Off-by-none: Issue #272

March 26, 2024

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RIP Redis 🪦

In our previous issue, cold starts were top of mind, Timestream and InfluxDB got cozy, and Bedrock gave us cheap AI Haikus. This week, Redis' OSS license change gets blowback, AWS updates their Savings Plan return policy, and we learn 5 simple steps for serverless resiliency. Plus, we have lots of awesome content from the serverless community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

In AWS news, Amazon DynamoDB now supports resource-based policies, letting you simplify cross-account access control for sharing resources with IAM principals of different AWS accounts. Yan Cui asks, "Is that a good idea?"

Also, AWS CodeBuild now supports custom images for AWS Lambda compute. I really like using Lambdas to do my builds, and adding them to CodeBuild had already made it a much more attractive option. Now with custom container image support? 👀

Do you have buyer's remorse after you locked yourself in to a 3 year Savings Plan? Well, AWS announced a 7-day return window. 🙌

And then there was the Redis debacle. 😔

In case you didn't hear, Redis is switching to Dual Source-Available Licensing that effectively kills the open source version, or at least the future of it. For some extremely interesting background on all this, check out Khawaja Shams' post: RIP Redis: How Garantia Data pulled off the biggest heist in open source history.

But there might be hope! Madelyn Olson, a Principal Engineer at Amazon ElastiCache and former contributor to Redis, posted: "I've gotten together with various former Redis contributors and we've started working on a fork: https://github.com/madolson/placeholderkv. We are all unhappy with the license change, and are looking to build a new truly open community to fill the void left by Redis. Come join us!"

Having an open source software strategy has always been tricky, and commercializing it makes for an interesting challenge. I really do like Redis (the software not the company), so let's hope this fork works out.

And finally, Redpanda is now offering a serverless streaming option.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Large DynamoDB latency after creating Provisioned Concurrency
Interesting post on the AWS re:Post forum about how provisioned concurrency affects DynamoDB and KeepAlive.

Design a mission critical serverless application for high resilience
Pubudu Jayawardana has an excellent post that outlines five simple solutions the PostNL team implemented to improve the resilience of their AWS serverless application.

Spring Boot 3 application on AWS Lambda - Part 1 Introduction to the series
Vadym Kazulkin is starting a new series that will demonstrate multiple ways to run and optimize a Spring Boot 3 application on AWS Lambda.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

There were so many amazing tutorials this week. I had a hard time narrowing them down. One that stood out was 100% Serverless RAG on AWS by Fynn Fluegge. Really, really cool solution here.

And here are several other tutorials you don't want to miss, including several by the AWS team:

• How to Upload Images to an S3 Bucket Using Presigned URLs by Luis Valdés
• Invoke AWS Lambda functions from cross-account Amazon Kinesis Data Streams by Amar Surjit and Pratik Patel
• Upgrade Your Email Tech Stack with Amazon SESv2 API by by Zip Zieper, Dmitrijs Lobanovskis, and Vinay Ujjini
• Backendless with AWS Cognito, DynamoDB and ReactJs by Priyank Rupareliya
• Building a Serverless Newsletter: Your Guide to AWS and Amazon SES by Matteo Depascale
• Automating chaos experiments with AWS Fault Injection Service and AWS Lambda by André Stoll
• Bulk update Amazon DynamoDB tables with AWS Step Functions by Chris Gillespie
• Rapid Development of Agents for Amazon Bedrock Using AWS Lambda Web Adapter by Kazuaki Morita
• An Allow List Lambda Function in Rust is 1 Guaranteed Way to Improve CORS by Benjamen Pyle
• How to Set Up Jest in Serverless: A Step-by-Step Guide by Mrugank Ray
• Step functions for granting JIT privileges by Joel Teo
• Setting Up Real-Time Communication with WebSockets Using AWS API Gateway v2 and Amazon CloudFront by Jari Ikävalko
• Guides: Migrating Astro, Remix, or Nuxt Applications to Ampt

Serverless Reads 🤓

How AWS Step Functions helped streamline the DVLA's application process
I love good engineering stories. Gareth Griffiths walks you through their process for adopting Step Functions.

Reading from DynamoDB gone wrong
TL;DR - Don't use DynamoDB Scans (well, maybe sometimes).

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Advanced Step Functions Patterns with Ben Smith
Marcia Villalba continues her chat about Step Functions with Ben Smith, this time diving into topics like Saga and Circuit Breaker patterns for error management.

Java AI/ML on Lambda with Human Graphics | Serverless Office Hours
Andy Boothe joins Julian Wood to show how Human Graphics combines huge global datasets and uses AI to create a comprehensive profile of demographic estimates.

Your AWS Account is Talking. Time to Listen. with Matt Martz
Matt Martz covers how to discover events published automatically by AWS services and how to respond to various activities within your AWS account.

AWS Bites 119: The state of AWS 2024 (AnsWeRS community survey commentary)
Eoin and Luciano review and discuss.

Ampt Live: Building and deploying Astro 4.0 websites to AWS with Ampt
In this live stream, I show you how to use the Astro 4.0 web framework to build and deploy data-driven SSR websites to AWS using Ampt's supercharged development workflows.

New from AWS 🆕

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

• Amazon DynamoDB now supports AWS PrivateLink
• Amazon Linux announces new quarterly update with AL2023.4 and availability of EKS optimized AMI
• IAM Roles Anywhere now offers credentials that are valid for up to 12 hours
• AWS Batch now offers multi-container jobs via AWS Management Console
• Amazon EMR Serverless achieves FedRAMP Moderate compliance
• Amazon Aurora zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift announces support for data filtering and CloudFormation
• Introducing the Bedrock GenAI chatbot blueprint in Amazon CodeCatalyst

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

March 28, 2024 - A Look Into CloudEvents - The New Standard For Event-Driven Architectures with Omid Eidivandi

April 13, 2024 - Serverless Conf – Blumenau 2024

May 21, 2024 - ServerlessDays ANZ - Sydney, AU

May 23, 2024 - ServerlessDays Belfast

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 Taylor Jacobsen (@taylorjacobsen). Taylor is the AWS Heroes Program Manager at AWS, responsible for planning, coordinating, and executing all the details of this amazing program. And knowing how difficult us Heroes can be, it's basically herding cats! 😀 But seriously, Taylor and her team bring together dedicated, community-focused experts from around the world to collaborate and make AWS better. The work she does inspires, recognizes, encourages, and enables AWS Heroes to do their best work to help others. Thank you Taylor for your continued dedication (and patience).

Final Thoughts 🤔

I've been playing around with building a web app using a combination of HTMX and Alpine for interactivity, Hono for the backend, Tailwind for styles, Fraglates for templating, and Ampt to deploy to AWS. It is absolutely amazing how much functionality and interactivity you can easy add without ever touching React or Vue. 🤯 I'll share more soon.

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.