Off-by-none: Issue #274

April 9, 2024

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The Serverless Gauntlet has been Thrown ⚔️

In our previous issue, Cloudflare continued to raise the serverless bar, CloudFormation got better visualizations, and we learned how Lambda keeps secrets. This week, Cloudflare throws down the serverless gauntlet, Mistral Large hits Bedrock, and Redis fights back (sort of). Plus, we've got lots of serverless content from our amazing community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

A lot happened in the cloud this past week. Let's start with AWS.

AWS AppSync increased existing service quota and added subscription service quotas. The subscription quotas are quite high (and you can increase them), plus it's nice to have some added control.

AWS Lambda added support for Ruby 3.3 and Amazon CloudWatch now supports cross-account anomaly detection, which is a nice feature.

Also, Mistral Large foundation model is now available on Amazon Bedrock. It's a bit pricey (same as Claude 2.0/2.1), but it's supposed to be very good, especially at coding and mathematical tasks. There's more detail in the official blog post.

In other cloud news, Cloudflare just wrapped-up Developer Week 2024 and there were some BIG announcements, including the D1 GA, Workers AI, better full-stack framework support, and more.

Plus, Cloudflare acquired Baselime to expand their serverless application observability capabilities! Congrats to Boris Tane and his team.

Redis is trying to fight their recent licensing change disaster with a rather uninspired ad campaign: You know our name. Meet our new brand. Same Redis, still fast.

And, Brian LeRoux and the team at Begin introduced Enhance WASM, which provides backend agnostic server-side rendering for Web Components. 👀

Serverless Concepts 🏗

What are AWS CDK Aspects, and why are they so Powerful?
Lee Gilmore has another great post that shows you how to visit, inspect, change, and verify all constructs in your app through reusable code.

3 Proven Patterns for Reporting with Serverless
Benjamen Pyle shares his thoughts on implementing shared data across serverless microservices. There are many reasons to do this, but be sure to avoid heavy coupling.

Data API for Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 with AWS SDK for Java - Part 5
Vadym Kazulkin measures the performance of cold and warm starts on Lambda functions using the Data API for Amazon Aurora Serverless v2.

Understanding Reserved vs. Provisioned Concurrency
AWS Lambda concurrency can still be confusing. Here's a helpful overview.

10 Most Popular Tools to Monitor and Debug Serverless Applications
Shormistha Chatterjee put together a list of serverless observability tools for you. The usual suspects are on there, but it's a helpful reference.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Lots of great serverless tutorials this week! Here are some of my favorites:

• Here are four ways you can implement WebSockets using serverless by Yan Cui
• Fixing AWS Step Function errors due to reference to inactive AWS Batch Job Definition revisions by Luís Pontes
• Setup live notifications for asynchronous events in AWS AppSync
• Mastering Long Duration Workflows with AWS Serverless: Lambda, DynamoDB, and WebSocket Integration by Miguel Ramirez
• DevOps Automation : Secure API Gateway with Cognito and Custom Domain in Route53 Using Terraform by Joel Wembo
• AWS Bedrock, Claude 3, Serverless RAG, Rust
• Build and Deploy a Global Serverless Nuxt SSR App with Cloudflare Hyperdrive and Postgres by Stephen Siegert
• How to deploy Remix apps with SSR to AWS Amplify by Rich Buggy

Serverless Reads 🤓

The Ethics Of Social Media Connections And Followers!
Sheen Brisals is one of the most thoughtful people I know, and given the insanity that is social media, it was nice to read his take on all of it.

How to apply the TDD mindset to serverless
Yan Cui explains why the "driven" part of Test Driven Development is so important.

The threat to open source comes from within
This piece by Forrest Brazeal is a thought-provoking look at the state of "open-source software." He points out why transparency is a good thing, as was the case with XZ, and why the long term viability (or accessibility) of many projects can be at odds with funding incentives.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

How to integrate with any service or manual processes with Step Functions?
Marcia Villalba shows you the wait for callback pattern from Step Functions, letting you execute other tasks all without incurring costs during the wait time.

Architecting & designing SaaS solutions comes with its unique set of challenges with Anubhav & Ujwal
Anubhav Sharma and Ujwal Bukka, Solution Architects at the AWS SaaS Factory team, dive deep into the architecture of a simple SaaS application, built using AWS Serverless services.

LocalStack v3 is here and it's kinda amazing!
Yan Cui chats with Waldemar Hummer, founder and CTO of LocalStack about what's new in the latest version and highlights some of the most interesting additions.

AWS Bites #120: Lambda Best Practices
Eoin and Luciano discuss best practices for working with AWS Lambda including cold starts, how to handle different invocation types, tips on performance, cost optimization, monitoring, and more.

Building Serverless Apps with Terraform | Serverless Office Hours
Anthon Aleksandrov and Debasis Rath join Julian Wood to walk through an example application to understand working with Terraform.

DynamoDB Deep Dive with Alex DeBrie | S03 E06 | Build On Weekly
Rohini and Darko are joined by Alex DeBrie to look into database storage options for dad jokes!

Ampt Live: Utilizing Server-Sent Events (SSE) and WebSockets with HTMX and Ampt
I demonstrate how to utilize real time communication channels within your HTMX apps using serverless AWS backends deployed with Ampt.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some more AWS announcements that might interest you:

• Amazon OpenSearch Service now lets you update node count without blue/green
• Amazon Aurora zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift now in additional regions
• Amazon CloudWatch now supports tagging alarms with AWS CloudFormation
• Amazon Cognito customers can secure access to APIs using Amazon Verified Permissions
• AWS Lambda supports Kafka event sources in four new regions
• Launch Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor from Amazon CloudFront console
• Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion now supports enrichment of streaming data with geographical location
• Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock offers support for CloudFormation and Service Quotas
• Cross-account observability enabled for CloudWatch Internet Monitor

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

April 9, 2024 - Understanding Cost-per-tenant Inside A Serverless SaaS Application with Liz Fong-Jones

April 13, 2024 - Serverless Conf – Blumenau 2024

April 25, 2024 - What Causes AWS Lambda Cold Starts & 7 Ways to Solve Them (webinar)

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 the legendary Yan Cui (@theburningmonk). Yan is synonymous with serverless. He is one of the original AWS Serverless Heroes and has been a staple in the serverless community since its very beginning. He continues to regularly publish incredibly helpful serverless content on his blog, YouTube channel, and the Real-World Serverless Podcast. He also teaches several serverless course to help level up your serverless game. Thank you, Yan, for continuing to share serverless with the world!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Another busy week for serverless. Don't forget to try out the Cloud Quiz to test your cloud news knowledge. And please send me your feedback. Are the questions too hard? Too easy? Let me know.

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.