Off-by-none: Issue #299

October 1, 2024

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A new Data API 💿

In our previous issue, Cloudflare turned 14, AWS fought AI image slop, and the AWS Swift SDK went GA. This week, AWS releases a new Data API for Aurora RDS, Cloudflare wraps up its birthday week in a container, and Rails users reject React. Plus, we have some amazing content from the serverless and cloud communities!

This week's issue is sponsored by Kestra, an open-source, event-driven orchestration platform designed to manage large-scale, complex workflows. There are a lot of workflow engines out there, but Kestra lets you easily build, deploy, and manage workflows that seamlessly integrate with cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP, as well as tools like Snowflake and Databricks. Check out their Github repository to learn more.

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

AWS announced that Llama 3.2 generative AI models are now available in Amazon Bedrock. For a deeper look at their use cases, check out this post from Danilo Poccia.

In other AWS news, Amazon Aurora MySQL now supports RDS Data API (with support for Amazon RDS Performance Insights). This comes just as MongoDB is getting rid of their Data API and forcing you back onto their native drivers. I was a big fan of the Data API when it first came out (I even created the Data API Client library for it), so now that it supports Aurora Serverless V2 and Aurora MySQL, I might need to take another look.

Also, Amazon S3 now applies a default minimum object size for S3 Lifecycle transition rules (which makes sense), Amazon SES adds HTTPS open tracking for custom domains (can I switch from Sendgrid now?), and AWS Serverless Application Repository now supports AWS PrivateLink (yep, I forgot that still existed too).

Cloudflare wrapped up another Birthday Week celebration and it was big! They announced 18 big updates to the Workers platform, a bigger, better, faster AI platform, zero-latency SQLite storage in every Durable Object, and they reaffirmed their commitment to free. But beyond all that was news that their container platform is in production, and it has GPUs. As I said on X, I've been bearish on Cloudflare because I wasn't sure you could actually build anything "real" on it. This might possibly change my mind.

In a new survey, Ruby on Rails developers now prefer Stimulus.js over React. It also found that CloudFlare has overtaken AWS CloudFront as the most popular CDN. And unsurprisingly, Rails developers prefer monolithic applications over microservices.

The Generative AI Platform MindStudio announced Serverless AI Functions that "give developers new tools to solve problems that previously could not be solved with software alone." Hopefully I'm not the only one that smells something. 💩

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

• Serverless PDF Processing with AWS Lambda and Textract by Olga Shabalina
• Serverless Developer Experience is Finally Great with Lambda Live Debugger by Marko
• 6 API Gateway Configurations You Should Set by Josh Thorne
• Serverless Cloud Pizzeria Shop by Darryl Ruggles
• Building multi-tenant SaaS systems by Luca Mezzalira et al
• Amazon DevOps Guru for the Serverless applications - Part 12 Anomaly detection on Lambda consuming from DynamoDB Streams by Vadym Kazulkin

Serverless Reads 🤓

The Subprime AI Crisis
Edward Zitron somehow got into my head and articulated everything I've been thinking regarding the (un)sustainability of GenAI. There are several great use cases, and I use GenAI all the time for a number of things, but the economics are highly suspect.

The art of surviving re:Invent: Tricks from a eight year veteran
Jimmy Dahlqvist shares some tips and tricks for your AWS re:Invent travels. There's lots of good advice in here. My number one tip: don't waste too much time attending "Breakout Sessions" since they are all recorded. Instead, find some interesting Chalk Talks, reach out to AWS employees to ask questions, and try to meet and connect with new people!

The Platform Team Dilemma: every buying decision is an engineering decision
Khawaja Shams makes an interesting point. Sometimes higher-level decisions force engineers to work within specific constraints that very well could tie their hands.

You Are Not Saved By IaC
Omid Eidivandi explains why Infrastructure as Code is imperative, but not infallible. There are no silver bullets.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Serverless Framework v4 | Serverless Office Hours
Austen Collins joins Julian Wood to highlight v4 of the Serverless Framework which includes new native support for bundling JavaScript and TypeScript functions, a Dev Mode for faster hybrid local and cloud development, and more.

Building Real-Time Applications with Cloudflare Durable Objects
James Eastham teaches you about Cloudflare Durable Objects and how they allow you to coordinate multiple clients, manage state, and handle infrastructure effortlessly.

The Believe in Serverless community continues to produce some amazing content for your viewing enjoyment:

• You Can Listen to This Episode in 'Real Time' with Alan Helton and James Eastham
• Analyzing Marketing Campaigns using Generative BI with Amazon Q in QuickSight with Wendy Wong
• Get live reactions on ANY web page with Michael Liendo and Allen Helton
• Destination: API Destination with Michael Gasch
• Do MORE with stateLESS Elasticsearch with Philipp Krenn
• Power your predictive analytics with InfluxDB with Anais Dotis

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some additional AWS announcements that might interest you:

• Amazon EventBridge announces new event delivery latency metric for Event Buses
• Amazon Kinesis Data Streams announces support for Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC)
• AWS Announces AWS re:Post Agent, a generative AI-powered virtual assistant
• Amazon CloudWatch Natural Language Query Generation is now available in 7 additional regions
• Amazon Redshift announces mTLS support for Amazon MSK
• PostgreSQL 17.0 is now available in Amazon RDS Database preview environment
• Amazon SNS now delivers SMS text messages via AWS End User Messaging
• Llama 3.2 generative AI models now available in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart

Serverless Tools 🛠

Lambda Web Gateway
A high-performance web gateway for AWS Lambda functions, written in Rust.

Local Development Server for AWS SAM Lambda Projects
Quickly test business logic and data validations while avoiding the overhead of rebuilding Docker images for every change.

Thoughts from Social 🐦

In the future, we won't need programmers; just people who can describe to a computer precisely what they want it to do.

— Jason Gorman @jasongorman@mastodon.cloud (@jasongorman) September 29, 2024

This literally made me LOL. What was even funnier is that most of the comments and reposts didn't seem to get the joke. I asked my wife (who is not in tech) if she got it, and she immediately responded, "yeah, so he means programmers." 😉

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!

Take the latest Off-by-none Cloud Quiz 🧑‍🏫

What action did WordPress.org recently take against WP Engine?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• Sued WP Engine
• Revoked WP Engine's license
• Fined WP Engine
• Blocked WP Engine's servers
• Partnered with WP Engine

Star of the Week ⭐️

This week's star is Marko Štrukelj (@ServerlessL). Marko is a Senior Serverless Developer at Wieni and an AWS Community Builder. He's been sharing his experience with serverless for over 5 years on his ServerlessLife.com blog. Marko recently released the Lambda Live Debugger that offers similar functionality to SST and Serverless Framework v4's Dev mode. Thank you Marko for continuing to help others take advantage of serverless.

Final Thoughts 🤔

Hopefully Cloudflare's Birthday Week made it obvious, but there's a lot happening in the cloud right now. It's both exciting and overwhelming. Take a deep breath, and realize that you DO NOT have to learn every new thing that pops up.

Speaking of learning, reserved seating for sessions at AWS re:Invent opens October 8th. Like I said earlier, focus on interesting Chalk Talks, the rest are recorded.

Also, next week is our 300th issue! 🤯 I appreciate you all and look forward to celebrating next week.

Cheers,
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.