Off-by-none: Issue #295

September 3, 2024

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

Elasticsearch is open source, again 👀

In our previous issue, the Serverless Framework added support for SAM, S3 got conditional writes, and Neon Autoscaling went GA. This week, Step Functions get validated, Elasticsearch becomes open source (again), and Laravel teases a new cloud. Plus, we've got lots of amazing content from the serverless community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

AWS had a few interesting announcements, including the Validation API for AWS Step Functions. This lets you perform semantic checks on your workflows before you run or deploy them, allowing you to catch errors much earlier in the process. Also, AWS Amplify introduced new function capabilities with scheduled cron jobs and streaming logs. Developers can now schedule Lambda functions to run at specific intervals and debug faster by streaming logs to their terminal.

AWS also announced that AWS WAF enhanced rate-based rules to support lower rate limits. This means that your evaluation windows can be much more granular to catch traffic spikes earlier.

In cloud news, Momento was added as an Amazon EventBridge API destination, Pinecone previews a new bulk import feature for its serverless offering, and Shay Banon says Elasticsearch is open source, again!

And, for all you PHP fans, you might want to get on the waitlist for Laravel Cloud.

Wrangling your cloud costs is a hot topic right now, and for good reason. For many workloads, buying Reserved Instances (RIs) or Savings Plans (SPs) is a great way to find discounts, but at the cost of a 1 or 3 year commitment! That's what I love about Archera. Not only do they allow you to achieve cost savings of native AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, but their commitments are as low as 30 days. And if you underutilize those commitments, their cloud commitment insurance will literally put money in your bank account to cover the difference. Sponsored

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Everything Suffers from Cold Starts
Seth Orell shares his thoughts on the impact of cold starts and why he believes they're not unique to serverless functions.

AWS Advanced: Getting SES Production Access
Warren Parad lays out some tips and tricks for getting approved to use AWS SES for real production workloads, just as long as they aren't sending SPAM.

5 Lambda Configurations You Should Always Set
Josh Thorne gives you five important configuration considerations when using AWS Lambda. You should know these.

Next.js and Separate Backends: When and Why?
I get this question quite a bit. This post seems to do a good job of answering it.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

So many great tutorials this week. Here are some of my favorites:

• Is it safe to use ID tokens with Cognito authorizers? by Yan Cui
• Build A WebRTC Video Chat App On AWS with Amazon API Gateway WebSocket
• Saving your AWS Cloudfront Cost by Kavindu Vindika
• Resolve Lambda URL Error - signature not match when using POST/PUT by Vuong Bach Doan
• Stop using Lambdas to trigger AWS Glue workflows based on S3 Events! by Pavan Emani
• Building a real-time weather update system with Momento, Amazon EventBridge, and DynamoDB by Rishti Gupta
• Serverless AWS Account Watcher by Darryl Ruggles
• Enterprise Level Micro-frontend on AWS by Omid Eidivandi
• Lambda function using Docker Container Image - Part 2 Measuring cold and warm starts of Lambda function with Java (21) runtime by Vadym Kazulkin
• Mastering Jest in your AWS CDK Apps by Lee Gilmore

Serverless Reads 🤓

Framework Defined Infrastructure (FdI) – an Evolution of Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Malte Ubl, the CTO of Vercel, introduces the concept of Framework-defined Infrastructure (FdI) as an evolution of the industry-standard Infrastructure as Code (IaC). This is eerily similar to IfC (Infrastructure from Code) which seeks to solve a similar problem.

Is Simplicity making a comeback? Pieter Levels on Lex Fridman’s Podcast
Jose Canciani recaps/rants about the now infamous Pieter Levels podcast appearance. I too like to seek simplicity (HTMX has been a breath of fresh air), but I don't think building single box solutions is the answer either. And, yes, serverless needs a better story around linear cost growth.

The serverless challenge
This post by Luis Dourado does an excellent job articulating the major roadblock to adopting serverless. It's not as simple as a "skills issue." In many practical cases, it requires adopting complex hybrid approaches to optimize workloads for both performance and cost.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Using the Data API for Aurora Serverless | Serverless Office Hours
Vadym Kazulkin joins Julian Wood to talk about all things Aurora with Lambda. Find out what Aurora is and how it differs from RDS, plus how Aurora Serverless v2 evolved from v1.

A Day in the Life of Cloud Engineers | Working in the Cloud ☁️
Andreea Merariu, Andres Moreno, and Paul Chin Jr. share their experiences and challenges working as software engineers specializing in AWS serverless technologies.

The AWS Developers Podcast Episode #128: The architecture behind aws-news.com
Luc van Donkersgoed talks about the incredible story behind aws-news.com and how a personal project fueled by curiosity about new APIs like Bedrock for Generative AI turned into a platform with over 600 subscribed users.

And here's some amazing content from the Believe In Serverless community:

• Can you build an entire app with Anthropic artifacts?
• Lunch and learn: Building sites with Launch Darkly
• Moving a scaled workload to AWS ECS Fargate Spot for less than a coffee a day
• A simpler serverless local development experience with Appwrite
• Episode #6: You only need one podcast to run your SaaS startup
• Episode #7: This is not the ReadySetCloud podcast

New from AWS 🆕

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

• Amazon Location Service announces Migration SDK
• Amazon Bedrock now supports cross-region inference
• AWS AppConfig now provides deletion protection for additional guardrails
• Organizational Units in AWS Control Tower can now contain up to 1,000 accounts
• Amazon Redshift Serverless now supports AWS PrivateLink
• AWS announces Amazon-provided contiguous IPv4 blocks
• Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases now supports Llama 3.1 405B, 70B, and 8B
• Announcing AWS Parallel Computing Service

Thoughts from Social 🐦

Why are all serverless platforms rubbish?
I've tried to use serverless hosting for a project because people say it's great, but every platform I've tried (AWS, Heroku, Glitch, Convex) is unnecessarily complicated to use. They all require you to structure your code / files in a specific, unintuitive way, they can't do many things that are easy when self hosting.

I wouldn't say "rubbish", but this is the disconnect that deeply plagues serverless adoption. The average developer absolutely has the capacity to learn the complexities of this approach. However, is becoming a nuanced "serverless" developer the right evolution for the programming masses?

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

September 20, 2024 - ServerlessDays Lima

October 10, 2024 - ServerlessDays Cardiff

December 2-6, 2024 - AWS re:Invent 2024

February 20, 2025 - ServerlessDays Manchester 2025

Please send me your serverless events!

Star of the Week ⭐️

This week's star is Luca Mezzalira (@lucamezzalira). Luca is a Principal Serverless Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. When he's not helping AWS customers design and implement serverless workloads, he's creating and sharing content and best practices with the community. Thank you, Luca, for all your conference talks, blog posts, books, YouTube videos, and more!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Welcome to September. Let the countdown to AWS re:Invent begin. 😀

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.