Off-by-none: Issue #300

October 8, 2024

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Happy 300th Issue of Off-By-None! 🎉

In our previous issue, AWS released a new Data API for Aurora RDS, Cloudflare wrapped up its birthday week, and Rails users rejected React. This week, we celebrate 300 issues of Off-by-none, MongoDB launches v8.0, and Vercel introduces "in-function concurrency". Plus, we have lots of awesome content from the community!

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.

300 Issues! 🤯

Before we begin, I just want to thank you all for being part of the Off-by-none journey with me. I published the first issue on September 4, 2018 and have been closely following the incredible evolution of the serverless ecosystem and community ever since.

Much has changed since then. We've added so many amazing people and new voices to the community. We've seen new projects and products rise and fall. We lived through a pandemic that saw content generation skyrocket, and we were shocked and fascinated by the advent of GenAI and ChatGPT. We're now on our third AWS CEO! Today, we're witnessing a complete transformation of the cloud industry as the focus has shifted to who can hype GenAI more. But we're still here. We're still building. And we've got a lot more to do!

I don't know if I have another 300 issues in me, but I'm certainly going to try. It's been an honor to share this newsletter with you over the last 6 years, and I hope you'll continue to enjoy it as much as I love creating it. ❤️

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Not a lot of super exciting announcements from AWS this past week, but still a few that caught my attention. First up, AWS Application Composer is now AWS Infrastructure Composer. It's just a name change to "emphasizes our capabilities in building infrastructure architectures." I'm not 100% sure what that means, but clearly AWS still thinks IaC deploys "infrastructure".

Also, Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 now supports up to 256 ACUs, an increase from the previous 128 ACUs limit, and AWS CodePipeline introduced a new general purpose compute action that lets you run shell commands as part of your pipeline execution, which is pretty cool.

In other cloud news, MongoDB 8.0 was just released, Fauna Launched a Pay-As-You-Go Listing on AWS Marketplace, and Kubernetes 1.31 is now a 'truly vendor-neutral platform' thanks to removal of built-in cloud provider code. Sure.

Vercel posted an interesting piece about support for "in-function concurrency" called Serverless servers: Efficient serverless Node.js with in-function concurrency.

In legal news, WP Engine sued Automattic and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, because, they definitely should have. And, Patent troll Sable pays up and dedicates all its patents to the public thanks to Cloudflare. ❤️

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Avoiding the Lambda Doom Loop
AJ Stuyvenberg explains how a recent change in the Lambda sandbox environment can potentially cause functions with low timeouts to enter a "Doom Loop".

Lambda function with GraalVM Native Image - Part 1 Introduction to GraalVM and its native image capabilities
Vadym Kazulkin introduces a new series that focuses on deploying GraalVM Native Images on AWS Lambda and measuring the performance.

Extract insights in a 30TB time series workload with Amazon OpenSearch Serverless
OpenSearch Serverless is a beast that can handle a lot of data without needing to provision for peak. Still not "serverless" IMO, but a beast nonetheless.

AWS re:Invent 2024 — My Selection Of Sessions
AWS re:Invent reserved seating opens today (October 8th). If you're still wondering where you should focus your time, Ran Isenberg shares some thoughts.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

• Progressive Lambda Deployments with Rollbacks by Lee Gilmore
• Automate Cleaning of Unused EIP Through Lambda Part1 by Muhammed Ashraf
• Integrating Data with AWS Glue, Dynamodb, S3 and Amazon Athena by Uendi Hoxha
• EventBridge Pipes in Practice, with Typescript and CDK by Derek Murawsky
• Designing Serverless Integration Patterns for Large Language Models (LLMs) by Chris McPeek
• 3 practical tips to lower your DynamoDB cost by Benyamin Shafabakhsh
• How to run PHP on AWS ServerLess architecture? Part 1 & Part 2 by Paul Santus
• Build a serverless voice-based contextual chatbot for people with disabilities using Amazon Bedrock by Michael Shapira and Eitan Sela
• Implementing AWS Lambda Versioning and Aliases by Souren Stepanyan
• Creating AWS Lambda Functions Using the Serverless Framework with Integrated CI/CD Pipelines by Yassine Didi

Yan Cui released several step-by-step guides for implementing different use cases with Momento:

• How to build a real-time notification system with Momento
• How to build a leaderboard service with Momento
• How to build a real-time chat application with Momento

Serverless Reads 🤓

Has Generative AI ruined the re:Invent experience?
Mike Graff points out that AI/ML sessions have increased 52% from 2022 to 2024 while sessions of every other topic have significantly decreased (Serverless & Containers are DOWN 43%). 😞

Gregor Hohpe's Post on leaving AWS
Honesty is the best policy, and Gregor doesn't hold back here. His experience is worth reading if you're curious about serverless priorities at AWS.

Don't deploy these applications on serverless
I love counterpoints and differences of opinion. They challenge us to question our own beliefs and either strengthen our resolve or open our mind to new possibilities. Despite the perfunctory overview of serverless, the article points out five types of workloads the author believes aren't a good fit for serverless. I could make his case for all of these.

Why Gumroad Didn't Choose htmx
Y'all know I'm a big fan of htmx, but like any technology, it's never a silver bullet. I agree with most of the article, but I do think there's a bit of laziness that makes reaching for React components a default choice.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Cache Me If You Can: Serverless Caching with Rust & Cloudflare
James Eastham shows you how to optimize your applications by using caching with Cloudflare's KV service in serverless applications written in Rust.

The AWS Developers Podcast #133 - How Generative AI Can Help Developers
Massimo Re Ferrè and Brooke Jamieson join Seb to try and convince you that Amazon Q Developer is all it's hyped up to be.

AWS Bites #132 - GitHub Action Runners on AWS
Eoin and Luciano cover options for running GitHub Actions on AWS including EC2 and CodeBuild, compare pricing across solutions, and share their hands-on experience setting things up.

Speedrun: Escape Room Challenge
David Behroozi challenges Danielle Heberling to solve "escape room" style challenges with his Speedrun tool.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are several more announcements from AWS that might interest you:

• Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases now provides option to stop ingestion jobs
• Amazon S3 adds Service Quotas support for S3 general purpose buckets
• AWS Compute Optimizer now supports 80 new Amazon EC2 instance types
• Amazon Route 53 Resolver endpoints now support DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) with Server Name Indication (SNI) validation
• Amazon Q Business is now HIPAA eligible
• Amazon Timestream for InfluxDB now includes advanced configuration options
• Amazon EMR Serverless introduces Job Run Concurrency and Queuing controls
• Amazon Data Firehose delivers data streams into Apache Iceberg format table
• AWS announces Reserved Nodes flexibility for Amazon ElastiCache
• AWS Security Hub launches 7 new security controls
• Amazon MSK APIs now supports AWS PrivateLink \

Serverless Tools 🛠

EventCatalog September 2024 update by David Boyne

Thoughts from Social 🐦

There are 3x more AI/ML talks than any other category at re:Invent this year. pic.twitter.com/qnu0rwiA3E

— AJ Stuyvenberg (@astuyve) September 29, 2024

I think you all know my feelings on this (similar to Mike Graff's). Technology seems to be an endless parade of hype cycles, and this too shall pass. I'll be at AWS re:GenAInvent again this year, but I'm not sure how many more I and others will be willing to take.

Upcoming Events 🗓

October 10, 2024 - ServerlessDays Cardiff

October 18, 2024 - Introducing AntStack's AWS SAM Template (Webinar)

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 🧑‍🏫

Cloudflare announced that they're working on a new container platform. Which of the following services are already using this in production?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• Cloudflare DNS
• Cloudflare CDN
• Workers AI
• Cloudflare Access
• Cloudflare Workers

Final Thoughts 🤔

Thanks again for being a subscriber. We'll see you again 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.