Off-by-none: Issue #289

July 23, 2024

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

A Global AWS Heroes Summit 🦸

In our previous issue, AWS had another GenAI-heavy summit, App Studio promised enterprise-grade applications without software development skills, and AWS faced some backlash from developers. This week, AWS Heroes assemble, AWS puts the kibosh on QLDB, and Momento goes GA with Topics. Plus, we have lots of amazing content from the serverless community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Last week was the AWS Heroes Summit in Seattle, WA. It was the best AWS related event I've ever attended. 190 AWS Heroes from around the world got an opportunity to meet, collaborate, learn, and share our thoughts with the AWS service teams. There were Q&As with Matt Garman (the new CEO), Deepak Singh (VP of Next Gen Developer Experience), and several other GMs and PMs. We gave feedback on roadmaps, shared our #awswishlist items, and even vented our frustrations. And it true AWS fashion, the product teams were happy to hear all of it. I'm truly honored to be included in such an amazing group of people. The future remains bright!

In other AWS news, Amazon DocumentDB got a few upgrades including improvements to document compression and support for change streams on reader instances. Also, AWS Lambda now supports SnapStart for Java functions that use the ARM64 arc.

And, unsurprisingly (at least to me), Amazon QLDB will shut down on July 31, 2025. 🤷‍♂️

In other cloud related news, Netlify introduced the Frameworks API, the DynamoDB Toolbox reached v1, and Believe In Serverless announced a new podcast.

Finally, Momento announced a Series A and the General Availability of Topics. Congrats to Khawaja and Daniela for building such an amazing suite of services. More here.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Here are some great posts I came across to help you expand your cloud/serverless knowledge:

• Cloud Run Idle Instance Conundrum by Nael Fridhi
• Unlocking High Throughput with Amazon SQS FIFO Queues by Marcos Henrique
• Event-Driven Magic: Exploring AWS EventBridge by Lilupa Karu
• AWS Lambda vs. Cloudflare Workers Detailed Comparison by Kiryl Anoshka
• De-Bugging with Amazon Q and Generative AI by Kasun de Silva
• Do you know your Fan-Out/Fan-In from Map-Reduce? by Yan Cui
• A battle for the ages: AWS Serverless vs Microservices on Kubernetes by Anton Smit
• Data API for Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 with AWS SDK for Java - Part 9 Comparing cold and warm starts: Data API vs DynamoDB by Vadym Kazulkin

A dive into health roll-up
Adam Kinniburgh shares SquaredUp's really cool approach to rolling up application health status using a dependency graph. It's way too easy to let your custom dashboards go unmaintained, creating a bunch of separate (mostly useless) interfaces that you can't confidently rely on. This is a clever way to avoid that trap. Sponsored

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

And some awesome tutorials to keep you busy:

• Live Data Transfer: RDS to DynamoDB Made Easy by Ayushi Garg
• Getting to the meat and potatoes of serverless recipe parsing with Amazon Bedrock by Will Dady
• Implement A Serverless Priority Queue Pattern by Joud W. Awad
• Achieve near real-time analytics with Amazon DynamoDB and zero-ETL for Amazon OpenSearch Service by Lee Hannigan and Praveen Kadipikonda
• Innovating with AWS Lambda Extensions: Boosting Your Serverless Capabilities by Mohamed wael Ben ismail
• Optimising package size for Typescript AWS Lambda functions using serverless-esbuild by Hugh
• Getting the Actual Client IP When Using Application Load Balancer (ALB) in AWS Lambda by Ramkumar Jayakumar
• Preventing Multiple Processing of SQS Messages by Joao Marques

Serverless Reads 🤓

Is AWS Lambda a Halo Product?
Gregor Hohpe shares a rather stinging indictment of AWS Lambda in his latest piece. There are parts of this I agree with, and parts that I don't. But one thing is true: years of acquired skills by true believers often dismisses the wall of complexity faced by newcomers.

The Journey of Modernization: Lessons Learned from a Fragmented Architecture
Complexity isn't the only challenge, as this post points out. Cultural changes and adoption of best practices often take years within even small, well-run dev teams.

The state of CodeCatalyst in July 2024
I'm honestly quite bearish on CodeCatalyst. AWS has a history of trying to create things that serve the needs of everyone. This works with primitives, not so much with end-to-end product offerings.

The New Paid Media
Emily Freeman shares her thoughts on why Influencer Marketing is the next frontier for companies looking to get in front of developers. Traditional marketing has never worked on us (we're too skeptical), but a more personal approach from people you trust might just get us to turn our heads.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Cost-effective GenAI | Serverless Office Hours
Giuseppe Battista, João Galego, and Kevin Shaffer-Morrison explore tips, tricks, and techniques to get to market fast and cost-effectively with your GenAI powered MVP.

Hashnode's journey into its public GraphQL API
Sandro Volpicella provides an overview of Hashnode's journey to its public and serverless GraphQL API, which powers their Headless CMS.

New from AWS 🆕

• AWS Lambda now supports Amazon MQ for ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ in five new reg
• Amazon Aurora zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift now available in 8
• Amazon MQ now supports quorum queues for RabbitMQ 3.13
• New open-source Advanced MYSQL ODBC Driver now available for Amazon Aurora
• AWS KMS increases default service quotas for cryptographic operations

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

August 31, 2024 - ServerlessDays Bengaluru 2024

September 20, 2024 - ServerlessDays Lima

October 10, 2024 - ServerlessDays Cardiff

February 20, 2025 - ServerlessDays Manchester 2025

Please send me your serverless events!

Star of the Week ⭐️

This week's star is Ross Barich (@rossbarich). Ross is the Head of AWS Community at Amazon Web Services and one of the people (along with other amazing folks like Taylor Jacobsen and Farrah Campbell) who put together and pulled off the AWS Heroes Summit. Ross has been a huge supporter of the Heroes program and an advocate for AWS developers everywhere. Thank you Ross for continuing to build and support this unique community.

Final Thoughts 🤔

I used quite a bit of cognitive cycles during the AWS Heroes Summit last week, so this week I'm technically on vacation. But there was just too much to share with all of you to sit this one out. 😉

Now back to resting my brain for a few more days. 😀

Have a great 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.