Zoho Catalyst: A New (Sort Of!) Serverless Platform — It was two years ago that we first mentioned Zoho’s Catalyst platform, but it’s now finally generally available. Zoho are best known for offering a wide suite of business apps and they’ve taken a similar broad approach here with functions, workflows, databases, file stores, auth, and even ML features offered out of the box. They pitch the idea more completely in their official release post.

Zoho

Mulling Over Multi-Cloud with Corey Quinn — After a summer break, the Serverless Chats podcast is back and cloud economist Corey Quinn (the chap with all the snarky AWS news) is on the show discussing cloud agnosticism, the ‘myth of portability’, and how accounting feels about metered cloud/serverless billing models.

Serverless Chats Podcast

How 'Up' Ditched Docker and Halved Their Android Test Times — Up shares their recent adventures in Android native build optimisations, improving their speed and stability using parallelism and GCP with Buildkite.

Buildkite sponsor

'Kubernetes Users See Serverless Future' — Kubernetes is apparently driving increased rates of hybrid and multi-cloud environment adoption and greater interest in serverless technology, judging from a survey commissioned by Cockroach Labs and Red Hat.

Nathan Eddy

Building a Serverless Email Delivery Service on AWS — Don’t worry, you’re not going to be sending email entirely your own.. this tutorial leans on AWS Simple Email Service (SES) for the actual sending, but uses SQS, SAM, Lambda, and more for building emails, tracking events, etc.

Joakim Wånggren

Google Cloud Functions Adds 'Minimum Instances' Support — Setting ‘min instances’ on your Cloud Functions applications translates to lower startup times and fewer ‘cold starts.’

Vinod Ramachandran and Kelsey Hightower (Google Cloud)

End-to-End Testing of Azure Functions within GitHub Actions — How to run a function app locally within a build pipeline then run the integration testing scenarios instead of running the E2E testing after the app deployment.

Justin Yoo

An Easier Way to Move Your App Engine Apps to Cloud Run — I’m intrigued when I hear Google suggesting ways to migrate from one service to another (given their history for shuttering things) but if you want to containerize your App Engine apps to get things running on Cloud Run, instead, Google has a video and a codelab for you.

Wesley Chun (Google)

Building a Serverless GIF Generator with AWS Lambda — Let’s say you host videos and want to show GIF animations as a sort of preview feature in the UI. Generating such GIF files from videos is a compute-intensive operation but you can use something like AWS Lambda to create a scalable service to handle it for you.

James Beswick (AWS)

How to Use Puppeteer to Automate Chrome in an API with Netlify Serverless Functions — A walkthrough that brings together a few ideas: running serverless functions on Netlify (which are ultimately powered by AWS Lambda underneath), automating Chrome, and offering it all up as an HTTP accessible service. It’s simple stuff but if you’ve never joined all these parts together, tuck in.

Colby Fayock

Building a Serverless Distributed App with a Saga Orchestration Pattern — The AWS Compute Blog is on fire lately and this post is no exception.

Anitha Deenadayalan (AWS)

Increasing Performance of Java AWS Lambda Functions with Tiered Compilation — Tiered compilation stopping at level 1 reduces the time the JVM spends optimizing and profiling your code and can reduce start up times for Java apps that require fast responses.

Mark Sailes and Richard Davison (AWS)