Bookmarks (61)

How to Build a Serverless Discord Bot with OpenFaaS and Go — A serverless chat bot? Don’t bots need to be long running processes? No, it’s possible for them to be stateless and triggered by events, and Alex shows us how to rig one up with Go atop the OpenFaaS platform (itself written in Go).

Introducing CockroachDB Dedicated on Azure, On-Demand Global Clusters, & More — CockroachDB is now available as a dedicated service on Microsoft’s Azure, and you can now distribute data across multiple cloud regions with new multi-region capabilities in CockroachDB serverless.

PostgresML Raises $4.7M for Serverless AI Databases — PostgresML is an open source Postgres-based platform that enables performing modern machine learning related tasks (training models, working with vectors, performing inference) within SQL.

Deploying Serverless Generative AI on AWS Lambda with OpenLLaMa — "What if we could create a scalable, serverless LLM Generative AI inference engine? After some experimentation, I discovered that not only was it possible, but it actually worked quite well!"

Au Revoir, Serverless Cloud? Ampt Now Ready for Production Serverless Cloud Apps — The in-beta dev platform Ampt (spun off from Serverless, Inc. last year) is now ready for production Serverless Cloud apps, meaning you can now migrate away, along with their data, storage and parameters into Ampt.

Scaling Up the Prime Video Audio/Video Monitoring Service and Reducing Costs by 90% — An announcement from the Prime Video team back in March revealed plans to move away from a distributed microservices architecture over to a monolithic app in an effort to help “achieve higher scale, resilience, and reduce costs”. This news recently got picked up again, most notably by DHH (of Ruby...

Even Amazon Can't Make Sense of Serverless or Microservices — After famously moving 'beyond the cloud', David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) of 37signals shares some strong thoughts on how the well intentioned theory of serverless doesn’t match the reality in many cases.

A Boilerplate and Starter App for Node.js Serverless Apps — Leans upon Serverless Framework, Express, TypeScript, Prisma, Husky and more to provide a lot of functionality out of the box.

Building FaaS in Go with WASM, WASI and Rust — There are a lot of moving parts here, but the idea is showing how you could create a simple serverless platform, of sorts, in Go that could run modules written in any language that can target WebAssembly.

Serverless Speed Test: Comparing Lambda, Step Functions, App Runner, and Direct Integrations — Allen pits Lambda, direct integrations, synchronous express Step Function workflows, and App Runner against each other to see which is fastest and which scales the best.

Google Cloud Run Jobs & Second-Generation Execution Environment Now GA — Cloud Run jobs are now generally available. Here’s a deeper look at what they can do (batch data, migrations, reporting, etc). "The sky’s the limit for what you can build on our serverless platforms," say Google.

Implementing Error Handling for AWS Lambda Asynchronous Invocations — Explains the error behaviors and approaches for handling errors in Lambda asynchronous invocations to build reliable serverless applications.

Building and Dockerizing a Node.js App with Stateless Architecture — Explores the benefits of hosting containers on platforms like Kinsta (that offer a managed hosting environment).

Some Best Practices for Serverless Security — Including implementing proper IAM, key management practices, threat detection tools, logging/monitoring, and more.

Defining Serverless Databases as a Service — Makes the case that SDBaaSes ensure flexible scaling, eliminate the need to manage anything, and prevent overspending with DBaaS vendors.

Implementing an Event-Driven Serverless Story Generation App with ChatGPT and DALL-E — Demonstrates how to integrate AWS serverless services with modern AI services like ChatGPT and DALL-E. The end result is a serverless scheduler that triggers a workflow to create AI-generated stories, images and supporting audio.

Understanding Techniques to Reduce AWS Lambda Costs — While serverless approaches are often held up as a way to reduce the total cost of ownership compared to a server-based model, there are still things you need to consider to keep costs down.

🐍  Python 3.10 Runtime Now Available in AWS Lambda — This has been heavily demanded and long awaited, but Python 3.10 is now supported on Lambda as both a managed runtime and container base image. There’s also a preview Lambda container base image for Python 3.11. Ruby 3 next, please? 😁

Dynaboard: A Low-Code Web App IDE Made for Developers — Build high performance public and private web apps in a collaborative — full-stack — development environment.

The State of Serverless GPUs — A comprehensive report that dives into the latency, variability, billing strategies, user experience, and advanced capabilities behind various serverless GPU offerings.

Introducing AWS Lambda Response Streaming — AWS Lambda now has support for response payload streaming — a new invocation pattern that lets functions progressively stream response payloads back to clients which also opens up the opportunity to go beyond the usual 6MB response payload limit.

Supabase Edge Runtime: Self-Hosted Deno Edge Functions — This self-hosted solution for deploying Deno (an alternative V8-based JavaScript runtime that isn't Node.js) functions is now open-source. Still in beta, but usage is encouraged. May tread on Deno Deploy's toes a little but also broadens the ecosystem around Deno hopefully.

Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly + CGI — This new tool from Wasmer enables devs to run WebAssembly compiled functions in a CGI-like style in a sandboxed environment. "This innovative technology has the potential to reshape the landscape of serverless applications," they say. What's old is new again?

Build Complex Automations 10x Faster, Without Fighting APIs — The workflow automation platform for technical people who want to build complex workflows faster. With n8n, you can build workflows using JavaScript when you need flexibility. Or quickly connect apps with a drag n’ drop GUI when you don’t.

Thundra Ceases Operations — We’re not sure of the full story, but a key player in the serverless monitoring space appears to be going away. Someone on Twitter suggests they were acquired.

Are Serverless Services Worth It? — Preaching to the converted here admittedly, but Allen outlines a few trade-offs worth keeping in mind when discussing serverless.

"Pain Points I Faced Using Serverless" — The author shares a few challenges they encountered while working with a serverless stack on AWS Lambda (around execution times, variable sizes, etc).

How to Stream File Uploads to S3 Object Storage and Reduce Costs — How to upload files directly from a Node.js app to both improve availability and reduce costs.

Spin 1.0: The Developer Tool for Serverless WebAssembly — This is the first stable release of Spin, a new open-source developer tool for building, distributing, and running serverless apps built with WebAssembly.

Why AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store Still Reigns Over Secrets Manager — Although Secrets Manager is newer with advanced features, SSM Parameter Store is preferred by developers due to its affordability, simplicity, and flexibility.

Streaming for Serverless Node.js and Edge Runtimes with Vercel Functions — A overview of how Vercel handles streaming for serverless Node.js environments, and how this can boost performance.

Neon's Edge-Compatible Serverless Driver for Postgres — Neon is a multi-cloud ‘serverless Postgres’ platform, but one problem with certain serverless function platforms is their inability to make direction connections over TCP to services like Postgres. What to do? Use HTTP instead. Neon now offers this for V8/Node users in the shape of a node-postgres replacement that uses WebSockets instead.

Like Redis Caching, but in < 5 Minutes — Create a low-latency, global database cache without writing code. No need to define data structures or eviction policies. Automatically determine optimal TTLs and invalidate stale data. Start caching, faster.

Improved Node.js Compatibility Coming to Cloudflare Workers — Unlike AWS Lambda, say, the popular Cloudflare Workers platform uses V8 isolates to operate at a lower level rather than offer a full Node.js runtime. This means support Node features has been lacking, but things are changing with support for AsyncLocalStorage, EventEmitter, Buffer, assert, and parts of util now available to use with more to follow.

Using AWS Lambda SnapStart with Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD Pipelines — AWS Lambda SnapStart lets you reduce cold starts by caching an encrypted snapshot of an initiated Lambda function (on the Java runtime only for now) and reusing that snapshot for subsequent invocations.

S3 As An Eternal Service — AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr notes that 17 years since its inception, Amazon’s S3 now “effectively has to exist until the heat death of the universe”.

Serverless in 2023 — Following a recent podcast appearance, Mike reflects on the trajectory of serverless over the past eight years, looking at the enterprise offering, complications with Lambda, event-driven adoption, and more.

The Inside Story on Mountpoint, A File-Based Client for S3 — Mountpoint for Amazon S3 is an application (now in alpha) from AWS Labs that lets you mount an S3 bucket to a directory on your file system and use it in such a manner.

AWS Application Composer Now GA: Build Serverless Apps on a 'Visual Canvas' — This visual builder was previewed back at AWS re:Invent last year, and it’s now generally available. It’s a tool to help you compose and configure serverless apps from AWS services backed by deployment-ready infrastructure as code. Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels notes it “simplifies and accelerates the architecting, configuring, and building of...

Passwordless Authentication Made Easy with Cognito — A straightforward step-by-step guide showing how to implement passwordless authentication with the fully-managed Amazon Cognito service.

The Problem with Serverless,  From a Serverless 'Addict' — What a self-described ‘serverless addict’ sees as the biggest problems facing serverless today.

AWS Anti-Competitive Move Hidden in Plain Sight? — “there’s one particular aspect of how AWS advantages its own offerings that I don’t see folks talking about–and strikes me as particularly egregious”.

▶  How to Create a Serverless Cloud Workstation — Google's Cloud Workstations provides preconfigured managed development environments in the cloud, accessible from the browser.

In Defense of Serverless — A reply to the recent ‘Don’t Be Fooled by Serverless’ piece from Basecamp co-founder and Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson (a.k.a. 'DHH').

An Open Source Serverless Maps Solution — The cost savings of the approach shared here, when compared to using the Google Maps API, is notable, as highlighted in this Hacker News discussion.

Introducing AWS Lambda Powertools for .NET — Lambda Powertools .NET is now generally available. The library helps implement observability when running functions based on .NET 6 while reducing the amount of custom code. The Python equivalent is extremely popular and paved the path to this.

Don't Be Fooled by Serverless — Basecamp co-founder and Ruby on Rails creator (often known as "DHH") offers up a 'warning' of sorts: “The cloud is primarily for companies that have big swings in use. [...] Serverless doesn’t change that”. And yet in a round about way, he sells the idea of serverless too: "if you only need a few functions executed every now and...

Is AWS 'Asleep At The Lambda Wheel'? — Cloud economist Corey Quinn quips about the forgotten nature of AWS Lambda, noting that its “value proposition was and remains that it removes undifferentiated heavy lifting for customers”, before asking AWS to pick things up again. A lack of updates for Python, Ruby and Go runtimes all come into question here.

Experiments in Mitigating Serverless Cold Start Delays on JavaScript-Based Platforms — If you’re using Node.js for serverless functions on Vercel or Netlify, is a ‘cold start’ delay still a thing, and would frequently pinging a function mitigate against it? In short, using such platforms raise key considerations versus going with AWS Lambda directly, say.

The Biggest Problem with EventBridge Scheduler and How to Fix it — One-off schedules are not automatically deleted after they have been executed, so here, Yan shares a fix.