Off-by-none: Issue #287

July 9, 2024

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

Serverless is dead... again 💀

In our previous issue, EventBridge got some helpful updates, Ampt added Cost & Usage Reports, and AWS recommended using shared resources, which seemed contradictory to isolation best practices. This week, Amazon Q Developer takes over your IDE, some folks want to make it easier to get started with AWS, and Girls in Tech shuts down after 17 years. Plus, we have some excellent content from our amazing community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

It wasn't a particularly busy week, but still plenty of cloud and serverless news to share.

AWS announced that Amazon Q Developer is now generally available (GA) in the Visual Studio IDE. I think it's an impressive tool, but it hasn't fully won me over just yet.

Amazon CloudFront announced managed cache policies for web applications, giving you the ability to disable caching by default without needing to send Cache-Control headers. I like this flexibility, but I hope people use it wisely.

AWS also posted an announcement that AWS Lambda introduced new controls to make it easier to search, filter, and aggregate Lambda function logs. I thought this launched before re:Invent last year (the launch blog post is from last November), but maybe they never fully released it. 🤷‍♂️ Anyway, this is a handy feature that gives you way more control over logging.

And congrats to the new AWS Ambassadors from Q2 2024.

In other AWS related news, Kristi Perreault and Matt Coulter are launching a new services to help you get started on AWS. Be sure to sign up for announcements there.

David Boyne recently released EventCatalog v2, an open source documentation tool to bring discoverability to your event-driven architectures.

And some disappointing news, Girls in Tech is closing its doors after 17 years. This follows the shuttering of Women who Code early this year, and it really is a shame. There has been some progress over the last decade, but nowhere near enough. 🙁

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Are dashboards dead? Not quite. They just haven't evolved.
Great piece from Adam Kinniburgh at SquaredUp about why having access to dynamic dashboards with actionable data is still the best way to make informed decisions. Being able to quickly build those dashboards without needing a PhD in data science is the ultimate dream. Sponsored

• The Set Piece Strategy: Tackling Complexity in Serverless Applications by Sheen Brisals
• Comparing AWS Step Functions and Temporal: A Developer’s Perspective by Allen Helton
• Spring Boot 3 application on AWS Lambda - Part 9 Develop application with Spring Cloud Function AWS by Vadym Kazulkin
• Difference between SNS and SQS by Matthias Bloemker
• Serverless AI Inference with Gemma 2 using Mozilla's llamafile on AWS Lambda by Ken Collins

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

• Create an end-to-end serverless digital assistant for semantic search with Amazon Bedrock by Mehdi Amrane
• CDK: how to customize 3rd-party L3 constructs by Yan Cui
• Building Lightning-Fast AWS Lambda Functions with LLRT and Terraform by Matteo Depascale
• Build a Chatbot with Amazon Bedrock: Automate API Calls Using Powertools and CDK by Ran Isenberg

Serverless Reads 🤓

AI’s moment of disillusionment
This post by Matt Asay is dead on. AI has some amazing use cases, but the hype train is finally hitting a wall. This follows Anton Shilov's post about the AI industry needing to earn $600 billion per year to pay for the massive hardware spend. It's unsustainable and only a matter of time until the bubble bursts.

Ensuring Service Continuity: How Circuit Breakers Safeguarded Our Web Push Notifications During the Google Incident
Great post by Reza Farzaneh that explains how their use of the Circuit Breaker pattern helped mitigate a Google outage.

Serverless cloud technology fades away
David Linthicum makes a lot of good points in here. Do you think he's right?

I’m sorry, but the way you adopt serverless is wrong
Yan Cui advocates a slow and steady approach to adopting serverless. I totally agree. He lost me when he said that "configuring AWS resources" and "managing infrastructure" are completely different things, but that's a discussion for another day. 😉

Refactoring to Serverless: From Application to Automation
Gregor Hohpe shares an interesting post advocating that "serverless isn't a runtime; it's an architecture." I definitely agree with that, but I'm not sold on the idea of "architecture as code" as he advocates for. I think the underlying premise makes sense, but the architectural coupling required by this approach still seems wrong to me.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Operating EDA with Quality in Mind • GOTO 2024
Sheen Brisals and Sarah Hamilton discuss challenges created by the asynchronous nature of event-driven architectures and how we need to rethink our approaches towards operations.

Serverless Craic Ep57 The Value Flywheel Effect - Chapter 2
Serverless Craic team discusses the application of Wardley Mapping in understanding movement and making strategic decisions. They share their experiences with the method, emphasizing its ability to visualize and track changes in tech stacks and capabilities.

Building a Culture of Observability
Benjamin Pyle explores important steps that teams can take in order to build a solid foundation to create a culture of observability within organizations.

Simpler, faster serverless APIs | Serverless Office Hours
AWS Serverless Hero, Brian LeRoux, joins Julian Wood to show how to deliver Functional Web Apps at global scale using Begin and Enhance.

New from AWS 🆕

Bit of a slow AWS news week, but here are a few more announcements that might interest you:

• Amazon SQS introduces new Amazon CloudWatch metrics for FIFO queues
• Amazon ECR adds EventBridge support with ECR’s replication feature
• Amazon RDS Snapshot Export to S3 now available in eight additional AWS regions
• Amazon MQ now supports RabbitMQ version 3.13

Serverless Tools 🛠

serkan-ozal/leanser
AWS Lambda Cleaner - Cleanup resources on AWS Lambda container shutdown (timeout and/or spin-down)

Thoughts from Social 🐦

So do people hosting serverless apps not understand serverless?

Like it’s been around for a decade, why are you all surprised that your architecture did what it was supposed to?

If you don’t want surprise bills then enable spend management, it’s like 5 clicks https://t.co/7x6NfmhRGo

— Dev Agrawal (@devagrawal09) July 4, 2024

I'm not sure Dev made a lot of friends with this post, but he makes a valid point. The problem is that people probably don't understand the linear scaling aspect of serverless, especially when it comes to something like serving dynamic websites. This is why the $5 VPS conversation isn't (and perhaps shouldn't) go away.

this is such a good tweet

serverless is truly the final boss of your web journey. it's simplicity and ease of starting masks the difficulties

i am not saying it's wrong, it's just much more difficult to get right than the initial learning curve suggests https://t.co/ecxE1C74Or

— ThePrimeagen (@ThePrimeagen) July 5, 2024

This post was in response to a comment on Dev's post, and it is 100% accurate. We definitely should not "blame beginners for using the platform that was clearly marketed to them." But we also shouldn't blame serverless for doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

August 31, 2024 - ServerlessDays Bengaluru 2024

Please send me your serverless events!

Star of the Week ⭐️

This week's star is Richard Davison (LinkedIn). Richard is a Senior Partner Solutions Architect at AWS and the creator of the Low Latency Runtime (LLRT) for AWS Lambda. With up to 10x faster startups and 2x overall lower cost compared to other JavaScript runtimes running on Lambda, Richard's contribution has made a huge leap towards optimizing serverless workloads. Thank you Richard for your amazing work!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I'll be in Seattle next week with some of my favorite AWS Heroes sharing our thoughts with AWS on how to shape the future of cloud. It should be a blast. Is there anything you want me to share with them for you? Any #awswishlist items you'd like me to run up the flag pole? Send them my way!

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.