Off-by-none: Issue #303

October 29, 2024

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10 years of ECS 🎉

In our previous issue, the AWS Lambda Console got some development workflow upgrades, we learned that CloudWatch Evidently wasn't an evident success, and we saw cloud databases keep getting better. This week, Amazon ECS celebrates 10 years, Lambda gets a better console code editing experience, and there's a new fork of the Serverless Framework. Plus, we have plenty of content from the cloud and serverless communities!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

AWS is celebrating 10 years of Amazon ECS, which is kind of crazy to think about. Lambda's birthday is right around the corner as well.

In other AWS news, the Lambda console now features a new code editor based on Code-OSS (VS Code - Open Source). I took some time to play around with it, and it is very cool. Julian Wood shares some additional details here.

Also, Anthropic’s upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet model and computer use is now in Amazon Bedrock (more here) and Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink now supports per second billing.

There was a recent disclosure that an AWS Cloud Development Kit vulnerability exposed users to potential account takeover risks. "The impact of this issue could, in certain scenarios, allow an attacker to gain administrative access to a target AWS account, resulting in a full account takeover," said researchers.

In other news, Wiz Expanded Runtime Protection to Serverless Containers, Pete Hanssens expressed some disappointment about the AWS Partner Network, and Matthieu Napoli forked v3 of the Serverless Framework to maintain support for Bref users.

Serverless Concepts 🏗

• How we managed Aurora Serverless V2 Idle connections in RDS Proxy and saved RDS costs by 50% by Swakhil Mattapalli
• AWS SNS Deep Dive by Joud W. Awad
• Is your S3 PreSigned url not opening object instead it is downloading. Check this out by Bhargav Katabathuni
• AWS & OpenTelemetry: Collector architecture at scale by Marcin Sodkiewicz
• Eventbridge and API Gateway a perfect combination for doing away with too many api routes by bmasaiti
• Parameter Management at Scale: How Multi-Region Configurations Saved My Application by Daniele Frasca

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

• Configuring AWS CDK Apps Across Multiple Environments by Lee Gilmore
• Hosting a Next.js (App Router) app on Amazon S3 by Simone Lusenti
• Next-level mocks with Lambda extensions by Elias Brange
• Cloud Dev Environments by Richard Boyd
• Leveraging Ephemeral Storage in AWS Lambda by Tunmise Ogunniyi
• Lambda function with GraalVM Native Image - Part 3 Measuring cold and warm starts by Vadym Kazulkin

Serverless Reads 🤓

Should “serverless” just mean “function-as-a-service”?
Yan Cui thinks that maybe talking about the higher principles of serverless wasn't the right approach to selling it to the masses. I tend to agree, but not sure that we can apply purist definitions to the vast majority of FaaS solutions or managed services. That ship has sailed.

Serverless, it can help you brew beer
Finally a practical use for serverless! 😀 Joris Conijn shares how he forwarded sensor data to API Gateway and Lambda to make sure he had the perfect brew. 🍻

Qualities of a Good Cloud Architect
Eyal Estrin makes some keen observations regarding what makes a good cloud architect. Hold this up when you look in the mirror.

Lambda Tail Warming
I have been working on a more cost and resource efficient way to keep Lambda functions warm for low traffic applications. This is an experimental technique, with more ideas and improvements to come, but it works really well.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Real-World Serverless #109: Bref vs. Laravel Vapor for building serverless apps in PHP
Yan Cui chats with Matthieu Napoli about how Bref works, working with PHP in AWS Lambda, and how it compares with Laravel Vapor. They also touch on the oss-serverless fork and why that was necessary.

Evolving Serverless Architectures • Emily Shea • GOTO 2024
Emily Shea explains how serverless integration services like Step Functions, EventBridge, SQS, and SNS enable you to easily evolve your applications as requirements change and features advance.

The AWS Developers Podcast
Vadym Kazulkin discusses AWS Lambda Snap Start and covers the challenges of cold starts, how Snap Start works, its impact on performance, and optimization techniques such as priming.

The Art of Embracing Failures
Anahit Pogosova, an AWS Data Hero (and one of my favorite people), shares the common challenges and pitfalls inherent to distributed systems and ways to mitigate them.

The Believe In Serverless community shared several more production horror stories that should hopefully make us feel a little better about all the mistakes we make. 🙂

• Tales From The Crypt: Spooky Serverless Production Stories
• On Outages, Stories from A Career in Operations
• I was called in from vacation for a death march 💀

New from AWS 🆕

• Meta’s Llama 3.1 8B and 70B models are now available for fine-tuning in Amazon Bedrock
• AWS Lambda now supports using a custom serializer with Java runtimes
• Amazon Aurora Global Database support for tagging global clusters
• AWS now accepts partial card payments
• Amazon Timestream for LiveAnalytics introduces Query Insights
• Amazon Aurora launches Global Database writer endpoint
• Announcing increased quotas and improvements to CloudWatch Logs Anomaly Detection and Pattern Analysis

Thoughts from Social 🐦

A lot of people are worried about the costs of using AWS' container services.

So here's what we did:

1. Set good low cost options as defaults

2. Document in plain English what the costs would be

There's a new cost section in many of our docs. Starting with the VPC... pic.twitter.com/VlNk39bxoy

— Jay (@jayair) October 28, 2024

This is really good stuff from the SST team. Not only is clearly understanding costs an important part of building in the cloud, but the built-in, low costs alternative patterns are a great way to get started with more complex architectures.

No one wants to admit this, but:

- Serverless is technical debt
- Scrum is process debt
- Daily standups are communication debt
- RTO mandates are engagement debt

As with any kind of debt. These things can get you a lift on the short term, but you'll need to pay them back on…

— Sergio Pereira (@SergioRocks) October 27, 2024

I wouldn't call serverless technical debt, at least not with proper planning. Sergio expands in a comment that he's only seen it work for small MVPs and production-level loads with teams to manage the complexity. So, all the way from startup to steady state? Get started quickly and find your PMF, then go through growing pains like all tech orgs do, then settle on some form of serverless-first thinking to minimize operations as you continue to grow and expand.

Upcoming Events 🗓

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

December 3, 2024 - Believe In Serverless Party

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 🧑‍🏫

Which code editor has AWS Lambda recently integrated into its console?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• Atom
• Sublime Text
• Code-OSS
• Vim
• Emacs

Star of the Week ⭐️

This week's star is Evandro Pires (@epiresdasilva). Evandro is the CTO at Senior SA leading its Cloud Native, Data & AI, and technology innovation strategies. He is also an AWS Serverless Hero, the host of the Sem Servidor Podcast, a regular conference speaker, and is now the organizer of the first ServerlessDays in LATAM. Thank you Evandro for continuing to spread the love of serverless to Brazil and beyond!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I hope you're all getting ready for AWS re:Invent! Being an AWS Hero certainly has its perks, one of which is learning about upcoming AWS releases. There is something very, very cool coming to re:Invent, and I can't wait to talk about it with all of you. Until then, my lips are sealed. Just know that I'm very excited.

See you 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.