#193 — March 26, 2021

Read on the Web

Serverless Status
Serverless news, views, and developments every Friday

How (and Why) You Need To Start Generating Serverless Infrastructure Diagrams — Infrastructure diagrams are a handy way to quickly see all of the moving parts contained with a service and you can automatically build them in your CI pipeline. They key piece is cfn-diagram which generates diagrams from CloudFormation templates.

Allen Helton

Vercel Serverless Functions vs Cloudflare Workers — A helpful comparison of two less well understood platforms that clears up some misconceptions people have about both in areas like caching, language support, and limits. For example, Workers has a 10ms or 50ms execution timeout but it’s based on CPU runtime and not clock time.

Alexey Antipov

Learn How Pipeline Automation Helps PagerDuty Run 500+ Builds Daily — With Buildkite and a small amount of automation PagerDuty is able to go from a blank repo to a service running in production in a few minutes.

Buildkite sponsor

Using S3 Object Lambdas to Generate and Transform on the fly — Last week we featured the news of S3 Object Lambda which provides a way to place Lambdas in the S3 object retrieval process. One suggested use case is to (re)process data on the fly and this post looks at how to approach that.

Eoin Shanaghy

▶  Discussing WebAssembly and WASI with Aaron Turner — The use of WebAssembly for deploying code generated by languages like Rust and Go to the Web is reasonably well understood, but this interview digs more into WebAssembly’s uses on the server (including for, yes, serverless use cases!) and how WASI makes it possible.

Serverless Chats Podcast podcast

Announcing End of Support for Python 2.7 in AWS Lambda — Python 2 is no longer supported by even the Python Software Foundation so it’s probably no surprise AWS will be dropping support too later this year. Such functions will continue to run, however.

Jonathan Tuliani (AWS)

▶  Automating Social Images with Airtable, Cloudinary, and Serverless — It’s an hour long but this is a fun format for a video.. a developer is brought on to solve a problem, live, in an hour. James’ challenge is to create a system to auto-generate social media sharing images using a variety of tools.

Colby Fayock and James Quick

Building a Serverless API Usage Tracker on AWS — Events go into EventBridge, get filtered, then Kinesis Firehose buffers the results into a Glue job for processing and eventual querying by Athena.

Fraser Sequeira

Integrating AWS Step Functions Callbacks and External Systems — A look at how to integrate Step Functions workflows with external systems using Lambda, DynamoDB, and API Gateway.

Zach Abrahamson (AWS)

▶  Using Observability to Scale AWS Lambda — A live recorded webinar-style session with Ben Ellerby and Alex White of Theodo and Taavi Rehemägi of Dashbird on observing Lambda functions and using what you see to scale and maintain their performance. Cold starts, load testing, tuning, and then using a broader system like Dashbird itself.

Dashbird

How I Conquer My AWS Costs“Take the time to regularly drill down into your AWS bill using the AWS Cost Explorer. Write a script if necessary, and share it with the world, so that we can reuse it.”

Yann Stoneman

Using wkhtmltopdf on Azure Functions to Convert HTML to PDF — The perfect adhoc task for a serverless approach.

Arjav Dave

A Serverless Cost Calculator — A very simple serverless cost tool that helps you compare between AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, and IBM OpenWhisk. It makes it quite striking how much extra Lambda adds for functions to be called publicly over HTTP.

Peter Sbarski and A Cloud Guru

Mangum: AWS Lambda and API Gateway Support for ASGIASGI is a successor (or sorts) to WSGI, a popular approach for interfacing with asynchronous Python apps. GitHub repo.

Jordan Eremieff