This is probably the biggest announcement in the past month: AWS will open a region in Switzerland, around Zurich, in 2022, and there will be 3 Availability Zones. This has been asked a lot since Microsoft and Google opened their datacenters, and now it becomes true.

A very deep dive guide from Lumigo on AWS Lambda costs: comparison to EC2, advantages and drawbacks, how to monitor and more importantly how to optimize costs. And if you are interested in optimising costs, also have a look at this AWS article from James Beswick which provides some advice to reduce cost of serverless applications.

Great story from BBC, who completely rebuilt their website, widely used in UK, and moved it from their own datacenters to the AWS Cloud, leveraging serverless technologies: "Around half of the BBC’s website is rendered serverlessly with AWS Lambda". One of their takeaways: "Don’t solve what’s been solved elsewhere", a good reason to go serverless.

Another great story from the Director of Digital Transformation at Armedia. In this article he explains how they transformed an ECS Fargate based application to Lambda, increasing availability and reducing yearly cost from 1730$ to 4$. ☕️ What else?

Lots of great stories in this newsletter: this time from Liberty Mutual (insurance) who built Serverless Well-Architected applications on AWS and was able to handle totally unexpected usage behaviours: Due to COVID-19, one of the apps was much less used (74% reduction in volume), and the other, on contrary seen an important increase. Thanks to serverless technologies, the first one scaled down and the bill reduced accordingly. The second one scaled up seamlessly to handle unplanned volumes.

A visual introduction to AWS Lambda permissions

Enough stories, let's talk about tech stuff. In this article, Harprit Singh explains how to handle permissions with Lambda: permissions to invoke a function, and permissions of the function to invoke other services. This is very well explained with great visuals and code samples. It also gives information for cross-account access, rare enough to be worth a read.

You may know that the number of CPUs available for your Lambda function depends on the amount of memory you configure. But this article goes a little further: The author made some benchmark and discovered interesting figures.

The Power of Serverless GraphQL with AWS AppSync

Very great article from Slobodan Stojanović (yes the one we have for the event on Thursday!). In this article, he describes GraphQL, where does it come from, why it is useful and how to do it on AWS with AppSync. The article is told as a story, and really pleasant to read, with lots of information. A nice sharing of experience for whoever wants to start building GraphQL APIs.

In this article, Sheen Brisals (Engineer at LEGO) is speaking about a potential new pattern when dealing with events: the ability to batch events. You could categorise events (domain, criticality), and then according to some criteria, decide if you need to process them urgently or if you can regroup them and process them as batches a bit later. Refreshing!

Load Testing Serverless Applications With Serverless Artillery

Artillery is a load test solution. Mix it with serverless and you get serverless artillery, another solution to load test your serverless application (http endpoints). This article details how to leverage it to load test an application and get insights on Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB or any other part of your serverless application.

I've been a java and spring (boot) developer for a while and it's true that the Lambda model can be strange at first glance. This article (first of a series) tries to explain to java developers how Lambda works and why Spring Boot may not be well suited. Nice introduction, looking forward to the next episodes.

Announcements

You don't have to be far away for too long in the serverless ecosystem, otherwise you miss a lot of things:

• Probably the biggest news: Lambda extensions. The extension will run in parallel to your Lambda function code and can interact with the function and the execution environment. For the moment, the main use case is for observability/monitoring and security. And last week, AWS also announced an extension to send logs directly to the destination of your choice, without CloudWatch in the middle.
• Archive & Replay events for EventBridge. This one is also important as it gives EventBridge the missing feature: observability. What events did I receive, when, ...? Now you know! And you can replay events if some of them failed to be processed. Regarding EventBridge again, another feature has been released: dead letter queues. With those 2 features, EventBridge becomes even more powerful and a key piece in your event-driven architectures.
• SNS FIFO: You probably knew SQS FIFO, to handle messages once and in the right order. Now SNS can do the same with SQS FIFO Queue as a subscriber to the FIFO Topic. There are cases where it is needed...
• Lambda supports Privatelink. With this feature, you are now able to invoke a lambda function (not in a VPC) from your VPC without going to the Internet. A great layer of security!