Off-by-none: Issue #298

September 24, 2024

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

Hey Cloudflare, it's your birthday! 🎉

In our previous issue, Amazon Q started writing SQL, AWS became buddy-buddy with Oracle, and WFH went BYE at Amazon. This week, Cloudflare turns 14, AWS fights AI image slop, and a new SDK helps you tailor Swift. Plus, we have lots of great content from the serverless community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Hold onto your hats, there's a lot to get to this week! 🧢

AWS had several announcements recently that piqued my interest. The new Content Credentials for Amazon Titan Image Generator won't stop the AI slop, but it's a first step to more easily identifying it. The AWS SDK for Swift is now generally available, AWS Lambda now supports tagging of Event Source Mappings and Code Signing Config resources, and AWS Amplify now supports long-running tasks with asynchronous server-side function calls.

Also, AWS CloudFormation Git sync now supports pull request workflows to review your stack changes, Jamba 1.5 family of models by AI21 Labs is now available in Amazon Bedrock, and Amazon SES now offers automated complaint rate recommendations which aims to increase awareness when complaint rates approach or exceed levels allowed by best practices.

There were two interesting cost savings announcements as well. AWS Cost Management now provides purchase recommendations for Amazon DynamoDB reserved capacity. I wish reserved capacity applied at the Organization level, but hopefully this will save you some money. And, Amazon SageMaker Studio now supports automatic shutdown of idle applications. I like things like this. There are probably lots of services that could benefit from something similar.

In other cloud news, this week is Cloudflare's Birthday Week. I appreciated the mention of "AI's Threat to Original Content Creation" in their Annual Founders’ Letter. If you don't think this is a problem, you probably need to do some soul searching. They are also launching some cool things like Ephemeral IDs for fraud detection and More NPM packages on Cloudflare Workers using polyfills and native code to support Node.js APIs. Nice.

Fauna has also been busy. They announced Native Integration with Cloudflare Workers and Datadog Integration. They also published a post about MongoDB Data API and HTTPS Endpoints Deprecation, which I didn't realize was even happening. Read more here, but this is an interesting tack.

Also, Serverless, Inc. introduced The AWS AI Stack and DeltaStream raised $15M in Series A Funding to "Deliver the Future of Real-Time Stream Processing in Cloud". Guess people are still bullish on data and AI. 😉

Self-hosted, not self-managed CDEs Sponsored
I'm a huge fan of Gitpod and have been using it for quite some time. Signing in with SSO and spinning up a standardized development environment in seconds is amazing DX. I'm on a small team, so letting Gitpod handle everything for me makes sense. But for companies that need to self-host for security and compliance reasons, Gitpod Enterprise allows them to do just that without the operational overhead. That's really cool and a great approach that gives you the best of both worlds.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

So long API Gateway, and thanks for all the routes
Great post by Brett Andrews that explains why CloudFront + Lambda Function URLs might be your new best friend. We've been doing this at Ampt for over a year and it's been extremely effective.

This stranger EventBus Mesh
Daniele Frasca shares his ideas around an "EventBus Mesh" pattern that you might find intriguing.

Here are a few more tips, tricks, and concepts for you:

• AWS EventBridge Pipes: Simplifying Event-Driven Architectures by Vipin Mishra
• AWS SnapStart - Part 26 Measuring cold and warm starts with Java 21 using different garbage collection algorithms by Vadym Kazulkin
• How to make DynamoDB cheaper by Borislav Stoilov
• 10 Tips for keeping your AWS Lambda functions performant by Jake Bazin
• AWS Lambda Cold Start Latency Reduction by Abhilash Krishnan

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

• Setting Up AWS Cognito Authorizer for API: A Step-by-Step Guide by Deepak Kapse
• Terraform — Deploying Docker Images on AWS Lambda Function by Prashant Bhatasana
• Enhancing event-driven architecture with Temporal and Fauna by Shadid Haque
• Building a Real-Time Chat Service with AWS API Gateway and WebSockets Using Express.js & AWS Lambda by Shubham Soni
• Building a serverless connected BBQ as SaaS - Part 4 - AuthZ by Jimmy Dahlqvist
• Deterministic API Test Harness for AWS Step Function e2e tests by Lee Gilmore

Serverless Reads 🤓

Comedian John Mulaney brutally roasts SF techies at Dreamforce
If you can't laugh at AI fanatics, then who can you laugh at? "Can AI sit there in a fleece vest? Can AI not go to events and spend all day at a bar?" #burn

How Samsung Cloud optimized Amazon DynamoDB costs
Interesting post that outlines five approaches Samsung Cloud took to lower their TCO for Amazon DynamoDB since migrating from Apache Cassandra.

A Deep Dive Into DynamoDB: Groundbreaking Principles from the Dynamo Research Paper
Ever wonder how DynamoDB works? Rishi Nahar explains some major highlights in this post.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Busting the serverless myth
AJ Stuyvenberg shows how you can use the AWS Lambda Web Adapter to ship a docker image to AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2, and AWS Fargate running the same application.

AWS Bites #131: What do you do about CloudFormation Drift?
Eoin and Luciano discuss the concept of CloudFormation drift, what causes it, how to detect it, and strategies for resolving it.

Ampt Live: Automating your SDLC on AWS using Ampt and Gitpod’s Web-Based IDE
Gitpod is sponsoring this week's newsletter, but that's not why I did this live stream last week. I truly love the flexibility that Gitpod gives you, and when you couple that with the ease of Ampt, it's pretty darn powerful.

The Believe In Serverless community continues to create amazing content. Here's some of the latest:

• This Show Is Hexagonally Architected
• Can we build a judgy RSS feed??
• History of AWS Lambda with Jeremy Edberg
• Serverless Jeopardy! Ft. Danielle Heberling, Dan Pudwell, Joshua Proto

New from AWS 🆕

Here are several other AWS announcements that might interest you:

• AWS Lambda adds support for Amazon Linux 2023 runtimes in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
• Amazon S3 Express One Zone now supports AWS-KMS with customer managed keys
• Amazon RDS Performance Insights supports Aurora cluster-level configuration
• AWS Database Migration Service now includes enhanced monitoring
• AWS Chatbot now allows you to interact with Amazon Bedrock agents from Microsoft Teams and Slack
• Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics now supports canary tag replication to associated AWS Lambda resource
• Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) now supports add-column for multi-Region tables
• AWS CodeBuild now supports managed GitLab runners

Thoughts from Social 🐦

"Disagree and commute".

This will dramatically accelerate AWS bleeding talent. #awsexodus #aws https://t.co/T0p4dXWqGy

— James Beswick (@jbesw) September 16, 2024

"Disagree and commute". 🤣 I love James, and this might be the best comment I've seen on the whole Amazon RTO thing. Also, it's not just about bleeding talent, it's about losing people with institutional knowledge. You need folks who know where the bodies are buried.

Upcoming Serverless Events 🗓

October 10, 2024 - ServerlessDays Cardiff

October 19, 2024 - ServerlessDays São Paulo

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

December 13, 2024 - ServerlessDays Rome

February 20, 2025 - ServerlessDays Manchester 2025

Please send me your serverless events!

Star of the Week ⭐️

This week's star is Nick Smit (@nickste). Up until recently, Nick was a Principal Product Manager at AWS. During his five year tenure, he was the driving force behind many an amazing EventBridge feature and optimization. His leaving is another major loss for AWS (these are starting to feel like obituaries), but he deserves tremendous thanks for all he's done for the serverless and EDA communities. Good luck with your new venture, Nick!

After five and a half happy years, today is my last day at AWS! I feel beyond lucky to have worked with such brilliant people, and to have learnt and grown from their input. I'll be joining @safetycli as a cofounder and CPO. More in the thread 🧵

— Nickste (@nickste) September 20, 2024

Final Thoughts 🤔

AWS has been taking a lot of flak lately, some of which is of their own making and probably deserved. I hate to pile on, but there was a bit of an incident yesterday with a feature rollout that caught me off guard and spiked my blood pressure (it would have taken me a long time to work around this). They rolled it back and fixed the issue (and please note that I have a ton of respect for the team responsible), but the impact wasn't insignificant.

We've all seen the attrition at AWS. A lot of good people with deep knowledge of a very complex system no longer work there. There are, of course, still lots of really good, plenty capable people left. I just hope that AWS isn't asking too much of them.

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.