Off-by-none: Issue #293

August 20, 2024

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Defining Serverless Platforms 🧐

In our previous issue, AWS up'd its image generation game, Aurora PostgreSQL added pgvector, and Neon got a boost from Microsoft. This week, AWS enables container restarts, DBOS gets a new CEO, and "Serverless Platforms" get a new definition. Plus, we've got plenty of awesome content from our amazing community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Not much on the serverless front from AWS last week, but there were still some noteworthy announcements that caught my attention.

For example, AWS CodeBuild now supports using GitHub Apps to access source repositories. I guess when you plan to shutdown CodeCommit, you need to give folks more options. Also, Amazon S3 no longer charges for several HTTP error codes, which we already knew was in progress, but has apparently now been completed.

AWS announced that AWS CodeBuild now supports Mac builds, which is pretty cool for those using Xcode to build apps for Apple systems. They also announced an AWS Support Official channel on AWS re:Post and new Blueprints that simplify agent-based automation on Amazon Bedrock.

The most interesting one to me was that Amazon ECS now provides the ability to restart containers without requiring a task relaunch. This is actually a pretty big deal. Being able to recover from failures within a few seconds is a massive improvement over relaunching a container.

For those interested in how AWS powered Prime Day 2024 for record-breaking sales, Jeff Barr and Channy Yun have the details for you.

And finally, DBOS announced the appointment of Jeremy Edberg as CEO. If you're not familiar with DBOS, that's the company that was co-founded by Postgres creator, Mike Stonebraker. It's some really cool serverless technology, so I'm excited to see what Jeremy Edberg will do as CEO.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

AWS SnapStart - Part 24 Measuring cold and warm starts with Java 21 using Lambda layer
Vadym Kazulkin shares another insightful post in his AWS SnapStart with Java series.

Automating Event Validation Through Schema Discovery
Giedrius Praspaliauskas published an extremely helpful README that explains some core concepts as part of an Event Validation solution.

Max Voskob published a great three part Lambda with CloudFront Configuration Guide:

• AWS Lambda Function URL with CORS explained by example
• AWS Lambda with CloudFront configuration guide
• AWS Lambda with CloudFront: CORS, authorization and caching examples

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

And here are some excellent tutorials for you:

• Own Your AWS Serverless Runtime: How to Build and Deploy Custom AWS Lambda Layers using AWS SAM by Bishr Tabbaa
• Building LLM functionality made easy with AWS Bedrock by Bence Balazs
• Reliable S3 Data Replication: Automatically Mirror New Files Without Worrying About Deletions by Rahul Kumar Sharma
• Leveraging AWS Lambda and EventBridge for a Multilingual Slack Bot
• Exporting Cloudwatch Logs automatically to S3 using Kinesis
• Serverless HuggingFace on AWS by Gokberk Ozsoy

Serverless Reads 🤓

Time to move on to Day 2 cloud operations
Eyal Estrin shares his perspective on the much needed mindset change that companies have to adopt when building for the cloud. Day 2 is about utilizing true cloud native capabilities, not being held back by mistakes of the past.

Extreme Programming Meets the Cloud: How Serverless Would Have Been XP's BFF
Whether you're a fan of XP or not, Piero Bozzolo points out a few reasons why he thinks serverless aligns with its core methodology.

Serverless Is Trending Again In Modern Application Development
I tend to take most "analyst's" takes with a grain of salt, but Devin Dickerson outlines Forrester's new market definition of "serverless platforms" in this post, and it's probably worth taking note.

Procreate's anti-AI pledge attracts praise from digital creatives
I know I keep drifting into the AI space here, but I though this was an interesting strategy taken by Procreate. Vowing not to include AI tools in its products may just be virtue signaling to a crowd of angry artist, but I'm really curious to see if this kicks off a larger trend (I doubt it).

MIT researchers release a repository of AI risks
One last AI thing (sorry). I've been critical of AI because I think we're mostly optimizing for the wrong use cases, but I use it extensively and I'm bullish on its future. That being said, the risks are real, and according to this research, most companies and governments aren't accounting for all of them.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

EDA Panel • GOTO 2024
Rita Sethi, Sheen Brisals, Luca Mezzalira, Michael Gasch, James Beswick, and Eric Johnson sit down to discuss event-driven architectures.

Let's build a Jeopardy game with the least amount of code possible
Allen Helton builds a Jeopardy game with Neon and Momento using as little code as possible.

EventBridge under the hood | Serverless Office Hours
Nick Smit and Rishi Baldawa join Julian Wood to peek into how EventBridge delivers more than 2.6 trillion events a month.

The AWS Developers Podcast - Episode #126: Domain-driven design for cloud automation
Gregor Hohpe talks about applying Domain-Driven Design (DDD) to cloud automation, specifically for event-based integration systems, and emphasizes the importance of domain languages for clearly expressing core system concepts.

Believe in Serverless Podcast - Ep4: Latency, Lies, and Architecture
James Eastham and Andres Moreno review all that happened in the serverless community during the week ending August 10th, 2024.

Serverless Feud: Allen Helton vs. Michael Liendo
Join host Sam Lock as he quizzes 2 teams of 3 with cloud-based (and some not so cloud-based) survey questions.

Ampt Live: Building Data Enrichment Pipelines on AWS using Ampt
I use Ampt to build a data ingestion pipeline on AWS that asynchronously enriches records using third-party API calls.

New from AWS 🆕

It was relatively quiet last week at AWS, but here are a few other announcements that might interest you:

• AWS CodeBuild now supports multiple access tokens via AWS Secrets Manager
• Amazon Redshift Query Editor V2 now supports query import
• Introducing browser-based SSH/RDP support for IPv6-only instances bundles on Lightsail
• Amazon Neptune now introduces support for PropertyGraphStore in Neptune to build more reliable GraphRAG applications
• Amazon VPC Lattice is now available in 7 additional Regions

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 Ahmed Usman Khalid (@A_Usman_Khalid). Usman is a Director and General Manager at AWS responsible for AWS Lambda and Beanstalk. His team continues to do amazing things to push the boundaries of serverless and introduce news features and services that help developers bring ideas to market quickly, securely, and sustainably. His passion for serverless drives the industry forward, and without dedicated people like him constantly raising the bar, we wouldn't have the game-changing tech we have today. Thanks, Usman, for all you do!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I've been seeing a lot of posts about people registering for AWS re:Invent (yep, I plan on being there too). But a lot has changed in the last 9 months since the last one. Prominent employee turnover, reorg of the developer advocates, more and more GenAI stuff, and even some product deprecations. Plus, a brand new CEO! I feel like this one could be...different. What are you predictions? I'd love to hear them.

See you in the next issue,
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.