AWS Lambda, 9 years of Serverless AWSomeness 🚀☁️ #43
AWS Lambda celebrating 9 years and bunch of content and announcements about Lambda Functions
In this issue, we are celebrating AWS Lambda turning 9 years enabling developers to build amazing things on Serverless, and a huge list of announcements coming our way with AWS re:Invent just 2 weeks away.
Congratulations and welcome to the new AWS Heroes - Emin Alemdar, Richard Fan and Takuya Tachibana.
Recapping our previous issue, we did see a lot of pre:Invent announcements from SNS and SQS along with the change in Serverless Framework’s pricing model along with some brilliant content and shoutout about AppSync.
📢 What's new in AWS Serverless
IAM Access Analyzer policy generation now extends coverage to over 200 AWS services
Amazon SQS announces Amazon EventBridge Pipes console integration
AWS Lambda supports faster polling scale-up rate for Amazon SQS as an event source
AWS Lambda makes it easier to troubleshoot errors and timeouts of Init and Restore phase
Amazon SNS increases default FIFO topic throughput by 10x to 3,000 messages per second
Amazon SQS announces support for JSON protocol
AWS Lambda enhances auto scaling for Kafka event sources
AWS Lambda adds support for Amazon Linux 2023
Amazon EventBridge now supports over 20 new Amazon CloudWatch Metrics for event buses
Amazon CloudWatch Logs announces regular expression filter pattern support for Live Tail
AWS Lambda console now features a single pane view of metrics, logs, and traces
AWS Lambda now allows to view and export the function’s template to AWS Application Composer
Amazon EventBridge Pipes adds new logging functionality for improved observability
🚀 AWSome content to learn from
Understand AppSync debugging with CloudWatch logs by Benoît Bouré that speaks about how to enable logs, find the right logs of the AppSync API, and also resolver’s logs.
Benjamen Pyle in his experiments of Serverless with Rust, writes about SQS events triggering Lambda with Rust, shares why choosing Rust runtimes for Lambda helps with performance and reducing Cold Starts; and walkthrough the SAM deployed Lambda which is consuming events from SQS.
Still questioning about Lambda’s scalability? Jason Spiliotopoulos shares the lessons from 200 million Lambda invocations which cover the limitations that were at question, how monitoring was crucial in the journey, and how orchestration was in action.
Hieu Do writes about how warmup is the answer to Lambda Cold Start issues and is also cheaper when compared with provisioned concurrency with constant monitoring.
Last year re:Invent, AWS SnapStart was announced, Vadym Kazulkin has created a series about SnapStart and in part 8, dives into measuring Cold Starts for Java 17.
AJ Stuyvenberg talks about why you shouldn’t use Lambda layers as the Cold Starts don’t reduce if we have Lambda layers and of course, the overhead with development as you need to pack the layers as zip and the pain with updating Lambda functions with layers every time!
Lambda with Node 20? Yes, you read it right! Pierre Cholle guides in his tutorial on deploying Lambda function with Node 20 with the docker image and also compares the performance with Node18.
Luciano Mammino explains how to debug API Gateway’s custom authorizers when it responds with a 500x error where the key is to use CloudWatch logs and trace up the error.
Lee Priest explains AWS CDK in his blog series Let’s CDK: The Energy Drink Episodes about the different constructs that are the building blocks for CDK projects and about stacks of constructs.
Khawaja Shams has been sharing his wisdom about DynamoDB’s scalability and “magic numbers” along with Alex DeBrie over a Twitter (now X) thread. And also about Cold Starts which existed from the “server era”, more details in the Cold Start thread on X.
Jones Zachariah Noel (author) talks about the improved Developer Experience of GraphQL APIs with JavaScript resolvers for AWS AppSync APIs which is also published on Community.AWS and sheds light on how JavaScript resolvers plays an important role in AppSync.
⚒️ What's happening with AWS Serverless tools and Open Source DevTools
Zac Charles published the DynamoDB calculator years ago, and I stumbled into it a few days back.
Michael Walmsley has published Serverless DNA’s new initiative Serverless DNA Constructs.
Hono now supports AWS Lambda with Node18.
Ran Isenberg publishes a new version of aws-lambda-env-modeler.
AWS Lambda Web Adapter now supports NextJS, here is a sample.
The new version of AWS SDK for JavaScript is out, and if you notice carefully, Lambda also added runtime support for Node 20.
Ollie has published amplify-util-blog, a utility plugin for Amplify CLI.
AWS CDK Stack Builder tool, a GUI for building CDK projects is out.
⭐ Pick of the month
This month’s Pick of the month is “AWS Lambda - performance“.
Vignesh Dayalan dives into explaining how AWS Lambda functions work under the hood, by walking through the phases of Lambda when it’s invoked for execution and gives you tips for improving performance.
Jones Zachariah Noel N (author) takes a stab at how to maintain the performance of Lambda function during peak traffic with different approaches.
🗓️ Mark your calendars
AWS Community Days happening -
ACD Central Asia on November 17th and 18th, 2023.
ACD Kochi on December 16th, 2023.
AZ Cloud and AI conference 2023 on November 17th and 18th, 2023 in Chennai.
AWS Brighton UG’s meetup - building low code Serverless applications on November 21st, 2023.
AWS UG Perth meetup - Lightning-fast Lambda: Ephemeral Compute with Rust on November 21st, 2023.
AWS re:Invent 2023 between November 27th to December 1st, 2023.
Serverless Guru is hosting a virtual Serverless Holiday hackathon between December 1st to 17th, 2023.
Is Serverless Ready? happening virtually on December 6th, 2023.
👨💻 Word from the author
Cheers to everyone building amazing things with Serverless!
I’ll be attending AWS re:Invent, if you are around; say a hi! 👋 Or DM me to catch up and chat about Serverless or Freshworks Developer Platform; you can book a slot on PeerTalk.
I’m open to feedback, so feel free to DM me on Twitter or LinkedIn for any queries about AWS or Serverless.
Stay tuned and share with Serverless enthusiasts. Follow The Serverless Terminal on X (formerly Twitter) and Blog.
Until next time, happy building on Serverless!