Symphonia’s Serverless Insights — November 2017
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Hello all, and welcome to a special ‘pre:Invent’ (yeah, I went there… — Ed.) edition of our Serverless Insights. We were going to wait until December before our next newsletter … but plans are made for bending. Don’t miss our special re:Invent crystal ball gazing below!
News from the Serverless World
As is typical this time of year AWS have announced a few things ahead of reInvent either (a) to wet our appetites or (b) because they ran out of space in Andy and Werner’s keynotes. The recent update we’ve been most interested in is Regional Endpoints for API Gateway . This opens a few opportunities that didn’t exist before, including managing your own API Gateway multi-region failover, but it also means you can make intra-region calls through API Gateway without incurring out-of-region latency through Cloudfront.
The debate of ‘what is Serverless’ continues, as is the history of any technical trend worth investing in. If our book doesn’t satisfy your curiosity about this, then why not take a read of Ben Kehoe’s latest take on ‘The Serverless Spectrum’.
And while we’re on the subject of on-going debates, there’s the old ‘multi cloud’ chestnut. We wrote on this back in the spring, but here’s a shorter take from Subbu Allamaraju of Expedia, also from earlier in the year.
Special re:Invent Section!
So re:Invent is only a week away. One week! I (Mike) am going to be taking AWS Community Hero Ben Kehoe’s sage advice — not stressing about getting to sessions, chatting to a bunch people, and wearing the the most comfortable shoes I have.
John and I will both be speaking — John on AWS Lambda and the JVM and myself on Serverless and Organizational Effectiveness . Apart from that I will largely be hanging out at Aria during the day on Weds and Thurs. Please let us know if you’d like to meet up in Las Vegas — we’d love to see a bunch of you while we’re there. You can email us at johnandmike@symphonia.io.
The Serverless community Slack forum (http://bit.ly/serverless-slack) has a dedicated #reinvent channel, so join in there if you want to meet some other Serverless folks, or to follow along with the buzz.
As to what will be announced? Here are our best SWAGs :
- X-Ray 2.0 . Distributed monitoring and observability are hot topics in Serverless, and cloud in general, so we expect that X-Ray will see a big bunch of improvements.
- More language / runtime support for Lambda. Tim Wagner dropped some general hints about this earlier in the year at his NYC summit talk, but we expect to see something concrete at re:invent. We don’t expect generalized container support (yet), but that would be nice too.
- Lambda SQS event source. C’mon folks!
- Step Functions ++ . Step Functions got edit support last week, but we expect this to be the tip of the iceberg of improvements
- Web sockets support for API Gateway.
- First-class Kubernetes support. AWS’ embrace of open-source projects for production services has been hit and miss, but K8S has a huge amount of community momentum right now and we don’t think AWS will be able to resist trying to hop on that wave.
- Cross-region, non-VPC, serverless relational Database. This one’s a little out there, but Microsoft have Cosmos DB, so it’s not completely unreasonable.
News from the Symphonia World
We’ve posted a few new articles since the last newsletter:
- Serverless ‘Glue’ apps in AWS, and sending Slack notifications for Code Pipeline Events — A practical guide to our thinking about building small productivity apps with Serverless, including apps like the Code Pipeline Slack Notifier we recently open-sourced.
- Three (yes, three!) more installments of our Learning Lambda series. We’re getting into some meaty topics at this point including Error Handling, Cold Starts, and Scaling & State.
Closing out
Thanks for reading our latest newsletter, and we trust you found something useful here. We continue to enjoy your suggestions for improvements and additions for future issues.
Our mission at Symphonia is to bring the benefits of Serverless and the Cloud to both our clients and the industry at large. Drop us a line at johnandmike@symphonia.io to chat about how we might help you, or just to share ideas how the Cloud is helping your team, and your business.
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