Off-by-none: Issue #307

November 26, 2024

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A lot to be thankful for! 🦃

In our previous issue, AWS Lambda celebrated 10 years, DynamoDB announced a massive price cut, and Python and .NET got SnapStart support on Lambda. This week, Aurora Serverless v2 finally scales to zero, AWS gets ready for re:Invent, and I share some exciting personal news. Plus, we have a ton of AWS pre:Invent announcements and plenty of amazing content from the community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

I don't even know where to begin. Last week was another firehose of announcements, and there are some absolute bangers in here.

Perhaps one of the biggest announcements was that Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 now supports scaling to zero capacity. This was available in v1, which made it an excellent choice for development environments, but when v2 launched, it was no longer an option. There's still a 15 second cold start, but unless you have highly predictable traffic patterns, I wouldn't enable this in production.

Another exciting one is AWS Step Functions support for Variables and JSONata transformations. It won't solve all your problems, but with the ability to reference saved variables (instead of passing them through each step) and performing some basic data transformations, you should be able to cut out some Lambda functions. More details in the official blog post.

Lambda got some great upgrades including support for Node.js 22, support for Amazon S3 as a failed-event destination, application performance monitoring (APM) via CloudWatch Application Signals, and Provisioned Mode for Kafka event source mappings (ESMs). Also, there are new Amazon CloudWatch Metrics for AWS Lambda ESMs that give you greater visibility into the processing state of events. This will be very handy.

And don't forget S3! It added new functionality for conditional writes and enforcement of conditional write operations for S3 general purpose buckets, plus Amazon S3 Express One Zone now supports the ability to append data to an object! 🤯 Appending data to an S3 Object! Think of the use cases for that!

CloudFront got some major love from the service teams as well. Support for gRPC delivery, VPC origins, and the ability to make origin modifications using CloudFront Functions instead of Lambda@Edge functions. This is a lot cheaper and all your logs will go to us-east-1 instead of being spread across 34 AWS regions.

Remember Amazon Cognito? You know, the service they didn't touch for like 5 years then suddenly remembered it was still a product a few months ago? It just got Managed Logins to support rich branding for end user journeys, passwordless authentication for low-friction and secure logins, and updated pricing with two new feature tiers: Essentials and Plus. Cognito was objectively terrible for a very long time, but if you haven't looked at it in a while, check out how it could potentially improve your app authentication workflow with its new features.

If you've been playing around with AWS AI stuff, you're probably like me and think that some is good, and some is not so good. But I have to say, the ability to define and configure Bedrock Agents dynamically at runtime with the new InlineAgents for Amazon Bedrock is pretty amazing.

And there's so much more! AWS AppSync launched AI gateway capabilities with a new Amazon Bedrock integration in AppSync GraphQL, you can now create Binary Embeddings using the Titan Text Embeddings model, Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases now supports binary vector embeddings to build RAG applications, and Amazon OpenSearch Serverless now supports Binary Vector and FP16 cost savings features.

Speaking of OpenSearch Serverless, it now supports point in time (PIT) search, which is a super cool feature that's been available in ElasticSearch for quite some time. And when you're importing data, OpenSearch Ingestion now supports using AWS Lambda for custom data transformations.

There were some fancy visual updates to the AWS Management Console, Amazon SQS increased the in-flight limit for FIFO queues from 20K to 120K, Amazon API Gateway added Custom Domain Name support for private REST APIs, and AWS AppSync now supports cross account sharing of GraphQL APIs.

And not for nothing, Amazon SageMaker introduced Scale Down to Zero for AI inference to help customers save costs. Could this be a new trend at AWS? Automatically scaling unused resources to zero to save on costs? Let's hope so.

Maybe this cost optimization stuff is really catching on? Werner Vogels is relaunching The Frugal Architect with expanded content including stories from AWS customers who are innovating to optimize their architectures for cost and sustainability. Read all about it in the Return of The Frugal Architect(s).

If you're looking for some more hot takes, check out Yan Cui's post on the biggest pre:Invent 2024 serverless announcements so far. It's always worth getting Yan's insights.

And finally, for all you JavaScript fans out there, Deno is petitioning the USPTO to cancel Oracle's JavaScript Trademark. Did you know that every time you used the word JavaScript without paying royalties that Larry Ellison had to fire one of the deckhands on his yacht? I hope you can sleep at night. 😂

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Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Serverless Reads 🤓

The serverless attendee’s guide to AWS re:Invent 2024
Julian Wood shares an extensive list of serverless and application integration sessions available at AWS re:Invent 2024.

Why You Should Design Your Cloud Architecture to Be Vendor-Agnostic
The author argues that vendor lock-in poses significant risks, but I argue that building for the lowest common denominator is an even bigger risk that stifles innovation and slows down time to market.

DynamoDB and the Art of Knowing Your Limits - When Database Bites Back
Sebastian Zakłada is hopefully pointing out the obvious here: don't expect DynamoDB to do things it wasn't designed to do.

Why Infrastructure Must Be Serverless in the AI Age
I've been banging this same drum for quite some time, Nikita Shamgunov.

Can Amazon Q Save You 4,500 Developer-Years of Work?
Josh Thorne built a simple serverless e-commerce app with Amazon Q, and he says it worked pretty well.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Lambda SnapStart for your Serverless .NET Applications
James Eastham explains what SnapStart is, how to enable it, and demonstrates its performance improvements by minimizing cold start impact for .NET applications.

Serverless Craic Ep63: Map the Market and A Cloud Guru Case Study
The Serverless Craic team reviews "Mapping the Market" and discusses a fascinating case study on clarity of purpose, featuring the story of A Cloud Guru.

Enhancing Lambda DevX | Serverless Office Hours
Julian Wood joins Darko Mesaros to show off Lambda's new console, the Visual Studio Code IDE additions, and some enhanced monitoring functionality.

pre:Invent 2024 | Serverless Office Hours
Julian Wood is joined by a varied cast of AWS greats to discuss pre:Invent service and feature releases, give previews of their upcoming re:Invent talks, and talk about the incredible experience that is re:Invent.

New from AWS 🆕

There were way too many announcements from AWS last week for anyone to keep straight. Here several that I think are worth a quick look:

Serverless Tools 🛠

EventHub For Front Ends (Effe)
Effe (pr. e-ff-y) connects your frontend javascript applications to your backend Event Driven Architecture (EDA).

Thoughts from Social 🐦

I really appreciate Ben's insights here and I agree with just about everything he said. The only thing I'd add is that the problem has more to do with the programming model than the infrastructure choices. Serverless has become a leaky abstraction that forces developers to shape their code in a way that isn't portable. It's not about vendor lock-in, it's about service lock-in that isn't easy to upgrade as your needs change or traffic scales.

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 of the following remedies did the Department of Justice propose for Google's alleged monopoly in search?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

Final Thoughts 🤔

It's been a crazy few weeks with all the AWS pre:Invent announcements, but it's been even busier for me. Today I announced that I've joined CloudZero as the Director of Research to lead the team developing their new AI-driven data platform! I'm super excited about this new role, as well as for the future of Ampt, Off-by-none, and my continued commitment to the cloud and serverless communities.

I'd love to chat more about it with you at re:Invent if you're planning to attend.

Hope to 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, Bluesky, LinkedIn, or email.

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About the Author

Jeremy is the CEO and Founder of Ampt and an AWS Serverless Hero that has a soft spot for helping people solve problems using serverless. He frequently consults with companies and developers transitioning away from the traditional “server-full” approach. You can find him ranting about serverless on Twitter, in several forums and Slack groups, hosting the Serverless Chats podcast, and at conferences around the world.

 

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