#82 — December 21, 2018

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serverless status

This week we take a break from the usual news roundup to look at the whole of 2018 and what happened in the serverless world. We'll be back after the break on January 11 and hope you have a great Christmas :-)
— The Serverless Status Team

January

Awesome Serverless: A Curated List of Serverless Resources — Not new, but it continues to be updated on a frequent basis and has a couple hundred handy links in various categories.

Juan Anibal Micheli

AWS Lambda Gained Go(lang) Support — A quick tutorial on how to use Go to create Lambda functions on AWS. Go is a great fit for Lambda due to its performance, stability, and statically compiled nature. Lambda would go on to support a lot more languages later in the year, too. There was also another Go serverless tutorial that did well this year.

Amazon Web Services

AWS Lambda .NET Core 2.0 Support Released — It wasn't just Go getting all the fun on AWS Lambda. The highly anticipated .NET Core 2.0 AWS Lambda runtime became available in all regions too, turning up the heat against Azure.

Amazon Web Services

Low-Code Platforms: What Developers Think and Why — Is low-code the answer to your app delivery challenges? 5000+ devs speak out. See what they have to say in this whitepaper.

Progress Kinvey sponsor

February

Azure's Event Grid Went Live, Tying Together Serverless Functions and Cloud Services — Event Grid, a event delivery and routing service on Azure, was in preview for several months but went GA this year.

Mary Branscombe

AWS Serverless Application Repository Released — An attempt by AWS to create an ecosystem of serverless apps and components that can be easily brought together and hosted on their services. It’s now open to both consumers and providers.

Jeff Barr

March

Cloudflare Workers: Run JavaScript at the Edge — CDNs typically make static assets available at many edge locations, but this next step from Cloudflare took running code to the edge as well, all powered by V8.

Kenton Varda

Gloo: A Function Gateway — Built on top of Envoy Proxy, Gloo provides a unified entry point for access to both services and serverless functions. GitHub repo.

Idit Levine (solo.io)

Netlify Began to Offer Lambda Functions on Its Static Platform — The popular static site hosting platform took some steps into dynamism by letting users deploy AWS Lambda-powered functions simply by adding files to their Git repositories.

Matt Biilmann and Chris Bach

Secure and Accelerate Your Cloud Storage — Use Cloudflare Workers to cache content while still preventing unwanted access with HMAC and JSON Web Tokens.

Cloudflare Workers sponsor

April

Fly Edge Apps: JavaScript Functions at the Edge — Fly is a distributed JavaScript platform with which you can build your own CDN, and now they have a way to run JavaScript on the edge, all around the world. Image manipulation? Pre-rendering? Exactly.

Fly

AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) Implementation Now Open-Source — AWS SAM extends AWS CloudFormation to provide a simplified way of defining the resources needed by your serverless application. It’s now available under the Apache 2.0 license.

Amazon Web Services

Azure Container Instances Now Generally Available — You can now create Linux and Windows containers to run on Azure without managing any underlying VMs, effectively bringing serverless principles to containerized apps.

Corey Sanders (Microsoft)

May

Comparing PubNub Functions to AWS Lambda Functions — As numerous serverless platforms roll out, it’s going to be natural for users to try and compare them to AWS Lambda which appears to have become a ‘reference’ platform of sorts.

Adam Bavosa (PubNub)

June

AWS Lambda Adds Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) to Supported Event Sources — This was such a significant addition to AWS Lambda that we gave it two headline posts at the time. This one was the main announcement and a quick example of how it works. Prefer full docs and a tutorial? They’ve got that covered.

Randall Hunt

July

Have You Shipped Anything Serious with a Serverless Architecture? — A Hacker News discussion which attracted a lot of replies, from people running millions of function calls a month to people with failed experiments. Someone from London’s public transit system even explained their experiences with using Azure Functions.

Hacker News

Serverless QBasic: Yes, It Happened — Hello, it’s a fun, geeky item! QBasic was a BASIC development environment that first shipped with MS-DOS 5 (trivia: my first ‘newsletter’ was a QBasic fanzine on Usenet) but someone has rigged up a way to run QBasic programs in the cloud, serverlessly(!)

Philippe Suter

Google Updated Its Serverless Offerings, Made Cloud Functions GA, Revealed 'Serverless Containers' SupportCloud Functions, Google’s event-driven compute service, became generally available supporting Python 3 and Node.js. There was also a video of the session covering the releases.

Google

August

Key Takeaways from ServerlessConf 2018 San Francisco — This year’s ServerlessConf took place mid-summer and this post was frequently updated with key takeaways for the future of serverless.

Andrea Passwater

Serverless, Inc. Landed $10M Series A Funding — Serverless, Inc. were an early and influential player in the overall serverless space and closed a significant funding round to build out their collection of tools.

TechCrunch

September

AWS Lambda Introduces Support for PowerShell Core — Execute PowerShell scripts or functions in response to any Lambda event. Ideal for those in the .NET world.

Amazon Web Services

Introducing Azure Functions 2.0 — A major upgrade to Azure’s serverless platform. The host runtime is now a lot more portable meaning you can run functions locally in your dev environment. .NET Core 2.1 is supported, as well as both Node 8 and 10, with Python 3.6 on the way.

Eduardo Laureano (Microsoft)

October

AWS Lambda Ups Function Running Time to 15 Minutes — You can now configure your AWS Lambda functions to run up to 15 minutes per execution - it used to be 5.

Amazon Web Services

AWS Lambda Announces Service Level Agreement — Anyone building their app around AWS Lambda can breathe a small sigh of relief as Amazon has announced a service level agreement for the service. It’s ‘three 9s’ for now though.

Amazon Web Services

November

AWS Lambda Programming Language Comparison — A comparison of code size and ‘warm’ performance of different languages that Lambda supports.

Yan Cui

ZEIT Unveiled Version 2.0 of Its 'Now' PlatformNow is a serverless platform that makes it really easy to just push code to a repo and have it running in the cloud. 2.0 makes it easy to define numerous API endpoints in a single repo and supports concurrent builds while mantaining its fully on-demand pricing & free tier.

Gullermo Rauch, ZEIT, et al.

OWASP Releases a Report on Serverless Security Risks — The Open Web Application Security Project is best known for its ‘top 10’ Web application security risk reports, but they now have a new preliminary report into risks that specifically affect serverless systems which includes contributions from engineers from companies like IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and Serverless, Inc. PDF here.

OWASP

AWS Lambda Got Official Support for Ruby — While Ruby’s importance appears to have waned in JavaScript’s shadow over the past few years, it still has a thriving and determined user base and Lambda is finally, after many demands, offering an official Ruby runtime for Lambda functions.

Amazon Web Services