extraction feature for decompressed CloudWatch Logs
• AWS WAF enhances rate-based rules to support configurable time windows
• Amazon OpenSearch Serverless customers can now control access to VPC endpoints
• Anthropic's Claude 3 Sonnet model now available on Amazon Bedrock
• Amazon Redshift announces support for scoped permissions and object-level privileges in data sharing

Serverless Tools 🛠

irensaltali/serverlessapigateway
Serverless API Gateway is a tool designed to streamline your API management tasks using the powerful capabilities of Cloudflare Workers.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

March 7, 2024 - Buckle Up, We're Getting Event Driven with James Eastham

April 13, 2024 - Serverless Conf – Blumenau 2024

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 Marcia Villalba (@mavi888uy). Marcia is a Principal Developer Advocate for AWS and a Cloud-Native Applications Teacher at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. When we started this newsletter five and a half years ago, she was already a star in the serverless community. All these years later, Marcia is still just as active and continuously produces high-quality content and regularly speaks at conferences, spreading the serverless message. Thank you, Marcia, for your perseverance and continued focus on growth and teaching in all things serverless!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Another busy week for serverless and the serverless community. Be sure to check out my Fraglates package if you'd like to explore an alternative to JavaScript-heavy front ends, and make sure to give Ampt a try if you're looking to reduce your operational complexity with your AWS workloads.

Have a great 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.