The State of Serverless 2021 — In early 2020 we linked to a report from Datadog called State of Serverless looking at trends in the serverless space collected together from their thousands of users. It’s back in a 2021 form with a variety of added insights:

• Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions haven't exactly caught up with AWS Lambda but are gaining momentum with a larger share of companies using them than before.
• Lambda function use has grown, unsurprisingly, with functions now being invoked 3.5x more than two years ago.
• Pay as you go pricing clearly works as Lambda invocations are now far shorter than even a year ago at about 60 milliseconds on (median) average.
• Serverless Framework continues to dominate in the tooling and deployment space.
• In percentage share, Python use has grown, JavaScript has dipped.

Datadog

Application Monitoring Built for Serverless — See performance bottlenecks and exceptions in distributed applications by analyzing request flows with payloads, metrics and events. Search any payload, users, or tags in application-level calls; explore end-to-end request flows across microservices.

Epsagon sponsor

AWS Lambda Extensions Now Generally Available — AWS Lambda Extensions provide a way to integrate Lambda with external observability and monitoring tools. A handful of providers offered extensions during the preview phase but it can now be used more broadly, including for sending telemetry to custom destinations after a function has finished running.

Channy Yun (AWS)

Building a Serverless Outbreak Management Solution with AWS Data Lab — Unsurprisingly I’ve never needed to do this, but a real life case study is always appreciated as a learning exercise. Building a portal with React and AWS Amplify helped a manager of retirement communities keep a handle on COVID metrics.

Mondal, Mittal and De Jesus

Five Easy Steps to Deploy Containers as Lambda Functions — A practical introduction to using containers as the vector for getting things running on AWS Lambda.

Varun Singh

Convect: Instant Serverless Deployment of Machine Learning Models — A new platform for deploying ML models from Jupyter Notebooks. A good example of taking the serverless concept to an audience who simply isn’t paid to care about ops.

Convect Inc.

Behind the Scenes as AWS AppConfig Builds a Lambda Extension — Steve Rice and Tim Yao share “why the AWS AppConfig team built an AWS Lambda extension, the effort required to build it, and the outcomes”.

Amazon Web Services