On November 13th in 2014, Jeff Barr announced AWS Lambda, "a brand-new way to run applications in the cloud". At the time, it was only supporting DynamoDB Streams, Kinesis Streams and S3 events. NodeJs was also the unique runtime. Lambda is probably the origin of what we call today "serverless", look at the article and see how it evolved in 6 years...

re:Invent is THE conference for whoever wants to learn about AWS. Every year since 2012, re:Invent is a massive conference in Vegas, spread in several hotels, with hundreds of sessions. But this year, due to the exceptional circumstances, it will be online and free.

This guide will help you prepare this event. Schedule your agenda with the session catalog or Cloud Pegboard. And if you are looking for serverless sessions, check serverlessland, you'll find some featured sessions you should not miss.
My session ("Faire plus avec moins de code en serverless") is not featured but is part of the ten French sessions, first time ever that sessions are provided in other languages. re:Invent is a great opportunity to learn a lot about AWS services, architecture, get feedback from other customers, and don't worry if you cannot attend all sessions, they will be available on-demand.

Great article that compares different compute services (EC2, ECS, EKS, Fargate, Lambda) and helps you choose. The main advice: start with simplicity. Choose the simplest service that delivers

business value the fastest (Lambda). Then, look at scalability, technical limits, cost of maintenance, evolvability, ... I think they could have called the article "Serverless first, and after?"

When building microservices architecture, you need to select the best messaging solution to communicate between each service. On AWS, you have the choice between Kinesis, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, MSK... How to choose? This article provides some insight based on real experience.

Want to try out Firebase Cloud Functions? This article provides a great starting-guide to the serverless computing service on Firebase. Give it a try, it takes only a few minutes to get something working. Certainly a good solution if you are a Firebase user (not to confuse with Google Cloud Functions).

Bref 1.0 is released 🎉

If you are a PHP developer and wish to use this language on AWS Lambda, Bref is definitely for you. You probably know you can use any language on Lambda with custom runtimes. Bref provides this custom runtime for PHP and just released its version 1.0.

I've been asked several times by my customers: "Is it possible to have a cross-account CI/CD pipeline to deploy on several environments?" Of course it is, and this article explains how, in particular how they use SSM to store the role arn to use according to the target environment. Bonus: build notifications in Slack, packages saved to CodeArtifact and automated tests. Really detailed article, plus the code available in github.

Best practices for working with Amazon Aurora Serverless

I rarely speak about databases in this newsletter, especially relational databases which are not very friends with serverless applications. But this AWS article provides some meaningful information regarding Aurora Serverless: use the Data API for connection pooling, warm-up the DB with CloudWatch schedule event... and many more.

This is definitely a topic that I like, as it is a part of my talk at re:Invent this year. You don't necessarily need a Lambda function (or another compute service) between API Gateway and DynamoDB. I would even say that you will have better performance, lower cost and better resilience doing API Gateway -> Dynamodb -> Lambda. Check out the article!

Synchronous Express Workflows for AWS Step Functions

In the same idea, you can integrate API Gateway and Step Functions without any Lambda in the middle. But now, you can even get a synchronous response from the state machine and return it directly to the client. As you could probably do a lot of things within a unique Lambda function, Step Functions will help to respect the Single Responsibility Principle. No more excuse for decoupling!

You may now know that I've been a Java developer for a while and I try to maintain my skills (I had the opportunity to work on lambda-powertools-java). When you use Lambda functions, whatever the language, you want structured logging and tracing for faster

troubleshooting, you want metrics (technical & business) and many other things that can simplify your dev job. Lambda-Powertols aims to provide this. It was available in python and as a beta in Java. The java version is now in version 1.0. If you want more information about powertools and how it can simplify best practices, I suggest you have a look at Nicolas Moutschen, during Serverless Stockholm few days ago.

Announcements

November is generally a moment of the year when AWS announces a lot of new features and services, just before re:Invent. We also call it "pre:Invent". Here are few updates dedicated to serverless:

• Code Signing, a Trust and Integrity Control for AWS Lambda. You can add a new layer of security in your serverless development process, by signing the package you will deploy to Lambda.
• Step Functions integrations. Step Functions integrates with 2 news services: Amazon EKS (Kubernetes) & API Gateway. Now you can interact with your Kubernetes cluster directly from a state machine and also invoke APIs exposed with API Gateway.
• SAM SLI (1.9+) now supports cached and parallel build for lambda functions and layers. It really reduces the build time as it won't rebuild functions that didn't change.