ICYMI: Serverless pre:Invent 2019

With Contributions from Chris Munns – Sr Manager – Developer Advocacy – AWS Serverless

The last two weeks have been a frenzy of AWS service and feature launches, building up to AWS re:Invent 2019. As there has been a lot announced we thought we’d ship an ICYMI post summarizing the serverless service specific features that have been announced. We’ve also dropped in some service announcements from services that are commonly used in serverless application architectures or development.

AWS re:Invent 2019

We also want you to know that we’ll be talking about many of these features (as well as those coming) in sessions at re:Invent.

Here’s what’s new!

AWS Lambda

On September 3, AWS Lambda started rolling out a major improvement to how AWS Lambda functions work with your Amazon VPC networks. This change brings both scale and performance improvements, and addresses several of the limitations of the previous networking model with VPCs.

On November 25, Lambda announced that the rollout of this new capability has completed in 6 additional regions including US East (Virginia) and US West (Oregon).

New VPC to VPC NAT for Lambda functions

On November 18, Lambda announced three new runtime updates. Lambda now supports Node.js 12, Java 11, and Python 3.8. Each of these new runtimes has new language features and benefits so be sure to check out the linked release posts. These new runtimes are all based on an Amazon Linux 2 execution environment.

Lambda has released a number of controls for both stream and async based invocations:

• For Lambda functions consuming events from Amazon Kinesis Data Streams or Amazon DynamoDB Streams, it’s now possible to limit the retry count, limit the age of records being retried, configure a failure destination, or split a batch to isolate a problem record. These capabilities will help you deal with potential “poison pill” records that would previously cause streams to pause in processing.
• For asynchronous Lambda invocations, you can now set the maximum event age and retry attempts on the event. If either configured condition is met, the event can be routed to a dead letter queue (DLQ), Lambda destination, or it can be discarded.

In addition to the above controls, Lambda Destinations is a new feature that allows developers to designate an asynchronous target for Lambda function invocation results. You can set one destination for a success, and another for a failure. This unlocks really useful patterns for distributed event-based applications and can reduce code to send function results to a destination manually.

Lambda Destinations

Lambda also now supports setting a Parallelization Factor, which allows you to set multiple Lambda invocations per shard for Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and Amazon DynamoDB Streams. This allows for faster processing without the need to increase your shard count, while still guaranteeing the order of records processed.

Lambda Parallelization Factor diagram

Lambda now supports Amazon SQS FIFO queues as an event source. FIFO queues guarantee the order of record processing compared to standard queues which are unordered. FIFO queues support messaging batching via a MessageGroupID attribute which allows for parallel Lambda consumers of a single FIFO queue. This allows for high throughput of record processing by Lambda.

Lambda now supports Environment Variables in AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and the AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

Lastly, you can now view percentile statistics for the duration metric of your Lambda functions. Percentile statistics tell you the relative standing of a value in a dataset, and are useful when applied to metrics that exhibit large variances. They can help you understand the distribution of a metric, spot outliers, and find hard-to-spot situations that create a poor customer experience for a subset of your users.

AWS SAM CLI

AWS SAM CLI deploy command

The SAM CLI team simplified the bucket management and deployment process in the SAM CLI. You no longer need to manage a bucket for deployment artifacts – SAM CLI handles this for you. The deployment process has also been streamlined from multiple flagged commands to a single command, sam deploy.

AWS Step Functions

One of the powerful features of Step Functions is its ability to integrate directly with AWS services without you needing to write complicated application code. Step Functions has expanded its integration with Amazon SageMaker to simplify machine learning workflows, and added a new integration with Amazon EMR, making it faster to build and easier to monitor EMR big data processing workflows.

Step Functions step with EMR

Step Functions now provides the ability to track state transition usage by integrating with AWS Budgets, allowing you to monitor and react to usage and spending trends on your AWS accounts.

You can now view CloudWatch Metrics for Step Functions at a one-minute frequency. This makes it easier to set up detailed monitoring for your workflows. You can use one-minute metrics to set up CloudWatch Alarms based on your Step Functions API usage, Lambda functions, service integrations, and execution details.

AWS Step Functions now supports higher throughput workflows, making it easier to coordinate applications with high event rates.

In US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland), throughput has increased from 1,000 state transitions per second to 1,500 state transitions per second with bucket capacity of 5,000 state transitions. The default start rate for state machine executions has also increased from 200 per second to 300 per second, with bucket capacity of up to 1,300 starts in these regions.

In all other regions, throughput has increased from 400 state transitions per second to 500 state transitions per second with bucket capacity of 800 state transitions. The default start rate for AWS Step Functions state machine executions has also increased from 25 per second to 150 per second, with bucket capacity of up to 800 state machine executions.

Amazon SNS

Amazon SNS now supports the use of dead letter queues (DLQ) to help capture unhandled events. By enabling a DLQ, you can catch events that are not processed and re-submit them or analyze to locate processing issues.

Amazon CloudWatch

CloudWatch announced Amazon CloudWatch ServiceLens to provide a “single pane of glass” to observe health, performance, and availability of your application.

CloudWatch ServiceLens

CloudWatch also announced a preview of a capability called Synthetics. CloudWatch Synthetics allows you to test your application endpoints and URLs using configurable scripts that mimic what a real customer would do. This enables the outside-in view of your customers’ experiences, and your service’s availability from their point of view.

On November 18, CloudWatch launched Embedded Metric Format to help you ingest complex high-cardinality application data in the form of logs and easily generate actionable metrics from them. You can publish these metrics from your Lambda function by using the PutLogEvents API or for Node.js or Python based applications using an open source library.

Lastly, CloudWatch announced a preview of Contributor Insights, a capability to identify who or what is impacting your system or application performance by identifying outliers or patterns in log data.

AWS X-Ray

X-Ray announced trace maps, which enable you to map the end to end path of a single request. Identifiers will show issues and how they affect other services in the request’s path. These can help you to identify and isolate service points that are causing degradation or failures.

X-Ray also announced support for Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics, currently in preview. X-Ray supports tracing canary scripts throughout the application providing metrics on performance or application issues.

X-Ray Service map with CloudWatch Synthetics

Amazon DynamoDB

DynamoDB announced support for customer managed customer master keys (CMKs) to encrypt data in DynamoDB. This allows customers to bring your own key (BYOK) giving you full control over how you encrypt and manage the security of your DynamoDB data.

It is now possible to add global replicas to existing DynamoDB tables to provide enhanced availability across the globe.

Currently under preview, is another new DynamoDB capability to identify frequently accessed keys and database traffic trends. With this you can now more easily identify “hot keys” and understand usage of your DynamoDB tables.

CloudWatch Contributor Insights for DynamoDB

Last but far from least for DynamoDB, is adaptive capacity, a feature which helps you handle imbalanced workloads by isolating frequently accessed items automatically and shifting data across partitions to rebalance them. This helps both reduce cost by enabling you to provision throughput for a more balanced out workload vs. over provisioning for uneven data access patterns.

AWS Serverless Application Repository

The AWS Serverless Application Repository (SAR) now offers Verified Author badges. These badges enable consumers to quickly and reliably know who you are. The badge will appear next to your name in the SAR and will deep-link to your GitHub profile.

SAR Verified developer badges

AWS Code Services

AWS CodeCommit launched the ability for you to enforce rule workflows for pull requests, making it easier to ensure that code has pass through specific rule requirements. You can now create an approval rule specifically for a pull request, or create approval rule templates to be applied to all future pull requests in a repository.

AWS CodeBuild added beta support for test reporting. With test reporting, you can now view the detailed results, trends, and history for tests executed on CodeBuild for any framework that supports the JUnit XML or Cucumber JSON test format.

CodeBuild test trends

AWS Amplify and AWS AppSync

Instead of trying to summarize all the awesome things that our peers over in the Amplify and AppSync teams have done recently we’ll instead link you to their own recent summary: “A round up of the recent pre-re:Invent 2019 AWS Amplify Launches”.

AWS AppSync

Still looking for more?

We only covered a small bit of all the awesome new things that were recently announced. Keep your eyes peeled for more exciting announcements next week during re:Invent and for a future ICYMI Serverless Q4 roundup. We’ll also be kicking off a fresh series of Tech Talks in 2020 with new content helping to dive deeper on everything new coming out of AWS for serverless application developers.