Off-by-none: Issue #309

December 17, 2024

Wrapping up 2024 🎁

In our previous issue, we re:Capped AWS re:Invent, I shared some thoughts on the biggest announcements, and Elastic Cloud Serverless went GA. This week, AWS adds Live CloudWatch Logs to VScode, Guardrails get a heckuva lot cheaper, and Jeff Barr steps away from the AWS News Blog after 20 years. Plus, we have plenty of content for you from our amazing community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

It wasn't an overly busy week for AWS, but they did announce a few things of note. The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code now includes Amazon CloudWatch Logs Live which makes it a lot easier to debug your applications without needing to jump into the console.

Also, I've been spending a lot of time with Amazon Bedrock and all the tools they're building around it, so I was happy to see that Amazon Bedrock Guardrails reduced pricing by up to 85%. This is a critical service if you don't want to turn your AI interfaces into free LLMs that will answer any question a user throws at it. They also added support for Spanish and French, and I expect more languages will be coming soon.

Something else that may have flown under the radar is that AWS introduced an enhanced version of the AWS Secrets Manager transform: AWS::SecretsManager-2024-09-16. Maybe not super exciting to most, but this new version includes Automatic Lambda upgrades, which is a pretty nice feature.

Last week Jeff Barr announced that he was ending his tenure as lead blogger on the AWS News Blog after doing it for 20 years! 🤯 What a run.

SkySQL, a serverless Cloud DBaaS platform company, announced that they raised $6.6 Million. I'm skeptical of "AI managed" services, but at the same time, I'm intrigued by serverless databases.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

I always appreciate the hard work of these content creators. Here are some of my favorite tutorials from the past week:

• Highly scalable image storage solution with AWS Serverless at ip.labs - Part 2 Architectural decisions by Vadym Kazulkin
• Scaling to Zero with Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 by Anuj Tyagi
• AWS re:Invent 2024: How Multi-Region Strong Consistency Transforms DynamoDB by Abhay Kumar Chaudhary
• Serverless multi-region active/active architecture with geolocated routing by Steve Morland
• Handling Paginated Results Seamlessly with AWS Step Functions by Ian Brumby
• AWS EventBridge Pipes Deep Dive by Joud W. Awad
• Avoiding the SQS Event Mapping Trap 💥 in Lambda by Sebastian Zakłada
• Relative Python imports in a Dockerized lambda function by Joris Conijn
• How to use Biome in AWS CDK Solutions by Lee Gilmore
• Building a Scalable Serverless Image Processing Pipeline with AWS SQS and Lambda by Jehiel Martinez
• Protect Your API Gateway with AWS WAF using CDK by Ran Isenberg
• How to invalidate Cognito-issued JWT tokens by Yan Cui
• Refactoring a Lambda Monolith to Microservices Using Hexagonal Architecture by Matheus das Mercês
• DSQL Part 2 – More Rust and a Momento Cache by Benjamen Pyle

Serverless Reads 🤓

AppSync events is great, but did you really want serverless WebSockets?
Allen Helton deep dives into the new AppSync Events service and gives us a much needed reality check into the complexities of real-time communication.

10 Years of AWS Lambda — The Evolution, Impact, and Future of Serverless (1/2)
Take a trip down memory lane with Fabian Lober's recounting of Lambda's milestones.

Blake's Take: Who are the AWS Heroes?
Kristi Perreault and Matt Coulter (with the help of Blake the mascot) explain what it means to be a hero and how we're here to help you with your AWS journey.

The Balance of Serverless Simplicity
I really liked this post from Marco Troisi. As developers, we should know that there are no silver bullets, but HTMX + Hono + Mono Lambda + Amazon Aurora DSQL can get most startups pretty darn far.

What hath AWS wrought?
Forrest Brazeal says that AWS seems to be focused on making their good stuff better. I have mixed feelings about their approach, but some things certainly feel like they are moving in the right direction.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

AWS Bites #137: Transit Gateway Explained
Eoin and David Lynam give an overview of AWS Transit Gateway, which aims to simplify complex network connectivity between VPCs, VPNs, and on-premises networks.

Event Sourcing Explained in 5 Mins | Why You Need It, Common Pitfalls
Yan Cui gives you a quick lesson to clear up some common misconceptions.

Jeff Barr: 20 years of blogging
Tiffany and Seb sit down with Jeff Barr, VP and Chief Evangelist at AWS, to celebrate 20 years of the AWS News blog.

Top 10 AWS re:Invent 2024 Sessions on AWS IoT and Serverless for Developers
At some point I'll share my own list, but until then, here are Bhavesh Gohel's top sessions.

Building event driven architectures with Stripe
Ben Smith sits down with Andrew Robinson to explore how to build event-driven architectures on Stripe.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are a few more AWS announcements that might interest you:

• Amazon Simple Email Services (SES) announces Deterministic Easy DKIM
• Amazon Lex launches new multilingual speech recognition models
• Amazon SES now offers Global Endpoints for multi-region sending resilience
• Kinesis Producer Library now supports the AWS SDK for Java 2.x
• Amazon Redshift supports auto and incremental refresh of Materialized Views for zero-ETL integrations
• Amazon IVS Introduces Thumbnails Recording for Real-Time Streaming
• Amazon DynamoDB announces support for FIPS 140-3 interface VPC and Streams
• Amazon Timestream for InfluxDB now supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) connectivity
• AWS Resource Explorer supports 59 new resource types
• Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL announces Extended Support minor 11.22-RDS.202411

Serverless Tools 🛠

Introducing keyv-upstash: Seamless Key-Value Storage for Serverless Redis
keyv-upstash is a storage adapter for Keyv that connects it to Upstash Redis.

Upcoming Events 🗓

February 20, 2025 - ServerlessDays Manchester 2025

June 12, 2025 - ServerlessDays Milano 2025

Please send me your serverless events!

Take the latest Off-by-none Cloud Quiz 🧑‍🏫

What is the name of OpenAI's new video generation model?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

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Final Thoughts 🤔

Since the next two Tuesdays fall on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, we're going to be taking a two week break from the newsletter. We'll see you back here on Tuesday, January 7, 2025!

Thank you all for following along this year. 2024 was an interesting one for me personally, and I'm incredibly excited about 2025 and all its possibilities.

Happy Holidays and have a Happy New Year!!! 🍾🥂🎉

See you next year,
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 Bluesky, LinkedIn, X, or email.