Off-by-none: Issue #276

April 23, 2024

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Amazon Bedrock Means Business 🪨

In our previous issue, Neon and Supabase both went GA, Amazon Bedrock launched in Sydney, and CloudFront added (slightly) better support for Lambda fUrls. This week, Amazon Bedrock continues to rollout some impressive updates, Powertools gets a parser, and Vercel rolls back Edge rendering. Plus, we have lots of serverless content from the community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

AWS made a lot of announcements about AI this past week, so let's get those out of the way.

Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus model and two Meta Llama 3 models are now available on AWS Bedrock. These are quite powerful, so if you're interested, I suggest reading the Claude 3 Opus model official post and the Meta Llama 3 models official post for more details. They also announced that Amazon Titan Image Generator and watermark detection API are now available in Bedrock. The Titan Image Generator is rather impressive, especially its instant image customization capability.

Also, Amazon Bedrock model evaluation is now generally available, letting you test different models to determine which ones are best suited for your use case. And Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock is now available with new safety filters and privacy controls. Parts of this get pricey, but a few things are included that can certainly make working with these models a lot safer. Finally, you can now import custom models in Amazon Bedrock (preview).

Two non-GenAI related AWS announcements were that AWS CloudFormation ChangeSets now offer enhanced change visibility for deployments and Amazon Athena announced federated query pass-through.

The latest version of Powertools for AWS Lambda (TypeScript) was released and adds a very cool "Parser" feature that uses Zod to validate data.

And not to be left out, Meta Llama 3 is now available on Cloudflare Workers AI as well.

Finally, according to Guillermo Rauch from Vercel, "We've run the experiment. Edge rendering doesn't work: it's slower, has worse DX & runtime limits. We reverted it." Edge has been over-hyped from the beginning (though it still has its place), but there's nothing wrong with running experiments to see where efficiencies can be gained. Edge rendering might work in niche scenarios, but round trips x distance it the most important calculation.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Using CloudFront functions as a REST API
David Behroozi runs a fun experiment to see just how far you could push CloudFront functions.

How to set up Amazon RDS Proxy for Amazon Aurora (Serverless) database cluster and connect AWS Lambda function to it
Vadym Kazulkin shows you how to connect a Lambda function to an Aurora database with RDS Proxy using Java JDBC capabilities.

How to handle execution timeouts in AWS Step Functions
Yan Cui shows you three ways to catch and handle execution timeouts in Step Functions.

AWS EventBridge Scheduler as a workaround to SQS Fifo queue limitations
Cvetanov Goce shares how they used the EventBridge Scheduler to deliver messages at a specific time when not concerned with the message order.

And here are some other interesting tutorials:

• Using Verified Permissions with Cognito to control access to API endpoints by Arpad Toth
• Enhancement of Amazon API Gateway Proxy connecting to Amazon DynamoDB in 3 phases by Prasenjit Roychoudhury
• Serverless Strategies with OpenAI: Episode 1 by Miguel Ramirez
• Managing AWS Lambda Versions with AWS Step Functions: A comprehensive guide by Maureen Plank
• Advanced AWS Lambda — An Obscure Feature You Must Absolutely Use by Ifezouani Ilyass
• Serverless Web App on AWS Amplify by Babajide Oni
• Creating a simple API with Winglang by Andre Lopes
• Use Amazon Titan Text Model with Lambda (Exploring 🤖 Generative AI on AWS) by Awedis Keofteian
• Run NodeJS App on AWS App Runner Using Amazon ECR by Ikeri Ebenezer
• Dive into Generative AI with Amazon Bedrock and AWS Lambda Function URL Response Streaming by Ike Gabriel Yuson
• Adding flexibility to your deployments with Lambda Web Adapter by Zied Ben Tahar

Serverless Reads 🤓

The Serverless Illusion
Gregor Hohpe writes, "Serverless reduces the need for (readily available) ops skills but increases the demand for (less readily available) distributed system design skills." What a great way to put it.

Architect Serverless Applications with Anticorruption Layers
Great post from Sheen Brisals on implementing ACLs to protect your domain models from upstream suppliers.

Stateful Cloud Services at Neon Navigating Design Decisions and Trade-Offs: Q&A with John Spray
Steef-Jan Wiggers interviews John Spray about a recent talk that looks at the often-overlooked complexities of stateful cloud service design, using Neon Serverless Postgres as a case study.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

The Future of Solution Architects: How Generative AI will impact their work?
Nahia Orduña and Slavik Dimitrovic join Marcia Villalba to delve into career development for solutions architects and sharing observations on growth and impact over the years.

Saving Money With Serverless
Rakesh Sanghvi and Sam Lock share their journeys of optimizing serverless costs, including going beyond standard Lambda power-tuning, enabling ECS shutdowns, using SFTP server hosting, and optimizing Amazon Bedrock usage.

AWS Bites 121: 5 Ways to extend CloudFormation
Eoin and Luciano discuss five different ways to extend CloudFormation to support more complex infrastructure needs.

Using serverless messaging services | Serverless Office Hours
Dirk Fröhner and Christian Mueller join Julian Wood to explore fundamental serverless messaging building blocks for distributed architectures including Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, and Amazon EventBridge.

SaaS Multitenancy at Scale with Khawaja Shams
Khawaja Shams, CEO of Momento, covers the essentials of multitenancy at scale in SaaS environments.

Exploring Neon - The Serverless Postgres Service
Andres Moreno and Allen Helton explore Neon, the serverless Postgres service that recently went GA. They build a dinosaur-themed API connected to Neon to test this new service's capabilities.

Ampt Live: Password Protected Environments and Other Authentication Options
I show you how to use Ampt's new Password Protected Environments plus how you can use other authentication options (like Clerk) to secure your apps.

New from AWS 🆕

We covered most of the AWS news above, but here are a few more announcements that caught my attention:

• AWS Config advanced queries support 35 new resource types
• Unify DNS management using Amazon Route 53 Profiles with multiple VPCs and AWS accounts
• Amazon SageMaker enables Projects in SageMaker Studio
• Workflow approvals for Amazon CodeCatalyst
• Introducing Amazon Route 53 Profiles

Thoughts from Social Media 🐦

"serverless cost is unpredictable" in one diagram ;-)

I think the big Q is whether you want to optimize for efficiency or make your budget more predictable. Both are valid - e.g. car makers optimize for unit cost; hedge funds pay huge amounts to make earning more predictable. pic.twitter.com/fNdr0jna4m

— Yan Cui (@theburningmonk) April 18, 2024

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

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

April 26, 2024 - Yan Cui's Money-Saving Tips for the Frugal Serverless Developer

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 David Behroozi (@rooToTheZ). David is the founder of Speedrun, a tool that lets you use Markdown to build tools. He's been publishing some really interesting posts on the Speedrun blog that we love to feature in Off-by-none. Thanks for sharing your serverless knowledge, David!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I know, I know, lots of GenAI has been creeping into the newsletter. I think much of it is over-hyped (like Devin), but there are also some really interesting use cases for it out there (and no, I'm not talking about chat bots 😉). I personally find it fascinating once you wade through some of the sensationalism. Anyway, let me know what you think.

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.