Serverless Status Issue 272: December 2, 2022

#272 — December 2, 2022

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AWS re:Invent has been taking place this past week in Las Vegas, as such we've got plenty of serverless related updates to share. So yup, it's an AWS-heavy issue this week with lots to check out and get up to speed on. Let's get to it.

AWS Application Composer: (Another Way to) Visualize and Create Serverless Workloads — A preview for AWS Application Composer, a new visual designer that you can use to compose serverless apps from multiple AWS services, is now available.

Luca Mezzalira (AWS)

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Accelerate Your (Java) Lambda Functions with Lambda SnapStart — One of the biggest announcements was aimed at Java developers (for now) with a claim of up to 10x faster startup performance by caching the state of a function just after initialization and then reloading that state at runtime. This post shows off how it works in practice, whilst 'Serverless Sam' shares six things to keep in mind before jumping in. We're likely to see this idea branch out to other runtimes in due course, though Java apps will particularly feel the benefit given their start-up times.

Jeff Barr (AWS)

Log Analytics the Easy Way with Amazon OpenSearch Serverless — A new 'serverless' option for Amazon’s OpenSearch Service (used for log analytics, real-time app monitoring, site search, etc.) is in preview. This post shows us how use it by way of building a simple log analytics pipeline.

Prashant Agrawal & Pavani Baddepudi (AWS)

As with Neptune, there has been some discussion over just how 'serverless' OpenSearch Serverless is, given its minimum billing requirements. Ben Kehoe makes the observation that "serverless" mostly means "autoscaling" in this case.

💫 More serverless updates from re:Invent

Amazon Inspector now supports AWS Lambda functions, adding continual, automated vulnerability assessments for serverless compute workloads.
Version 4.0 of AWS Glue, the serverless, scalable data integration service, is now generally available.
With the v11.0.0-beta of the Amplify CLI, you can now use AWS CDK v2 to extend or modify your Amplify backend stack.
Amazon CloudWatch launches cross-account observability across multiple AWS accounts.
There's a new way to show off your AWS serverless knowledge/skills by way of (official) digital badges from AWS.

The Biggest 'Preinvent' Serverless Announcements You May Have Missed — Before re:Invent had even started we had plenty of updates and announcements, which Yan kindly brings together for us here.

Yan Cui

re:Invent 2022 Marks the Next Chapter in Data and Cloud
Dave Vellante opinion

AWS Lambda Powertools for TypeScript — A suite of utilities for working with AWS Lambda. Includes tracing, structured logging, and custom metric creation. A sister project of the popular AWS Lambda Powertools for Python.

Amazon Web Services Labs

ELSEWHERE:

Server-Side Rendering Full Stack Apps with Pages Functions — Cloudflare’s Page Functions allow you to integrate Workers with your site deploy to bring a little server-side-ish vibe to your serverless sites and are now generally available.

Cloudflare

Edge Config: Ultra-Low Latency Data at the Edge — Vercel introduces storage for configuration data at the edge that's usable by edge functions, middleware and serverless functions.

Vercel

Instacart on Dropping Postgres for Amazon DynamoDB — Instacart recently switched to DynamoDB from Postgres in order to scale a little more (and, well, if it works for Amazon.. why not?) The engineering team now shares a little about the schema that reduced their number of billable writes-per-transaction.

Jessica Wachtel (The New Stack)