Off-by-none: Issue #283

June 11, 2024

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The Limit Does Not Exist ⏱️

In our previous issue, Bedrock got a new Converse API, AppSync went async, and we reached the end of an era for serverless advocacy. This week, API Gateway increases its timeout, CloudWatch welcomes AI, and Amazon OpenSearch Serverless gets a price cut. Plus, we have some amazing serverless content from the community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

AWS had a busy week. They announced that Amazon API Gateway integration timeout limits were increased beyond 29 seconds. They didn't actually specify how much the limit increased, just that it did. The reasoning was for "Generative AI use cases with Large Language Models (LLMs)", though I suspect this will be for internal APIs and not user-facing ones.

AWS CloudFormation is accelerating the dev-test cycle with adjustable timeouts for custom resources, allowing you to set a ServiceTimeout so you can fail janky custom resources code faster.

In AWS AI news, Amazon Q now offers inline completions in the command line and Amazon CloudWatch announced AI-Powered natural language query generation. Both of these could actually be useful.

Amazon OpenSearch Serverless slashed entry cost in half for all collection types, now requiring just 2 OCUs at a cost of around $345 per month. Better than $690, but still far from the on-demand serverless search product we had all been hoping for.

AWS also introduced the CloudFront Hosting Toolkit, an "open source command line interface (CLI) tool to help you deploy fast and secure front-ends in the cloud." I appreciate the effort, but this is the wrong direction for things like this. 😐

Finally, we got a brand-new cohort of AWS Heroes. Congrats to all of them!

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Essential Strategies for Designing Serverless APIs with AWS Lambda
Hasnain Ahmed Shaikh shares a few different strategies for implementing APIs with Lambda and the advantages and use cases of each.

Cost-Effective Management of Static Data in Serverless Apps
Samuel Lock has an excellent post that outlines and compares the different ways to store and access static data within your serverless applications.

Spring Boot 3 application on AWS Lambda - Part 7 Measuring cold and warm starts with AWS Lambda Web Adapter and AWS SnapStart - Part 22 Measuring cold and warm starts with Java 17 using synchronous HTTP clients
Vadym Kazulkin shares new installments of his two ongoing series focusing on Java with AWS Serverless.

Storage-first pattern using Serverless
One of my favorite patterns. Sergio Kaz shows the different permutations and the costs associated with each.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here are some serverless tutorials that caught my attention:

• Using Amazon CloudFront and Lambda@Edge as a Global Reverse Proxy by Ike Gabriel Yuson
• How to Create a Sustainable Business Card with AWS CloudFront by Manuel E. de Paz Carmona
• Serverless event aggregation with AWS Lambda and DynamoDB by Kurtis Mash
• Build, Debug, Test, and Deploy AWS Lambda Functions Locally with AWS SAM by Balaji Sukumaran

Serverless Reads 🤓

Serverless x K8S: Reflections and Proposing a Framework to Guide the Selection
Mario Bittencourt wrote a thoughtful piece that attempts to score application requirements along a serverless to K8s continuum. I think it's more complex than this, but it's not a bad starting point.

How Stripe’s document databases supported 99.999% uptime with zero-downtime
Scaling databases is hard. This is a great case study to show you how complex, yet still possible, it is.

Orchestration nation: 10 years of Kubernetes
There are a lot of posts about 10 years of K8s this week. Adrian Bridgwater's post gives a good history of the ongoing debates.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

All the talks from ServerlessDays Belfast are now available! Be sure to checkout my opening keynote and the brilliant closing keynote from James Eastham and Julian Wood.

Serverless Craic Ep54 - AWS Serverless DA Team
The Serverless Craic team gave a quick recap of ServerlessDays Belfast, but more importantly, discussed the recent changes to the AWS Serverless DA team and how that might affect the future of serverless advocacy.

Simplifying serverless with the CDK | Serverless Office Hours
AWS Hero, Thorsten Höger, joins Julian Wood to show how to take your serverless projects to the next level using the CDK Serverless Toolsuite.

What is your cloud job about? | Working in the cloud ☁️
Hazel Saenz, Sarang Kumar, and Anastasia Kondratieva delve into the roles and responsibilities of software architects, software engineers, and site reliability engineers (SREs) within a cloud environment.

What is Serverless in 2024 & Why You Should Care?
James Eastham runs down why reducing operational overhead with serverless services doesn't need to be an all or nothing proposition. I've been advocating for the hybrid approach for quite some time.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are a several more AWS announcements that might interest you:

• Amazon Timestream for LiveAnalytics now an Amazon EventBridge Pipes target
• Introducing Amazon EMR Serverless Streaming jobs for continuous processing
• Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals, for application monitoring (APM) is generally available
• Centrally manage member account root email addresses across your AWS Organization
• Amazon Data Firehose now supports integration with AWS Secrets Manager
• Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion now supports ingesting streaming data from Amazon MSK Serverless
• Announcing the common control library in AWS Audit Manager
• Amazon CodeCatalyst now supports Bitbucket Cloud source code repositories
• Amazon Titan Text Embeddings V2 now available for use with Bedrock Knowledge Bases
• Amazon CloudWatch GetMetricData API now supports AWS CloudTrail data event logging
• Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate now allows you to encrypt ephemeral storage with customer-managed KMS keys
• Amazon CodeCatalyst now supports GitHub Cloud source code with blueprints
• Amazon Location Service launches Enhanced Location Integrity features
• Amazon API Gateway customers can easily secure APIs using Amazon Verified Permissions

Thoughts from Twitter 🐦

I hate that this is next-level evergreen tweet territory. pic.twitter.com/tOafDuH1Su

— Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) June 4, 2024

It's funny because it's true. 😂

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

June 13, 2024 - ServerlessDays Milano 2024 🗣️

June 14, 2024 - Deep dive into the LLRT runtime for Lambda

August 31, 2024 - ServerlessDays Bengaluru 2024

Please send me your serverless events!

Star of the Week ⭐️

This week's star is Mário Bittencourt (@bicatu). Mário is a Principal Software Architect at SSENSE who writes about serverless, event-driven architectures, and DynamoDB on his Medium blog. I always appreciate his non-dogmatic perspective. Keeping an open mind is important when approaching new technology, and there's much to learn from his approach. Thank you Mário for sharing your experience with the community.

Final Thoughts 🤔

Plenty of releases from AWS this week worth taking a look at. Lots of incremental improvements that continue to make life just a bit easier. I'm headed off to do the keynote at ServerlessDays Milan on Thursday, so if you're in the area, I'd love to meet up and say "hi!"

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.