Off-by-none: Issue #280

May 21, 2024

Only have a few minutes? Check out this week's MOST POPULAR links as chosen by our email subscribers.

The Elasticsearch Serverless we've been waiting for? 🤔

In our previous issue, AWS announced a new leader, S3 fixed a major billing issue, and OpenAI released the first version of "Her". This week, we get a new Elasticsearch Serverless option, Vercel gets a boost, and Scarlett Johansson snubs OpenAI. Plus, we have lots of amazing content from the serverless community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

It was a busy week in cloud. AWS announced Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage and that Amazon EventBridge now supports Customer Managed Keys (CMK) for Event Buses. Also Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock now lets you configure inference parameters and Guardrails.

Google announced that Project IDX, their next-gen IDE, is now in open beta, plus they launched Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps.

Elastic announced Elasticsearch Serverless to accelerates building AI search apps. I feel like Ajay Nair has his hands all over this one. 😀

Vercel completed a $250M Series E round at a $3.25B valuation, so get ready for more Next.js.

Remember how OpenAI's new "Sky" voice sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson? Well, she didn't like that, so now they're getting rid of it.

And finally, Emily Freeman and Forrest Brazeal are starting a service to help connect companies with the audiences of technical creators and monetize their content. I love this idea.

⚠️ 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 Tutorials 👷‍♀️

There were so many excellent serverless tutorials this week! Here are some of my favorites:

• Serverless Event Sourcing & CQRS (Part 2) by Lee Gilmore
• How to build a single-page application deployment using AWS CDK by Peter McAree
• Using the circuit-breaker pattern with AWS Lambda extensions and Amazon DynamoDB by Alan Oberto Jimenez and Tobias Drees
• Serverless Document Database: MongoDB Atlas Non-Functional Requirements by Robert Bulmer
• SERIES: Building a Serverless Appointment Scheduler Using Twilio, Express, and AWS: Initial Configuration, Designing DynamoDB Appointments Table, and Connecting Twilio With DynamoDB by Miguel Ramirez
• Risks of decisions up front with event-driven architecture by David Boyne
• Optimize AWS Lambda with Dynamic Provisioned Concurrency by Noa Gelber
• Deploy Serverless Apps with AWS SAR by Sumit Mondal
• Build a serverless exam generator application from your own lecture content using Amazon Bedrock by Merieme Ezzaouia and Mohammed Reda
• Building a Serverless Order Processing Workflow with Lambda, DynamoDB, and Step Functions by Aniruddh Fataniya
• Build GraphQL-powered Generative AI applications with Amazon Bedrock and AWS AppSync by Ike Gabriel Yuson
• Sub-minute Lambda Trigger by Sachin Devdhar
• Amazon DevOps Guru for the Serverless applications - Part 10 Anomaly detection on Aurora Serverless v2 by Vadym Kazulkin

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

A Builder's Guide: Getting Started with GenAI - Du'An Lightfoot
If you want to get one of the best overviews of how GenAI works, watch this episode of vBrownBag! So much information packed into just over an hour.

Real-World Serverless podcast - Episode 102: Building AWS communities
Yan Cui chats with Farrah Campbell, former AWS hero turned AWS employee (and one of my favorite people), about the AWS Heroes and Community Builders programs.

AWS Bites #123: What do you need to know about DynamoDB?
Eoin and Luciano provide a comprehensive overview of DynamoDB, including how it compares to relational databases, when to use it, how to get started, writing and querying data, secondary indexes, and single table design.

Ampt Live: Automating Image ALT text with AI using AWS Bedrock, Claude, and Ampt
I demonstrate how to use Amazon Bedrock and Claude to automatically describe images to generate ALT text for your web sites. Built and deployed with Ampt.

Building a personalized GenAI webapp | Serverless Office Hours
Corneliu Croitoru joins Julian Wood to show FoodLens, a personal food nutrition information and recipe generation app that uses Amazon Bedrock's Text Generation, Text-to-Image, and Image-to-Text capabilities.

What does a Software Engineer in the Cloud actually do?
Three cloud software engineers, Danielle Heberling, Ian McKay, and Lorenzo Hidalgo, provide an in-depth look at their roles and responsibilities, key tasks, and the challenges they face working in cloud computing.

New from AWS 🆕

And here are a few more AWS announcements that might interest you:

• Amazon MSK now supports the removal of brokers from MSK provisioned clusters
• Amazon VPC Lattice now supports TLS Passthrough
• AWS CodeBuild now supports connecting to an Amazon VPC from reserved capacity
• AWS announces Amazon DocumentDB zero-ETL integration with Amazon OpenSearch Service

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

May 23, 2024 - ServerlessDays Belfast 🗣️

May 23, 2024 - Moar Serverless!! 2024

May 24, 2024 - ServerlessDays ANZ - Auckland, NZ

June 7, 2024 - Diagrid Catalyst AWS Hackathon - Project Submissions Deadline

June 13, 2024 - ServerlessDays Milano 2024 🗣️

Please send me your serverless events!

Star of the Week ⭐️

This week's star is Peter McAree (LinkedIn). Pete is a Staff Software Engineer at Magnify and an AWS Community Builder. You might know him from his PeteScript blog where he shares articles about building on AWS with serverless and CDK. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with the community, Pete!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I'm heading off to Northern Ireland tonight for ServerlessDays Belfast on Thursday. Looking forward to seeing some of you there!

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.