Serverless Status Issue 151: May 22, 2020

#151 — May 22, 2020

💬 We caught up with Theodo's Ben Ellerby for a quick interview this week — check it out at the end of this issue :-)

What a Typical 100% Serverless Architecture Looks Like in AWS — It’s so huge we could only fit half of it into our graphic above! 😄 This is an interesting 30,000 foot overview of what a complete, fully featured serverless app can look like, architecturally, ‘from above’.

Xavier Lefèvre

Microsoft Unveils 'Azure Static Web Apps' — Azure Static Web Apps brings modern static site deployment to Azure and integrates with GitHub and Visual Studio Code too. Want to see more? Here’s a 6 minute screencast demo.

Microsoft

Understand Serverless Functions & Why They Fail — Monitor & troubleshoot your serverless and containerized environments to get the full picture of what they're doing, down to the payload level. Optimize service costs, troubleshoot issues quickly & reduce MTTR with full data correlation & distributed tracing. Try Free.

Epsagon sponsor

How to Make a Simple CMS with Cloudflare, GitHub Actions and Metalsmith — Let’s say you want to build a CMS but don’t want to mess with the fiddly UI bit.. how about using GitHub itself? Couple that with the Metalsmith static site generator and Cloudflare Workers.. and here you go.

Jon Paul Uritis

▶ How to Fail with Serverless — If you’re in the mood for learning, this is a great talk from Serverless Chats’ Jeremy Daly covering the tools and processes that AWS has in place to deal with failures in distributed serverless apps.

Jeremy Daly

Creating Azure Functions in F# — This is from January but we missed it at the time and some people have been asking about getting up and running serverlessly with F#.. :-)

Aaron Powell

The Architecture of a Serverless, Vue.js-Powered Content Management System — Not only does this outline the AWS infrastructural architecture pretty well, there’s code for you to use for your own setup if you wish.

Dan Bartlett

Six Serverless Security Mistakes To Avoid — Let’s boil down the mistakes:

Assuming WAF takes care of it all.
Failing to customize permissions.
Only worrying about your code.
Assuming you have full control.
Looking at the wrong attack indicators.
Allowing functions to run as long as they like.

Hillel Sollow

Build Internal Tools in Days, Not Weeks — Quickly build the tools your company needs with Retool. UI building blocks that connect to any DB or API—Lambda included.

Retool sponsor

▶ Innovapost: Scaling to 5M Package Deliveries with Serverless — A quick 6 minute use case video from AWS focusing on how a Canadian postal IT services company uses an all serverless approach. I like the way these are put together.

Mohan Rao and Adrian De Luca (AWS)

Using Lambda@Edge for Server-Side Rendering

Mohamed Elfiky

💬 A Q&A with…
Ben Ellerby
VP of Engineering at Theodo

Ben Ellerby is the VP of Engineering at Theodo and an AWS Serverless Hero. He's the editor of the Serverless Transformation blog and podcast and works to help improve Serverless adoption in startups and large organisations. He's part of the team that developed sls-dev-tools which we've featured recently.

What's the biggest pain point of working with serverless that you're seeing?

Education. Serverless, even as a term, is not widely understood and best practices are still emergent. Serverless is such a big space that people need guidance and keeping up to date with emergent best practices can be a full-time job. This was also the rationale behind the recent sls-dev-tools Guardian addition which aims to automate best practice checks for teams adopting serverless. At the moment the list of checks is limited, but we're testing out new ones internally and aim to build this with the community.

"Think Chrome Dev Tools but for Serverless" paints an evocative picture, but what do you really mean by this?

sls-dev-tools improves the Developer-Experience (DX) of building state-of-the-art serverless apps. It's complementary to IaC tools like Serverless Framework, SAM or CloudFormation - and aims to guide not just provide all possible metrics and actions.

As well as sls-dev-tools HQ, sls-dev-tools Guardian has emerged from our initial battle scars of missing best practices. sls-dev-tools runs an automated audit over deployed resources and their configuration to spot common mistakes and anti-patterns. For instance, many teams forget to properly configure their Lambda memory when they just start using Serverless. This can have an impact on performance and cost.

sls-dev-tools is for the community, by the community and Issues, Feedback, Stars and PRs are very welcome.

What is "EventBridge Storming" and why do you think developers should look into it?

Amazon EventBridge is forming the backbone of most of our microservice architectures. Although microservice communication gets easier with EventBridge, microservices are still not easy. The understanding of what makes a good microservice has not changed much since the Service-Oriented Architecture days, but it does not mean it's easy to fulfil those criteria.

Domain-Driven Design has established tools that can help, and 'Event Storming' is a useful extension of DDD. EventBridge Storming takes this a step further and lays out an 8 step guide for teams to collaboratively build out their serverless microservice structure and underlying EventBridge registry Schema. A lot of teams are excited to use tooling like EventBridge but don't know how to "do it correctly". EventBridge Storming aims to be a step by step guide and is a workshop I activity run with all our serverless projects.

You can find Ben on Twitter @EllerbyBen, on the Serverless Transformation blog, or busy hosting the Serverless Transformation podcast.