Off-by-none: Issue #301

October 15, 2024

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

ClickOps + AI = IaC? 🤖

In our previous issue, we celebrated our 300th issue, MongoDB launched v8.0, and Vercel introduced "in-function concurrency". This week, AI converts ClickOps to IaC, ElastiCache for Valkey gets better serverless pricing, and Databricks unveils Apps. Plus, we have plenty of amazing content from the cloud and serverless 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 had some exciting announcements this week. First up is the general availability of Console to Code to generate code. This is something people have been asking about for a long time, and now thanks to Amazon Q, you can apparently convert AWS console actions to reusable code.

In other big news, AWS announced Amazon ElastiCache for Valkey and Amazon MemoryDB for Valkey. What's even more interesting is the ElastiCache Serverless for Valkey is now as low as $6/month instead of $60. Marcin Sodkiewicz wrote a great review about it.

Also, AWS Lambda now detects and stops recursive loops between Lambda and Amazon S3 and Amazon OpenSearch Serverless introduced several new features and enhancements.

In other cloud news, Tencent built a NoSQL database to rule all data models and Databricks introduced Databricks Apps, a toolkit that simplifies AI development.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

Data API for Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 with AWS SDK for Java - Part 10 Aurora Serverless v2 Data API meets DevOps Guru or not?
Vadym Kazulkin tests DevOps Guru's anomaly detection using the Data API for Aurora Serverless v2 with the AWS SDK for Java.

5 DynamoDB Configurations You Should Always Set
Josh Thorne shares some essential settings for optimizing your AWS DynamoDB tables.

Five DynamoDB limitations you should know before using it
Kirk Kirkconnell addresses several DynamoDB limitations and explains how Fauna has solved these challenges.

Ferris vs The World: AWS Lambda Performance Showdown
Liel Fridman tests several language and memory options for Lambda Functions and compares their performance.

S3: The greatest AWS service ever, is not a Live Media Origin
Khawaja Shams explains how Momento's caching platform can fill S3's gaps when supporting a Live Media Origin.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

• Create your own QR Code Generator with AWS and AWS CDK! — Creating The API Katherine
• Automating Image Analysis in a photo-sharing application with AWS Lambda, S3, Rekognition, and… by DJ. KONE
• Using Kinesis + Firehose to stream data and Athena for near real-time queries by Helio Tarnowski
• API Gateway and Lambda Throttling with Terraform. Part 1 and Part 2 by Alexey Vidanov
• How to Pull Resources from AWS SSM Parameter Store in AWS SAM by Sherifdeen Awofiranye
• Scheduling emails through Amazon EventBridge Scheduler & Amazon SES by Lee Gilmore

Serverless Reads 🤓

Fixing serverless with a $5 VPS
James Perkins explains why his team added a proxy service to help mitigate downstream scaling issues.

How CyberArk is streamlining serverless governance by codifying architectural blueprints
Ran Isenberg shares how his company is translating architectural and security best practices into modular IaC definitions in order to save months of development time.

Why Serverless
Mark Henwood shares 7 reason why you should choose serverless, plus a few caveats you should be aware of.

Unpopular opinion about "Moving back to on-prem"
Eyal Estrin doesn't believe organizations should be repatriating to on-prem and explains why he thinks public cloud is the future.

From Lambda to Fargate: How We Optimized Node.js Performance with the Right Task Specs
Atsushi Suzuki explains why and how they migrated from Lambda to Fargate to optimize the performance of a NestJS application.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

The videos from September's Manchester AWS Community Summit 2024 were recently posted, and there are some great talks, including Observability in an Asynchronous World by James Eastham and Zero to Production Serverless: 8-Week Real-World Journey by Martyn Kilbryde.

High Performance Postgres with Rust, Cloudflare & Hyperdrive
James Eastham explores how to efficiently connect Cloudflare Workers to external relational databases using Cloudflare's Hyperdrive service.

Step Functions + containers | Serverless Office Hours
Uma Ramadoss and Jooyoung Kim join Eric Johnson to discuss ways you can integrate workloads running in Amazon EKS/Amazon ECS with AWS Step Functions.

The Believe In Serverless community continues to produce some amazing content:

• Unlocking the Hidden Power of Serverless for your GenAI Apps with Brian Hough
• Leverage Apache Flink to Supercharge Your Serverless Event-Driven Applications with AWS with Mohammed Izzy
• DynamoDB to Postgres - Opinionated notes on the state of databases with Pete Naylor

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some other noteworthy AWS announcements you might find useful:

• Amazon CloudFront launches support for JA4 fingerprinting
• Four new synthetic generative voices for Amazon Polly
• Amazon Bedrock Model Evaluation now supports evaluating custom models
• Amazon Redshift introduces query identifiers for improved query performance
• Access organization-wide views of agreements and spend in AWS Marketplace
• Amazon Redshift announces generally availability for data sharing with data
• Amazon EKS now supports using NVIDIA and AWS Neuron accelerated instance types with AL2023
• AWS CodePipeline introduces new getting started experience
• AWS Resource Explorer introduces new API to list resource inventory

Thoughts from Social 🐦

Serverless.com v4 is now paid r/serverless on reddit
"So as per their documentation, v3 will only be maintained through 2024. So eventually you will have to move to v4 which is now paid unless you fall in certain special category. Possibly there were seeing good customer traction and now that our APIs are dependent on serverless, they make it paid. What a shit move!"

I get these types of reactions, but things can't be free forever. When open source projects become popular, they become harder to maintain and support. That work needs to be coordinated and managed by someone (or some organization) with financial backing. Otherwise, you're expecting developers to work for free. You may not agree with their monetization strategy, but the reason why the Serverless Framework exists for FREE today is because somebody else paid for it with the expectation that it would one day be able to generate revenue.

Upcoming Events 🗓

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 🧑‍🏫

On October 3rd, the British government announced it was giving up sovereignty over the Chagos Islands. What top-level domains will be retired once the British Indian Ocean Territory ceases to exist?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• .to
• .es
• .io
• .gm
• .net

Star of the Week ⭐️

This week's star is Brian Hough (@brianhhough). Brian is a full-stack software developer, AWS DevTools Hero, and the founder of Tech Stack Playbook. Through his courses, tech talks, videos, and more, Brian has spent the last several years teaching developers the joy of building software. Thanks for all you do to help others, Brian!

Final Thoughts 🤔

If you're going to AWS re:Invent, be sure to join the waitlist for the Believe In Serverless Party on December 3rd! Last year was an absolute blast, and you don't want to miss it.

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.