Off-by-none: Issue #296

September 10, 2024

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Not all heroes wear capes 🦸

In our previous issue, Step Functions added a Validation API, Elasticsearch became open source again, and Laravel teased a new cloud. This week, Amazon Bedrock upgrades its Stability AI models, InfluxDB says "no" to AI magic beans, and we get a new batch of heroes. Plus, we have plenty of content from the amazing serverless community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

A lot happened in the AWS world this past week. Stability AI’s top 3 Text-to-Image models are now available in Amazon Bedrock, AWS AppSync enhanced API monitoring with new DEBUG and INFO logging levels, and AWS announced session reuse with the Amazon Redshift Data API.

Amazon DynamoDB announced support for Attribute-Based Access Control, letting you now use your tags to configure access permissions and policies to tables and indexes, which is pretty cool.

Also, the Amplify team announced a React Storage Browser Component for Amazon S3 to use in your web applications (currently an alpha release). You can use this component to provide authorized end users access to browse, download, and upload data in S3 directly from your own applications. Interesting.

The latest AWS Heroes have arrived! I think I say this every time new heroes are added, but how Faye Ellis, Jimmy Dahlqvist, and (especially) Lee Gilmore weren't already heroes, blows my mind. Congrats to all of you.

In other cloud news, Fauna announced Native Integration with Cloudflare Workers, and InfluxData smartly avoided "AI magic beans" in InfluxDB time series database update for enterprises.

Break free from savings plan and RI term limitations Sponsored
Taking advantage of Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans (SPs) is table stakes for any cloud cost optimization plan. But for fast moving businesses, multi-year commitments make it difficult to ensure you're getting the best value. That's what I love about Archera. They allow you to achieve the cost savings of native AWS SPs and RIs with commitments 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.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

A Critical Look at AWS Lambda Extensions: Pros, Cons, and Recommended Use Cases
Ran Isenberg shares a self-described "very opinionated" post about when you should and should not use AWS Lambda extensions. Lots of good points in here.

Optimizing Event-Driven Workloads: Our Journey from Lambda Triggers to Polling
An interesting perspective from Reshef Sharvit on why they moved away from using SQS-triggered Lambda Functions.

18 Amazon DynamoDB Microstacks
Chris St. John shares more patterns, this time focusing on DynamoDB solutions, scenarios, use cases, and potential gotchas.

SQS encryption options
Excellent post by Pubudu Jayawardana that explores different encryption options available for SQS and how to choose the best option for common scenarios like cross-account access.

Introduction to AWS App Runner
Osama HaiDer provides a quick overview of this underappreciated serverless container service. I wish more people would use it, because I'd hate to see it go the way of CodeCommit and Cloud9. 😐

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here are some of the useful tutorials I came across this week:

• An Alternative to Batch Jobs: Scheduling Events with EventBridge Scheduler by Zied Ben Tahar
• Securing Serverless HTTP APIs: Integrating Amazon Cognito with Custom Authorizers by Prabhath Perera
• Automate Deletion of Docker Images from ECR through lambda by Srinath Krishnamoorthy
• Deploy Puppeteer and Chrome on AWS Lambda With Layers and AWS CDK by Toan Huynh
• Serverless AWS Account Watcher by Darryl Ruggles
• Developing a serverless file-encryption app using AWS Lambda, S3, and AWS CLI by Richards Okiemute
• AWS SnapStart - Part 25 Measuring cold and warm starts with Java 21 using Lambda layer (2) by Vadym Kazulkin

Serverless Reads 🤓

PostNL’s Serverless Journey
Luc van Donkersgoed shares the story originally published in the Serverless Development on AWS book by Sheen Brisals and Luke Hedger

Dear AWS, how do I build & develop purely on AWS right now?
Johannes Koch articulates concerns from a builder, business, and personal perspective regarding AWS' recent move to deprecate several of their services.

500 Lambdas, Millions of invocations, One Database: Our MongoDB Connection Nightmare
Kelwin Ferreira explains how they built their own Datastore Lambda Proxy to mitigate connections issues to their MongoDB cluster. Many consider Lambdas calling Lambdas an anti-pattern, but these numbers are intriguing. 🤔

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Build Your First Cloudflare Worker with Rust
James Eastham teaches you how Cloudflare's unique use of the JavaScript V8 runtime enables incredibly fast startups and seamless performance.

Build Serverless Web Applications with Rust and Cloudflare Workers
James Eastham follows up his previous video by demonstrating how to build a full web application on Cloudflare Workers.

Documenting events with EventCatalog | Serverless Office Hours
Dave Boyne joins Julian Wood to show how his EventCatalog project simplifies the complexity of managing events, services, and domains by providing clear documentation and interactive visualizations.

Serverless Craic Ep60 Mapping Techniques
The Serverless Craic team discusses mapping techniques from Chapter 3 of The Value Flywheel Effect book and their applications in organizations.

AWS Bites #130: Growing in Tech with Farrah Campbell
Eoin and Luciano chat with Farrah Campbell, head of modern compute community at AWS, about her career journey, tips on public speaking, dealing with imposter syndrome, predictions for the future, and much more.

And here are three great videos from the Believe In Serverless community:

• Using Amazon Q to build an app. Will it hold up?
• Rethinking Serverless with Danielle Heberling
• Believe In Serverless Podcast - Episode #8: Commitment issues

New from AWS 🆕

AWS had several additional announcements worth looking at this week:

• Bedrock Agents on Sonnet 3.5
• AWS Network Load Balancer now supports configurable TCP idle timeout
• Amazon ECS now supports AWS Graviton-based Spot compute with AWS Fargate
• Amazon S3 Access Grants introduce the ListCallerAccessGrants API
• Amazon Kinesis Data Streams now supports FIPS 140-3 enabled interface VPC endpoint
• Use Apache Spark on Amazon EMR Serverless directly from Amazon Sagemaker Studio
• Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink now supports Apache Flink 1.20
• AWS Gateway Load Balancer now supports configurable TCP idle timeout
• CloudWatch Application Signals now supports request based Service Level Objectives (SLOs)
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk adds support for IPv6 inbound traffic to service endpoints
• Amazon Timestream for InfluxDB now supports enhanced managed features
• Amazon SES announces enhanced onboarding with adaptive setup wizard and Virtual Deliverability Manager

Serverless Tools 🛠

Lambda Live Debugger
Marko from Serverless Life shares an open source project that mimics the Live Lambda debugging behavior of SST and Serverless Framework v4. 👀

Thoughts from Social 🐦

🌶️ Serverless is too complicated for the average developer.

Tooling to build backends that are more configuration than code are mostly awful and complicated.

In the short to medium term the best chance will be a framework that just happens to deploy to serverless backends. https://t.co/xwqxT92By8

— Rich Develops (@richdevelops) September 10, 2024

I wholeheartedly agree with this. I've been using AWS Lambda and building in the serverless ecosystem since 2015 (prior to which I spent almost 20 years racking and stacking my own servers before moving to AWS/EC2). It's not simply a "skills issue"; it goes to the heart of what your role is as a developer. I know many disagree, but it's helpful to take a step outside the echo chamber every now and again.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

September 20, 2024 - ServerlessDays Lima

October 10, 2024 - ServerlessDays Cardiff

October 19, 2024 - ServerlessDays São Paulo

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 Tobias Schmidt (@tpschmidt_). Tobias is a Freelance Fullstack Engineer and cloud educator who's eager to share his knowledge and help others become better developers. He's the co-author of AWS Fundamentals and The CloudWatch Book, as well as publisher of the AWS Fundamentals Newsletter. Thank you Tobias for continuing to teach others about cloud.

Final Thoughts 🤔

I've seen some interesting push back on serverless criticisms lately which I don't fully agree with. I love serverless and will push the idea of serverless-first for almost every project. At the same time, I'm highly critical of serverless and how providers and companies implement it. But you don't win people to your cause by telling them they're wrong, especially when their own experiences contradict yours.

Also, serverless economics are highly complicated, most specifically for the cloud provider. There is a reason why high-scale workloads are "graduating" from AWS Lambda and other managed services. Linear pricing is not a great long-term strategy for the customer, nor is micro billing for the provider. Serverless is getting close, but it's not there yet. Without proper criticism and push back, the bubble will remain the only safe space for true believers. /end rant

Let's do this again 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.