Off-by-none: Issue #305

November 12, 2024

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The Real AWS Heroes 🦸

In our previous issue, AWS turned on the pre:Invent announcement firehose, AppSync gave us better serverless WebSockets, and Neon simplified row-level security for Postgres. This week, CloudFormation deployments get an x-ray timeline view, users report Bedrock might be on shaky ground, and we celebrate the real heroes of AWS. Plus, we've got plenty of awesome content from the cloud and serverless communities!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

AWS had several announcements that stood out this week. First up is the new AWS CloudFormation deployments timeline view. If you haven't seen this yet, it's pretty wild and super helpful. Also, Amazon CloudFront no longer charges for requests blocked by AWS WAF, a change that probably should have been made ages ago.

In other AWS news, Amazon Bedrock Prompt Management is now generally available, AWS Lambda announced JSON logging support for .NET managed runtime, and Amazon Redshift Serverless higher base capacity of 1024 RPUs is now available in additional AWS regions.

And just as we all seem to be moving away from the Zip packaging format, AWS Lambda adds support for Customer Managed Key (CMK) encryption for Zip function code artifacts. 🤷‍♂️

AWS also announced updates to the AWS Well-Architected Framework guidance, Jeff Barr said they'd be distributing AWS BuilderCards second edition at re:Invent 2024, and the AWS News Blog turned 20 years old this week.

Congratulations to the latest cohort of AWS Heroes including Serverless Heroes and Off-by-none regulars Vadym Kazulkin and Marcin Sodkiewicz.

In not so great AWS news, apparently AWS is killing customer AI apps without warning.

And finally, SST made the good decision to support containers on AWS. Letting Dax dance with his shirt open was a much more questionable one.

This week's issue is sponsored by incident.io, a Slack-enabled incident management platform meant to help companies track and respond to incidents in real-time. I really like their all-in-one approach. It's not just about alerting the right person on-call. Incident.io lets you respond quickly and keep your users informed with integrations, automations, and insights that simplify your entire incident management workflow. Be sure to check out their free trial and let me know what you think! Sponsored

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

• AWS CLI Made Easy with Amazon Q by Brian Rinaldi
• EventBridge best practice: why you should wrap events in event envelopes by Yan Cui
• When to use Light Events vs. Rich Events in Event-Driven Architectures by Yan Cui
• Introducing AWS Fault Injection Service Actions to Inject Chaos in Lambda functions by Vladislav Nedosekin, Saurabh Kumar, and André Stoll
• AWS Lambda: OCR and Text Translation in the AWS Cloud by Wojciech Lepczyński
• Syncing Data in Near Real-Time: Integrate DynamoDB and OpenSearch by Malik Idrees
• How to Query a CSV File Stored in AWS S3 Using Athena by Mohamad Amzar
• Query DynamoDB with SQL using Athena - Leveraging EventBridge Pipes and Firehose (2/2) by Marko Štrukelj
• Highly scalable image storage solution with AWS Serverless at ip.labs - Part 1 by Firdaws Aboulaye and Vadym Kazulkin
• How to Migrate from Serverless Framework to AWS SAM by Mohammed Ismaeel
• Handling Multi-Product Inventory Reservations in E-Commerce with DynamoDB Transactions by Katturaja Mookkan
• How to Create a (Nearly) Free Serverless Rate Limiter on AWS by Kieron McKenna
• Write queries faster with Amazon Q generative SQL for Amazon Redshift by Raghu Kuppala, Phil Bates, Xiao Qin, Erol Murtezaoglu, and Sushmita Barthakur

Announcing Catalyst Public Beta Sponsored
Catalyst gives developers a powerful, all-in-one set of APIs for microservices, so you can stop hacking together fragmented frameworks and libraries and get back to building. Check it out now!

Serverless Reads 🤓

Why serverless is no magic wand?
I often ignore the articles that simply parrot the "cold start", "vendor lock-in", "unpredictable costs" arguments against serverless. However, John Antony's mention of the "Leaky Abstractions" issue is worth taking note of.

Serverless computing's second act
I don't think serverless ever really left, but I agree with David Linthicum that there is a bit of a renaissance now that more companies have embraced (some) of its core tenants. I still believe in the abstraction, but I don't think it's been executed well.

Patterns of Modern App Development
James Eastham shares a collection of serverless patterns along with his thoughts on what serverless even means (to you).

5 Prompt Engineering Tips for Developers
Excellent post by Slobodan Stojanović that explains why it’s so hard to give clear instructions and how to change your thinking to get better results from LLMs.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Serverless moments with AWS Lambda and Amazon ECS | Amazon Web Services
Back in July during the AWS Heroes Summit in Seattle, a few of us were asked to wish Lambda and ECS a happy birthday and give our thoughts on why it was such a transformational service. Here's the result.

Stripe event destinations | Serverless Office Hours
Ben Smith and Trey Nguyen join Julian Wood to show how you can transform payment workflows using EventBridge.

New from AWS 🆕

So many announcements coming out of AWS right now! Here are several more that might interest you:

• AWS CodeBuild now supports additional compute types for reserved capacity
• Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion adds support for ingesting data from Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
• Amazon Kinesis Data Streams launches CloudFormation support for resource policies
• AWS IAM Identity Center now supports search by permission set name
• AWS introduces service versioning and deployment history for Amazon ECS services
• Amazon MSK now supports vector embedding generation using Amazon Bedrock
• Express brokers for Amazon MSK is now generally available
• Announcing AWS DMS Serverless improved Oracle to S3 full load throughput
• Amazon Location Service launches Enhanced Places, Routes, and Maps
• AWS CodePipeline open source starter templates for simplified getting started experience
• Six new synthetic generative voices for Amazon Polly
• New Kinesis Client Library 3.0 reduces stream processing compute costs by up to 33%
• Amazon SNS delivers to Amazon Data Firehose endpoints in six new regions
• Amazon S3 Access Grants now integrate with Amazon Redshift
• Amazon OpenSearch Service launches next-gen UI for enhanced data exploration and collaboration

Serverless Tools 🛠

Warp
Warp is a purpose built launcher for searching AWS resources lightning fast.

Thoughts from Social 🐦

I’ve heard a LOT of these stories over the last few days.

Doesn’t seem like @awscloud’s AI service is ready for production. https://t.co/eNRqXLQr0H

— Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) November 10, 2024

I've been using Bedrock all the time and I've yet to see these issues. But as Steve Sanders pointed out, it seems to be happening to a lot of people right now.

Upcoming Events 🗓

November 12, 2024 - Debunking Serverless Misconceptions (Webinar)

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 nuclear power plant is Microsoft preparing to reopen in order to provide energy for its AI compute needs?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• Chernobyl
• Fukushima
• Three Mile Island
• Savannah River
• Hanford Site

Stars of the Week ⭐️

This week I want to recognize and celebrate all the current (and former) DAs, DevRels, and DevEx folks at AWS. The ones that have been out there in the field for the last several years deeply connecting with local AWS users, creating and sharing amazing content, and building close relationships with the people that inspire other developers to build their businesses using AWS technology. If I've ever taken you for granted, I apologize. If your value hasn't been adequately communicated to the powers that be, I wish that I could have done more. How a $100B/year corporation was able to use a handful of talented people to create genuine connections with so many developers should be studied. As should why they now seem eager to break some of those bonds. To all my AWS friends that got heart-wrenching news this week, know that I, and many others, appreciate you more than you could possibly imagine. If there's anything I can do, please reach out to me.

Final Thoughts 🤔

This re:Invent might be special. It could very well mark the end of an era.

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, Bluesky, LinkedIn, or email.