Corey Quinn:

Countless volumes have been written about the various benefits of serverless, a task made even easier by it being such a squishy, nebulous term that’s come to mean basically whatever the author wants it to mean. This has been a boon for AWS’s product teams, who’ve gone from creating services that are clearly serverless such as DynamoDB, Route 53, IAM, and others to instead slapping the “serverless” moniker on things that are clearly not very serverless at all, like OpenSearch and Aurora.

Yup, that Neon. Congrats to Nikita and team for this big win.

Databases and web apps go together like peanut butter and jelly. In a word, they’re inseparable. And despite all the amazing innovations in NoSQL data stores, often a good old relational database is the most reliable tool for the job.

We want to make it completely seamless to develop applications that need databases on Replit. Starting today, you can create and instantly begin to use PostgreSQL databases from within the Replit workspace.

The fine print.

Under the hood, this product is powered by our friends at Neon who have created a lightning-fast serverless database. The database will go to sleep after 5 minutes of inactivity. Most clients should handle the reconnection seamlessly.

Ruby on Jets allows you to create and deploy serverless services with ease, and to seamlessly glue AWS services together with the most beautiful dynamic language: Ruby. It includes everything you need to build an API and deploy it to AWS Lambda. Jets leverages the power of Ruby to make serverless joyful for everyone.

I’m not (yet) big on serverless things, but if I were, I’d love to run some Ruby code there.

I won’t call SQLite’s current moment a comeback, because the most used database engine in the world doesn’t have anything to come back from. I’m going with “renaissance”, because despite its already mass adoption, there has been something of a rebirth of interest from one software sector that had previously relegated it to dev & test environments: web apps

When we had Paul Copplestone from Supabase on The Changelog I asked him what a cloud native Postgres would look like. He replied,

Decoupled compute and storage. So the idea is that you should be able to attach the compute part of it to a storage, hopefully like an infinite storage; you know, anything that is infinitely scalable. If you can do this, and in particular, if the compute can start up very fast, maybe in, say, a hundred milliseconds via some sort of HTTP response, then that’s cloud native, yeah.

Enter Neon, which sells itself as:

The multi-cloud fully managed Postgres with a generous free tier. We separated storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage.

Behind this new business from MemSQL co-founder Nikita Shamgunov is the linked (Apache-licensed) server written in Rust.

I came across an interesting use case for edge compute the other day: cookie management at the edge. It probably won’t be super relevant to a ton of people, but it’s an interesting use case I wanted to share, nonetheless.

Blueboat aims to be a developer-friendly, multi-tenant platform for serverless web applications. A monolithic approach is followed: we try to implement features of commonly used libraries (in the web application context) natively in Rust to replace native Node addons, improve performance and reduce duplicated code. Blueboat’s architecture ensures the security of the platform, prevents code duplication and keeps the overhead low.

This is a great post byu Andy Kimball on what they mean when they say CockroachDB is now serverless:

Serverless means you don’t have to think about servers. Of course there are servers hard at work handling your application’s requests, but that’s our problem, not yours. We do all the hard work behind the scenes of allocating, configuring, and maintaining the servers. Instead of paying for servers, you pay for the requests that your application makes to the database and the storage that your data consumes.

How they got here:

Before now, a single physical CockroachDB cluster was intended for dedicated use by a single user or organization. That is called single-tenancy. Over the past several CockroachDB releases, we’ve quietly been adding multi-tenancy support…

How they scale it:

Within every Serverless cluster, there is an autoscaler component that is responsible for determining the ideal number of SQL pods that should be assigned to each tenant, whether that be one, many, or zero.

And what it all means for Cockroach’s users.

Local development of remote/cloud functions has been various levels of painful ever since the computing trend started its rise, so it makes a lot of sense why Cloudflare would invest in easing that pain. Now they get to say developing with Cloudflare Workers is:

• 🎉 Fun: develop workers easily with detailed logging, file watching and pretty error pages supporting source maps.
• 🔋 Full-featured: supports most Workers features, including KV, Durable Objects, WebSockets, modules and more.
• ⚡ Fully-local: test and develop Workers without an internet connection. Reload code on change quickly.

Big news from Deno today.

Today we are releasing Deploy Beta 2. This is the second in a series of beta releases that will be made over the coming months. Each release will add features and refine the programming model. The releases will culminate in a General Availability announcement that we estimate will happen in Q4 2021.

Over the past eight months, we have been quietly designing this hosted service to supplement workflows with the open source Deno CLI. Deploy does not run on AWS Lambda nor does it use Cloudflare Workers; this is a new system with a unique design. We encourage people to look past the rough initial UI and explore this new JavaScript runtime.

What’s next: A general availability (GA) release is expected Q4 2021.

Yes, this joke has been made before, but I’m serious. In the same way that serverless lets backend developers “forget” about servers, what if “codeless” did the same, but for your application code.

In other words, what if API requests to your service included the code that the caller wants to be executed on the server?

Alex Ellis:

I wanted to write to you all and share that I’ve launched my first eBook called “Serverless For Everyone Else” - within the first three hours of launch, nobody bought a single copy and I thought that I’d got it all wrong.

Alex digs into the gritty details of why he wrote the book and what happened after his initial failure. And since Alex is super nerdy like you and me, the post is filled with fun moments like this one:

How did I fulfil the upgrade / discount? I did it by writing a function and deploying it to my Raspberry Pi, so that Gumroad would send a webhook, my code would query the dollar amount, and then send out an email to the customer over AWS SES.

Serverless Stack Toolkit is an extension of AWS CDK that makes it easy to build serverless apps. It features:

• A Live Lambda Development environment
• Zero-config support for ES and TypeScript using esbuild
• Support for deploying to multiple environments and regions
• Higher-level constructs designed specifically for serverless apps

Peter Thaleikis tells the story of how he got started with functions as a service:

Regularly, I discover myself thinking “wow, that’s so simple I can build this in a weekend”. My rational brain kicks in at some point: “Waaaaiiit a second, if it’s so simple, why am I not seeing this done a million times?”
…
Often, my developer mind insists on “it’s actually just two API endpoints and then I could do this and that”. And often this holds true for the core functionality.

I’m willing to be you’ve had that very same impulse (I know I have). He continues:

Function as a service sounds like a great step towards “just having a few API endpoints”. AWS Lambda is the name everyone is having in mind here. But any gains from simplicity are eaten up by AWS complexity.

Peter landed on faasd and explains what he likes about it. A solid read for the serverless-curious.

David Hamp-Gonsalves created a really cool use for your old Kindle:

Second hand Kindles are waiting in drawers for someone to repurpose them into something great. Boasting large e-ink screens, wifi connectivity and ARM processors they are an amazing hacking platform.

In my case I created an information panel summarizing my day such as my calendar, surf and weather forecast, garbage schedule, school closures, etc. My favorite part is that any extra space is filled with a random Pokémon sprite which my kids(not me) like to come check in on.

Built with Rust plus some serverless backend data collection bits.

serverless.tf is an opinionated open-source framework for developing, building, deploying, and securing serverless applications and infrastructures on AWS using Terraform.

This started as a response to the “accidental complexity of many existing tools”, which I definitely felt when I tried the Serverless framework awhile back.

This auth lib has a nice set of features, including support for a bunch of oauth providers. What I really appreciate about a solution like this (vs relying on a 3rd party) is the own your own data bit:

• An open source solution that allows you to keep control of your data
• Supports Bring Your Own Database (BYOD) and can be used with any database
• Built-in support for for MySQL, MariaDB, Postgres, MongoDB and SQLite
• Works great with databases from popular hosting providers
• Can also be used without a database (e.g. OAuth + JWT)

How to track your Stripe payments from your store or billing integration as they happen using Slack, powered by Python with faasd. Extend to do anything you like such as responding to new customers.

This stack was created out of frustration due to the fact that to this day there’s no easy way to have a full email server without the overhead of installing and configuring all servers needed to handle incoming and outgoing messages. We wanted something simple, with no interface and no server management, so we came up with S3-Email. This included AWS SES as our email server (receive and send) and S3 as our database and interface. Then we tied everything together with a bit of code via AWS Lambda.

All of this functionality and the repo is just some JSON, Yaml, and text files. Maybe 2020 really is the year of #nocode… 😉

A story of an internal tool – Replicator. It involves AWS Lambda, one of the hardest things in Computer Science, and Star Trek.

Jean-Luc Picard quotes FTW. I’d love to see this tool open sourced.

LocalStack looks like an excellent way to develop & test your serverless apps without leaving your local host. It appears they are basically mocking 20+ AWS services which is undoubtedly a lot of work and I would expect to be error prone. Is anybody out there using LocalStack on the regular and can let us know if it actually works as advertised?

Serverless doesn’t mean “less” security, instead we should fine-tune our focus area to security implications that accompany a serverless architecture.

If you’re developing serveless functions on Azure, Google or AWS you probably want to make sure you follow these security best practices.

Lambcycle is a middleware for lambda functions. It defines a configurable life-cycle and allows you to focus on your application’s logic. It has a “Feature as Plugin” approach, so you can easily create your own plugins or reuse your favorite packages with very little effort 🐑 🛵.

The author goes deep on why Lambcycle solves a serious problem over on Medium.

Abraham Ingersoll:

While AWS continues its Mr. Softy strategy of extend, embrace and extinguish with Lambda, Google is doubling down on its Kubernetes masterstroke with the upcoming “Knative.”

Using the CNCF’s trail map as a guide, he finds four serious “Serverless on Kubernets” contenders in addition to Knative and overviews them each in turn.

Now you can easily build, deploy, and distribute Slack apps for free with serverless on ZEIT Now.

We recently built a simple Slack app. The app allows users to type /eval <JavaScript code> directly in Slack that evaluates JavaScript code and prints the output directly in a Slack response. Try it out!

In this blog post, we will show you exactly how we did it. We will demonstrate how you can easily build, deploy and distribute similar Slack apps for free, leveraging the power of serverless on Now.