#179 — December 4, 2020

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Serverless Status
Serverless news, views, and developments every Friday

AWS re:Invent's Serverless Smörgåsbord

AWS always unveils lots of new goodies at re:Invent, and the opening few days have shown us just how important serverless is to them with a wide variety of news:

  • AWS Proton (currently in preview only) is a new automated management and deployment tool for container and serverless deployments. No doubt we'll write a lot more about this in 2021.
  • AWS Lambda now scales up to 10GB of memory and 6 vCPUs.
  • Lambda's minimum billing increment is now 1 millisecond (down from 100!) which means huge savings for more efficient functions.
  • Lambda can also now work with container images if that better suits your workflow.
  • Aurora Serverless 2 (in preview and MySQL only for now) is a much needed update to the on-demand, auto-scaling database system. Jeremy Daly gave it a test drive here.
  • AWS Batch supports Fargate as a compute resource for fully serverless batch computing.
  • S3 is finally strongly consistent. If you've ever written something to S3 then immediately read it and.. it's not worked, this is a good update.
  • Nearly half of new apps built at Amazon were deployed to AWS Lambda in 2020. Amazon is all in on serverless.

Amazon Web Services

Webinar: Build a Serverless App with Lambda & Step Functions — Join Lumigo & Cloudway for a webinar on Thu, Dec 10, on building serverless apps with Lambda and Step Functions. We'll demo the entire workflow and show you how to build the architecture and how to monitor the app. Save your spot.

Lumigo sponsor

How to Progressively Deliver New Image Formats to Users with CSS and Cloudflare Workers — When your browser makes a request, it can tell the server what types of responses it accepts, including what image formats it supports. Couple this information with a Cloudflare Worker.. and you can dynamically return more modern formats like AVIF or WebP to users and know it’ll work.

James Ross

Automatically Generating Social Share Images Serverlessly — This is a perfect use case for a serverless function and a great example of post that pulls together a variety of ideas for a creative end result.

Ryan Filler

▶  Discussing Serverless for Operations with Ryan Coleman — Ryan Coleman of Stackery talks about his work as a sysadmin and where serverless fits into the ops sphere.

Serverless Chats Podcast podcast

AWS Lambda Now Supports Batch Windows and Bigger Batches from SQS — Because we couldn't fit everything in above, you get a re:Invent bonus here too ;-) If you are using SQS as an event source for your Lambda functions, messages would be batched up in groups of up to 10. Now you can define a ‘windows’ of up to 5 minutes in which up to 10,000 messages can be batched.

Amazon Web Services

Serverless Transformation on a Brazilian News Media Outlet — The whys, hows, good, bad and the ugly of serverless transformation at Nexo Jornal.

Ibrahim Cesar

Creating Faster AWS Lambda Functions with AVX2AVX2 is a set of SIMD x86 instructions aimed at speeding up vector-oriented algorithms (think image manipulation or deep learning) and you can now run AVX2-optimized workloads on Lambda, your supercomputer in the cloud(!)

James Beswick (AWS)

14 Use Cases for AWS Lambda: How to Make the Most of It — When I rave about serverless to other developers, the most common question I get is.. well what can you actually do with it? This article may provide some inspiration for anyone asking such questions.

TechMagic

lambda-go-api-proxy: For Porting APIs on Go Frameworks (Such as 'Gin') to AWS Lambda + API Gateway — Also supports Negroni, GorillaMux, and plain HandlerFunc.

Amazon Web Services - Labs

Lambda, EC2 or Fargate? A Simple Approach to Choosing AWS Compute for Enterprise Workloads

Deploy Serverless Docker Containers and Functions with Koyeb CLI

The future's bright..
The future's serverless!