Off-by-none: Issue #278

May 7, 2024

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AWS has a Q about DevEx 🧑‍💻

In our previous issue, IBM tried to become cloud relevant again, Amazon Bedrock kept adding features, and there was a new Serverless Handbook. This week, AWS levels up on the AI leaderboard, DynamoDB lets you limit throughput, and a new book helps you make Rusty Lambda Functions. Plus, we have some amazing content from the serverless community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

The biggest announcements from AWS last week were the general availability of Amazon Q Business and Amazon Q Apps (Preview) and the news that Amazon Q Developer is now generally available. If you look up "going all in on AI" in the dictionary, it might just point you to these two announcements. Seriously, though, looking at some of what AWS has done here is quite impressive. Amazon Q Business being able to integrate with and ask natural language questions to other enterprise systems could dramatically increase productivity. Plus, the work they've done on minimizing hallucinations means you might even be able to trust the responses.

On the Amazon Q Developer side, I'm really excited to see where this could go. They are saying that it "includes new capabilities to reimagine [the] developer experience." That's a bold statement, and if AWS can leverage these tools to finally crack the DevEx gap, I'm all for it.

In other AI-related AWS news, Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock now supports MongoDB Atlas for vector storage, Amazon Titan Text Embeddings V2 is now available in Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Transcribe announced general availability of generative AI-powered call summarization, and Amazon Bedrock is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region.

AWS also made some useful serverless-related announcements. Amazon DynamoDB introduced configurable maximum throughput for On-demand tables (read more about it here), Amazon DynamoDB now supports an AWS FIS action to pause global table replication, AWS Amplify Gen 2 is now generally available, and Amazon CloudWatch launched resource filtering for cross-account observability - which is pretty cool.

And finally, Luciano Mammino and James Eastham are working on a new book, Crafting Lambda Functions in Rust. You can go and buy it now to follow along.

⚠️ Hackathon Alert: Build an app on AWS, win cash prizes, learn new tech
Diagrid is thrilled to invite you to the Diagrid Catalyst AWS Hackathon—a four-week, virtual event where you can unleash your creativity and showcase your coding skills by building or modernizing a cutting-edge application using the powerful serverless Catalyst platform, powered by open source Dapr. Get ready to collaborate, compete, and win cash prizes! Find out more and register here. Sponsored

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Here are some excellent posts to help level up your serverless game.

• Distributed Circuit Breakers in Event-Driven Architectures on AWS by Marcin Sodkiewicz
• Analyze more demanding as well as larger time series workloads with Amazon OpenSearch Serverless by Satish Nandi, Michelle Xue, and Prashant Agrawal
• AWS — Properly delete messages between Lambdas and SQS Queues by Joseph Hoppe
• Data API for Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 with AWS SDK for Java - Part 6 Comparing cold and warm starts between Data API and JDBC by Vadym Kazulkin
• Enhancing security for Lambda function URLs by Arpad Toth
• Cloud Run and Cloud Storage…now a perfect match by Wayman Smith
• Exploring Advanced Error Handling Patterns with Event-Driven Architecture — Part II by Mario Bittencourt

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Lots of really great tutorials this week. And most of them are not about AI. 😀

• In Real-Time notification system using WebSockets on AWS by Kevin Monvoisin
• How I made my own chat app with AWS by Krishnan V C
• Unlocking Geeky AI Magic: Transforming Video Transcriptions into Smart Assistance with Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Q by Esteban
• Scheduling events in AWS in a Serverless way - Pt1. EventBridge by Mike Schouw
• Cross-AWS Account Communication in AWS using SNS and Lambdas by Miguel Ramirez
• Create a serverless URL shortener in AWS with Terraform by Andre Lopes
• School Bus Tracker System Architecture by Joud W. Awad
• Building a Serverless Facial Analysis System by Edith Cherotich
• Reduce AWS Lambda Cost by Monitoring Memory Utilization by Michael Sambol
• Implementing Attribute-Level Encryption with DynamoDB by Matt Perreault

Serverless Reads 🤓

Tenant Switching and Custom Permissions in a Multi-Tenant Serverless Application
A lot goes into building multi-tenant systems in the cloud. This is just a great article with some solid architectural recommendations in it.

Serverless Doesn't Stand Still
Seth Orell shares some thoughts on why you need to keep adapting and upgrading your technology to stay innovative and how serverless fits in.

How I Tricked AWS CloudFormation To Power An API
Like using Route 53 as a database, this is objectively a bad idea. But as far as Meme-Driven Architecture is concerned, it's fascinating. Intentionally or not, Samuel Lock is pointing out the fact that just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Automating the Klarna Card Ownership Fees System using AWS Step Functions
Most processes can be automated with Step Functions. Let Michel Neumann's story inspire you to automate some of yours.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

AWS Bites #122: Amazing Databases with Aurora
Eoin and Luciano give a great overview of Amazon Aurora, compare Aurora Serverless V1 and V2, and touch on billing, the data API, RDS query editor, and RDS proxy.

Connecting Confluent Kafka to AWS | Serverless Office Hours
Joseph Morais and Mithun Mallick join Julian Wood to show how you can use serverless services to incorporate on premises data sources using Apache Kafka.

Is AI working for Big Tech? Financial reports suggest the payoff may take time
I found this episode to be super interesting. With all the recent quarterly results being reported, the Vultures discuss if all the AI hype is actually paying off.

Ampt Live: Building a Serverless Image Optimizer on AWS with Ampt
I show you how to build serverless image optimization workflows using S3 triggers, on-demand web requests, and more with Ampt and AWS.

Understanding the SAGA pattern with AWS Step Functions - With Demo
Marcia Villalba introduces you to the Saga pattern, which is crucial for handling failures in distributed transactions across microservices.

Rusty 🦀 Lambda Functions | S03 E14 | Build On Weekly - aws on Twitch
Benjamen Pyle joins Rohini and Darko to demonstrate building Lambda Functions using Rust.

Orchestrating workflows with Temporal
Allen and Andres explore orchestration with Temporal and give their thoughts on the developer experience, ease of use, and how it fits into your software projects.

New from AWS 🆕

And here are a few more AWS announcements that might catch your attention:

• Amazon EMR Serverless announces detailed performance monitoring of Apache Spark jobs with Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus
• Amazon Q launches subscription management with AWS IAM Identity Center integration
• Amazon EMR Serverless introduces Shuffle-optimized disks delivering improved performance for I/O intensive workloads
• AWS CodeArtifact now supports RubyGems
• Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall now supports Domain Redirection
• Amazon EventBridge Pipes now supports event delivery through AWS PrivateLink
• Introducing file commit history in Amazon CodeCatalyst
• AWS Trusted Advisor now supports API to exclude resources
• Amazon Connect Contact Lens now provides support for PII redaction in Spanish
• IP prefix visibility on Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor console
• Amazon Redshift announces support for Multi-AZ deployment with zero-ETL integration
• Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports Route 53 alias record for custom endpoint
• Amazon Q data integration in AWS Glue is now generally available

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

May 10, 2024 - Diagrid Catalyst AWS Hackathon - Project Submissions Open.

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 Seth Orell (@sethorell). Seth is a Principal Platform Engineer at Parsable, a serverless advocate, and an AWS Community Builder. Seth has been writing some excellent serverless posts on his Substack for quite some time and if you haven't subscribed yet, you definitely should. Thank you, Seth, for sharing your love of serverless with the community.

Final Thoughts 🤔

I've been somewhat indifferent towards GenAI since OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT to the masses a year and a half ago. This is mostly because the vast majority of people (and companies) were using it to flood the Internet with more noise and junk. The hallucinations are still really bad, the noise is worse than ever, and the VC bets outside of model makers and providers seem like lighting money on fire. But despite all that, the one company, other than Microsoft, that might actually be able to integrate enough of the good to streamline value, is AWS. Nothing's perfect, and I still think there is a lot of over-hyping going on, but AWS might be on the right track here.

Also, don't forget to check out the Diagrid Catalyst AWS Hackathon!

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.