Off-by-none: Issue #306

November 19, 2024

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10 years of AWS Lambda! 🥳

In our previous issue, CloudFormation deployments got an x-ray timeline view, users reported problems with Bedrock, and we celebrated the real heroes of AWS. This week, AWS Lambda turns 10 years old, DynamoDB announces a massive price cut, and Python and .NET on Lambda get snappy. Plus, we have a ton of amazing content from the cloud and serverless communities!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Hold on to your hats, because there's a lot to get to this week! First of all, AWS Lambda just turned 10 years old. 🤯 I can't even begin to tell you how much that service has positively impacted me. It changed the way I thought about software development, it made me rethink how development teams would need to be structured, and it introduced me to a community of absolutely amazing people!

Werner Vogels shared the original Lambda PR/FAQ that started it all, Jeff Barr outlined the improvements made each year to Lambda, and John Furrier shared his perspective on how Amazon’s serverless vision shaped the future of cloud and AI. Interesting read.

AWS Lambda not only turned 10, but also shared some big announcements of its own. AWS Lambda now supports SnapStart for Python and .NET functions, improving cold start performance from several seconds to sub-second startup times (no official benchmarks have been provided yet). Unlike SnapStart for Java, Python and .NET are not free (and seem a bit pricey), which is a little suss. And speaking of snakes (totally kidding 🤣), AWS Lambda added support for Python 3.13. 🐍

In things-just-got-cheaper-without-needing-to-do-anything news, Amazon DynamoDB reduced prices for on-demand throughput by 50% (and global tables by up to 67%). This is huge news for serverless fans because this dramatically reduces the need to manually balance on-demand and provisioned mode. Big win for tables with lots of GSIs. And if for some strange reason you use Keyspaces, Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) reduced prices by up to 75%.

Amazon DynamoDB announced general availability of attribute-based access control, simplifying permission management within your tables and indexes, and introduced warm throughput for tables and indexes, which lets you prewarm throughput for upcoming peak events.

Amazon S3 now supports up to 1 million buckets per AWS account letting you finally create one bucket per object (😬 please don't do this), AWS Application Load Balancer announced CloudFront integration with built-in WAF to cut out a bunch of manual configuration, and Step Functions now let you generate Infrastructure as Code templates right from the console.

Were you hoping that permissions on AWS could get more complicated? Well, you're in luck! AWS just introduced resource control policies (RCPs) to centrally restrict access to AWS resources. "While SCPs offer central control over the maximum permissions for IAM roles and users in your organization, RCPs offer central control over the maximum permissions on AWS resources in your organization." Basically SCPs for resources.

And that brings us to the news that AWS App Studio is now generally available. I haven't used this in the last two months, but I'm really hoping they made some massive improvements if they're slapping the GA tag on there. 🤖

In other cloud news, LocalStack raised $25M to help developers emulate and test cloud apps locally, Akka Serverless launched v3, and Apache OpenServerless is now in preview.

Finally, Ashley Peacock published a new book titled Serverless Apps on Cloudflare, and Netlify joined OpenNext with plans to replace their Next.js runtime with this open source version.

Have you seen last month's release of MongoDB 8.0? It has 36% faster reads, 56% faster bulk inserts, and up to 50x faster resharding. And if you still think MongoDB is just another NoSQL database, then you're missing out on some of its best features. MongoDB 8.0 meets the needs of modern apps including storing your unstructured data, plus full vector database capabilities alongside the document/non-relational model. And, of course, it's secure, durable, and crazy fast. Check out their Atlas Vector Search Quick Start to see how easy it is to get started. Sponsored

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

• Highly scalable image storage solution with AWS Serverless at ip.labs - Part 1 The why behind the re-implementation by Vadym Kazulkin
• Add Logging to AWS Lambda Without Redeploying Using a Simple Extension by Marko Štrukelj
• Building a Serverless URL Shortener: A Practical AWS Project by Keyur Modi
• AWS Lambda Layers by Joud W. Awad
• Building Serverless Applications with AWS Bedrock by Adhiraj Jarwal
• AWS App Runner: Getting Started with ECR Deployments by Vishwasa Navada K
• Why Modular Monolith is a great starting architecture for a serverless application (Part 1) and (Part 2) by Selcuk Sasoglu
• Build a reverse image search engine with Amazon Titan Multimodal Embeddings in Amazon Bedrock and AWS managed services by Nathan Pogue & Waleed Malik
• Building event-driven workflows with DynamoDB Streams by Arpad Toth

Serverless Security 🔒

We don't often see good security posts about serverless, but we had two this week (plus one about better managing access to your AWS accounts):

• Securing AWS Lambda | How Misconfigurations Can Lead to Lateral Movement by Yehonatan Bitton
• AWS WAF Essentials: Securing Your SaaS Services Against Cyber Threats by Ran Isenberg
• Centrally managing root access for customers using AWS Organizations by Sébastien Stormacq

Serverless Reads 🤓

AWS AppSync Events - Serverless WebSockets Done Right or Just Different?
Great post by Ran Isenberg that talks about the pros and cons of using the new AppSync Events service for building and managing serverless WebSockets.

What goes after Serverless? I'm looking for a new buzzword.
Michal Šimon shares his thoughts on what modern cloud development looks like and what might be a better term to describe it. AWS has been calling it "Configuration over Code", which works well, but I liken the maintenance nightmares to SQL Stored Procedures.

Making AWS News stupid fast with smart caching
Luc van Donkersgoed shares how he implemented intelligent caching to optimize performance.

Here is one of the most misunderstood aspects of AWS Lambda
Yan Cui explains how asynchronous function invocations use an internal queue that doesn't check the concurrency limits, eventually succeeding even if it doesn't have enough allocated.

I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and was Charged $1,100
Bit of a wild story by Elliott King that makes you realize how easy it is to accidentally spend money on AWS if you're not 100% sure what you're doing.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

AWS Bites #135: Serverless is making a comeback where you least expect it
Don't call it a comeback, it's been here for years! Eoin and Luciano discuss the success that enterprises are having with serverless, likely because more disciplined teams handle the complexity better.

Best practices and top trends for serverless at scale
Neat series from Capital One on how they use serverless. Brian McNamara shares lessons learned, top trends in serverless, and some predictions for the future.

10 years of Lambda & ECS! | Serverless Office Hours
Julian Wood is joined by Eric Johnson, Jeff Barr, and several others to share origin stories, insights from behind the scenes, and experiences from the builders and leaders of serverless at AWS.

Serverless Craic Ep62 Obsess Over Time To Value
The Serverless Craic team discusses one of my favorite chapters from The Value Flywheel Effect: why teams should be obsessing over "Time to Value" versus "Time to Market".

New from AWS 🆕

Here are several more interesting AWS announcements that you might have missed:

• Introducing Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall Advanced
• Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink now supports Amazon DynamoDB Streams as a source
• Amazon VPC Lattice now supports Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
• AWS Backup now supports copying Amazon S3 backups across Regions and accounts in opt-in Regions
• Easily troubleshoot NodeJS applications with Amazon CloudWatch Application
• Amazon CloudWatch launches Observability Solutions for AWS Services and Workloads on AWS
• Amazon Q Developer Pro tier adds enhanced administrator capabilities to view user activity
• Amazon Redshift to enhance security by changing default behavior
• Three new Long-Form Voices
• Amazon Data Firehose supports continuous replication of database changes to Apache Iceberg Tables in Amazon S3
• Amazon Q Developer in the AWS Management Console now uses the service you’re viewing as context for your chat
• Streamline container application networking with built-in Amazon ECS support in Amazon VPC Lattice

Thoughts from Social 🐦

🚀🎂🔟Happy 10th Birthday AWS Lambda!

One of the most impactful cloud services was announced by @jeffbarr and @werner today in 2014!
The event-driven model became the start of #serverless #AWS . pic.twitter.com/GB8Q7SKlAT

— Julian Wood (@julian_wood) November 13, 2024

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 new Python version did AWS Lambda recently add support for?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• Python 3.10
• Python 3.11
• Python 3.12
• Python 3.13
• Python 3.14

Star of the Week ⭐️

This week's star is Monica Colangelo (@monicaontech). Monica is a Principal Cloud Architect at NTT DATA Italia and an AWS DevTools Hero. She's an expert in cloud architecture, Infrastructure as Code, and DevOps (holding multiple AWS certifications), who shares her passion for building in the cloud on her socials, speaking at conferences, and on her blog. She's also a co-organizer of ServerlessDays Milano 🇮🇹, one of my absolute favorite conferences. Thank you, Monica, for supporting the community!

Final Thoughts 🤔

This was a long one, but we're finally in the homestretch of pre:Invent. Lots of exciting news coming out of AWS, and there's at least one more big announcement that's still to come! 🤩

Have a great 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.