Off-by-none: Issue #286

July 2, 2024

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Serverless Independence 🗽

In our previous issue, OpenAI acquired Rockset, Claude 3.5 Sonnet was added to Amazon Bedrock, and Datadog released their State of Cloud Costs report. This week, EventBridge gets some helpful updates, Ampt gets Cost & Usage Reports, and a new AWS Well-Architected cost optimization recommendation leaves me scratching my head. Plus, we have lots of amazing content from the serverless community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

AWS had a busy week, especially with some notable EventBridge announcements. EventBridge Scheduler added more universal targets including Amazon Bedrock to its AWS API actions, bringing the total up to over 7,000. Plus, Amazon EventBridge Pipes now supports AWS PrivateLink and Amazon EventBridge got a new console dashboard.

Amazon Redshift Serverless got a lower base capacity in some additional regions (don't get too excited), AI21 Labs' Jamba-Instruct model is now available in Amazon Bedrock, and Amazon API Gateway WebSocket APIs is now available in 7 additional AWS Regions. I still love this service for one-to-one WebSockets.

AWS also announced updates to the AWS Well-Architected Framework guidance. One of the things that stood out to me was the new COST06-BP04 Consider using shared resources recommendation. In many situations, your choice is to either share resources, or spend an exorbitant amount on idle capacity. The problem is that you generally have to poke holes through bulkheads to make this work, and ultimately violate the other recommendations to isolate workloads in separate accounts. AWS seriously needs to figure this out and manage the multi-tenancy on shared services for you.

If you want to catch up on more serverless happenings at AWS, check out the Serverless ICYMI Q2 2024 post.

And if you need some help figuring out the complexities of AWS, Yasunori Kirimoto created an AWS Heroes Map that lets you easily find AWS Heroes near you.

Speaking of optimizing costs, Ampt just introduced Cost and Usage Reports that let you view 12 months of daily AWS spending history.

Cloudflare just announced embedded function calling in Workers AI. Lots of interesting things happening over there as well.

And finally, according to a report from Omdia's Cloud Software & Services Intelligence Service, serverless computing is now valued at $19bn and is the fastest-growing cloud service. I don't put a lot of stock in these kinds of things, but I saw it mentioned a few times and figured it was worth a share.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Here are a few posts to broaden your understanding of the nuances of serverless:

• Strong Performance with EC2, Lambda, and the Momento SDK for Rust by Benjamen Pyle
• AWS SnapStart - Part 23 Measuring cold and warm starts with Java 17 using asynchronous HTTP clients by Vadym Kazulkin
• Data API for Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 with AWS SDK for Java - Part 8 Optimization strategies for the cold and warm starts by Vadym Kazulkin
• Events vs streaming data in AWS by Jimmy Dahlqvist

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here's a whole bunch of serverless tutorials to keep you busy this week:

• Building a Serverless Web Scraper with a ~little~ lot of help from Amazon Q [Part 1] by Cobus Bernard
• Controlling AWS Lambda Costs and AWS cost last resort, the killer lambda by Kodsama
• Leveraging Step Function Service Integration: Finding Balance for the Developer Experience by Mario Bittencourt
• Perform reindexing in Amazon OpenSearch Serverless using Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion by Utkarsh Agarwal and Prashant Agrawal
• Using DynamoDB as a Secrets Manager by David Behroozi
• Using Document Chat with the Amazon Bedrock Converse API by Jason Stehle
• Serverless media processing on AWS Lambda with FFmpeg by Liza Cullis
• Building an AWS Step Function for Employee Onboarding Process by Meghna Dutta
• Step Toward Better Tenant Provisioning by Jason Wadsworth
• How to validate requests in Amazon API Gateway by Sherif Awofiranye
• Verifying Lemon Squeezy Subscription Webhooks in Cloudflare Workers by Stephen Siegert

Serverless Reads 🤓

Optimizing Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) for speed and scale
Jeff Barr gives us a little peek inside the implementation of Amazon SQS.

How Disney+ Uses Amazon DynamoDB To Serve Billions Of Customer Actions Daily
Uriel Bitton shares how Disney handles billions of bookmarked videos and recommendations each day with AWS.

Let's Talk About Lambdas
Mike Arace gives his take on the pros and cons of using Lambda Functions and when they make the most sense. I agree with much of this (I even joked in the past that Lambda Functions felt like the old days of having a cgi-bin). When it comes to web server or synchronous APIs with consistent traffic, Lambda Functions aren't always the right answer.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Productized Patterns: Exploring the next evolution of Serverless
Here is the opening keynote I delivered at ServerlessDays Milano a few weeks ago. This was a fun talk that hopefully gets you thinking about where serverless is going.

Deploy frontends with the CloudFront Hosting Toolkit | Serverless Office Hours
Corneliu Croitoru and Achraf Souk join Julian Wood to show how the toolkit offers the convenience of a managed frontend hosting service while retaining full control over the hosting and deployment infrastructure.

Pathways to Cloud Excellence: Insights from Top Industry Experts | Working in the cloud ☁️
Andres Moreno, Hazel Saenz, and Ian McKay share their journeys in the cloud industry.

AWS Lambda Internals with Julian Wood
In this session, Julian Wood tells all - getting into the detail of exactly how AWS Lambda works and how you can use it effectively.

Serverless Craic Ep56 The Value Flywheel Effect Introduction - Chapter 1
The Serverless Craic team discusses the value flywheel effect in organizations and its application in driving progress and sustainability.

Becoming a full-time serverless content creator with Yan Cui
Yan Cui joins Allen Helton to talk about full-time content creation and consultancy within the serverless world.

AWS Bites #126: Bastion Containers
Eoin and Luciano discusses solutions for securely accessing private VPC resources for debugging and troubleshooting cloud applications.

New from AWS 🆕

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

• Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion adds support for ingesting data from self-managed sources
• Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployment with two readable standbys now supports snapshot export to S3
• Amazon CodeCatalyst now allows conversion of source repositories to custom blueprints
• Amazon Q in Connect now recommends step-by-step guides
• AWS CodeBuild build timeout limit increased to 36 hours
• Amazon ECR supports Open Container Initiative Image and Distribution specification version 1.1
• PostgreSQL 17 Beta 2 is now available in Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

August 31, 2024 - ServerlessDays Bengaluru 2024

Please send me your serverless events!

Star of the Week ⭐️

This week's star is Sandro Volpicella (@sandro_vol). Sandro is the Platform Lead at Hashnode, co-author of The CloudWatch Book and AWS Fundementals, an AWS Community Builder, and someone who genuinely loves to teach developers about the cloud. You can find all of Sandro's blogs and publications on his Hashnode profile. Thank you Sandro for educating so many developers!

Final Thoughts 🤔

It's 4th of July week here in the United States, so to all my fellow Americans, I hope you have a wonderful Independence Day. 🇺🇸 Given most of the news this week, it could possibly be our last (totally kidding 😬).

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.