All Serverless Announcements From re:Invent 2022 You Need to Know
Learn about all interesting updates for Serverless-related technologies and services running on AWS
As AWS re:Invent 2022 is wrapping up, it’s time to look back and summarize the key announcements for the Serverless engineers — We’ve got some really exciting features out there!
Amazon OpenSearch Serverless — Run Search and Analytics Workloads without Managing Clusters
As a Serverless fan, I’m always in favor of managing and scaling fewer resources. OpenSearch (formerly ElasticSearch) managed service now goes fully serverless. Why it’s great? Because managing such a database can be super complex.
This one is huge. Coding an ETL pipeline has a lot of undifferentiated code. Almost every application has a pipeline of events ingestion, filtering, transformation, and enrichment, and ultimately sending the data to the next service or storage.
It obviously plays well with the AWS ecosystem with the following services — SQS, Lambda, Kinesis, DynamoDB, API Gateway, and more. At a $0.40/million requests entering a Pipe, this becomes a no-brainer to use.
Preview: Introducing AWS Application Composer
AWS is putting more effort into simplifying Serverless application building. It comes this time with a visual builder — so we won’t need to spend time coding endless YAML files. This may also relate to the acquisition of the Stackery team last year.
While I’m not a big fan of building software visually, this service can be very helpful for Serverless newcomers since building a distributed application requires some expertise.
Preview: Announcing Amazon CodeCatalyst, a Unified Software Development Service
The second update AWS put into simplifying application building is the new CodeCatalyst. Developer portals are starting to become mainstream, with Backstage as an example of a CNCF project. CodeCatalyst will help in:
- Service catalog: Sharing information about services, blueprints, boilerplates, owners, and environments. It helps engineers get up to speed with new services quickly and efficiently.
- Issue tracking: Allowing teams to create boards and manage projects — like Jira, GitHub, and other similar solutions.
CodeCatalyst is a promising new service; however, I don’t know why the issue tracking is bundled into this service.
Accelerate Your Lambda Functions with Lambda SnapStart
The feature Lambda users were most excited about. Since launching Lambda back in 2014, engineers were always keen to improve cold starts performance. Three years ago, AWS launched the provisioned concurrency feature that helped retain a pool of warm functions that removed the bootstrap process.
However, Lambda is the holy grail of Serverless, and most engineers don’t want to provision it in advance. Just let it scale naturally with minimal performance overhead.
The new SnapStart feature takes an immutable, encrypted snapshot of the memory and disk state and caches it for reuse. So launching a new instance can become much faster.
As of now, SnapStart is available only to Java11 Corretto, and some early performance benchmarks show a 10x improvement in load time! SnapStart doesn’t introduce any new pricing.
Dear AWS: Please launch SnapStart for more runtimes and enable that by default. Sincerely yours — Ran and the Serverless community.
Step Functions Distributed Map — A Serverless Solution for Large-Scale Parallel Data Processing
This new announcement increases the Step Functions distributed map to a maximum concurrency of up to 10,000 executions in parallel instead of 40.
In large dataset processing, size matters. With 10,000 parallel executions, you can handle much more data than before. A few more improvements are coming from the map state flow:
Amazon Inspector Now Scans AWS Lambda Functions for Vulnerabilities
This is coming for compliance and security. Amazon Inspector is a vulnerability management service that continually scans workloads.
Now Lambda functions are also covered by Inspector, helping you find critical vulnerabilities in the environment and the code.
Summary
Overall, I think there hasn’t been much focus for Serverless at re:Invent 2022, but there’s some opportunity for very core improvements in the future of Lambda using SnapStart. You can read all AWS re:Invent 2022 announcements in here:
