Off-by-none: Issue #275

April 16, 2024

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The Battle for Serverless Postgres Supremacy 🏆

In our previous issue, Cloudflare launched more serverless goodness, Mistral Large got added to Amazon Bedrock, and Redis tried to clean up their PR nightmare. This week, Neon and Supabase both go GA, Bedrock goes Down Under, and CloudFront adds better support for Lambda fUrls. Plus, we have plenty of content from our amazing serverless community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

What are the chances that both Neon and Supabase went GA on the same day? Both platforms offer a managed Postgres service (Neon more serverless than Supabase), but these are exciting times in the Serverless Database Space Race™️. 🚀

In AWS news, Amazon Bedrock is now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region. This is welcome news for a lot of folks. The speed of light is a real problem.

Also in AWS news, Amazon CloudFront now supports Origin Access Control (OAC) for Lambda function URL origins. This means that we can finally use Lambda fUrls as the Amazonian Gods intended, as a replacement for API Gateway.

Amazon Route 53 added support for 18 additional Top-Level Domains including .beer, and AWS AppSync forwards application request headers to AWS Lambda custom authorizer functions letting you now make auth decisions based on the value of headers sent from the application client.

And speaking of authorization, Ampt is Introducing Password Protected Environments that allow you to make development stages and preview environments private.

Finally, Datadog released a report on how AWS flaws made Amplify IAM roles vulnerable to takeover. It's an interesting read and highlights how important it is to understand the infrastructure and configurations you own.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Unleashing Resilience: A Practical Guide to Chaos Engineering in Serverless Architectures
This guest post by Koby Aharon explains how to run a chaos experiment on serverless architecture and shows how to leverage AWS Fault Injection Service for enhanced experimentation.

AWS SnapStart - Part 18 Measuring cold starts with Java 17 using different deployment artifact sizes
Vadym Kazulkin is still trying to optimize cold starts with Java. I admire his persistence and optimism here. 😉

Processing Background Jobs on AWS: Lambda vs ECS vs ECS Fargate
Bit of a wonky post that compares costs of different AWS compute services for background jobs. I've found the length of the job to be the most important factor.

Overview of OpenNext, AWS Amplify, Netlify, and other Next.js hosting options
There are lots of ways to host your Next.js apps, but the author left out Ampt. 😀

Battle of the Extensions
Efi Merdler-Kravitz has a great post that examines how LLRT can significantly enhance Lambda extensions and how it compares to its Rust-developed counterpart.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

There were so many interesting tutorials this week covering topics like DevOps automation, serverless PHP, Single Table Design, and more. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Change Data Capture (CDC) with Debezium, Kinesis, and EventBridge by Kareem Mohllal
• Use AWS StepFunctions for SSM Patching Alerts by Lucian Patian
• How to trigger events every 30 seconds in AWS by Allen Helton
• Efficient Data Migration Between Existing AWS DynamoDB Tables by Sushant Mimani
• Serverless Image Object Detection at a Social Media Startup by Aiden Walton
• Deploy Laravel API To AWS Lambda by Daniel Pepuho
• Using API Gateway mapping templates for direct DynamoDB integrations by Arpad Toth
• Designing a Blog App Using The Single Table Design With AWS DynamoDB by Uriel Bitton
• Protect API Gateway with Amazon Verified Permissions by Jimmy Dahlqvist

Serverless Reads 🤓

Why Cloudflare is the Best Alternative to Vercel in 2024
Cloudflare continues to up its game, and as Pedro Rocha points out, the lines between Vercel are starting to blur. I don't think Cloudflare can (or will) be this cheap forever, but I bet they can hold out long enough to seriously eat into Vercel's market share. 😬

Meaningfulness of Events via Standardization( Part 5 )
Omid Eidivandi shares an in-depth series that should show you just how much there is to know.

How Serverless Almost Killed my App
This post is about serverless on Azure, but worth a read if only to understand that most developers are likely unaware of the tradeoffs. Not sure where 30 second cold starts came from, but designing these types of services requires two very different sets of expertise.

Step Functions HTTP Endpoint Node Considered Harmful
Sometimes criticisms are warranted, and I think Lee Harding makes a really good point here. Managed services are amazing, but poorly implemented abstractions can have unintended (and maybe harmful) consequences.

React, Solid, htmx
Not so much a serverless post, but I am fascinated by this ongoing debate. I've never been a huge fan of React, and seeing it finally come full circle back to the server amuses me greatly. Reactivity is incredibly important for modern UIs, but hypermedia lays a great foundation.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Developing with Wing Cloud | Serverless Office Hours
Elad Ben Israel joins Eric Johnson to show how Wing Cloud merges the simplicity of a modern programming model with the power of local cloud simulation and type-safe components.

Understanding Cost-per-tenant Inside A Serverless SaaS Application with Liz Fong-Jones
Liz Fong-Jones, Field CTO at honeycomb.io and AWS Community Hero, dives into the intricacies of building a serverless SaaS application with a focus on understanding and optimizing cost-per-tenant.

Expert Talk: Are We Post-Serverless? • Julian Wood & James Beswick • GOTO 2024
James Beswick and Julian Wood chat about the evolving landscape of serverless, the fusion of containers and serverless, and the role asynchronous development plays in scaling applications.

So You Want to Build An Event Driven System? - NDC London 2024
James Eastham shares tips taken from building event driven systems in the real world and walks you through a number of integration patterns that this architecture style unlocks.

Automating video dubbing with AWS Step Functions and Artificial Intelligence
Marcia Villalba shows you a demonstration of a custom-built application for automating the dubbing of YouTube videos that utilizes AWS Step Functions and AWS AI services like Transcribe and Polly.

New from AWS 🆕

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

• Amazon Verified Permissions is available in four additional regions
• AWS Step Functions Announces Optimized Integration for AWS Elemental MediaConvert
• Amazon CloudFront now supports Common Media Client Data (CMCD) fields in real-time logs
• AWS Lambda functions now scale up to 12X faster in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
• Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock now supports Claude 3 Haiku
• Amazon CloudFront now supports Origin Access Control (OAC) for AWS Elemental MediaPackage Origin
• AWS KMS announces more flexible automatic key rotation

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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 Sebastian Bille (@TastefulElk). Sebastian is the founder of Elva, a serverless first consulting company, as well as an AWS Community Builder. Sebastian is a huge serverless advocate, sharing his knowledge of serverless and amplifying other serverless folks in the community. Thank you, Sebastian, for continuing to be a champion for serverless.

Final Thoughts 🤔

I know Google Cloud Next happened last week, and there were a boatload of AI announcements, but there wasn't much from a "serverless" perspective. They're basically leaving it at Cloud Run (which is a great service), but it seems as though they're still all in on Kubernetes. To each their own, I guess. 🤷‍♂️

We'll 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.