AWS Compute Blog

ICYMI: Serverless Q3 2019

Welcome to the seventh edition of the AWS Serverless ICYMI (in case you missed it) quarterly recap. Every quarter, we share all of the most recent product launches, feature enhancements, blog posts, webinars, Twitch live streams, and other interesting things that you might have missed!

In case you missed our last ICYMI, checkout what happened last quarter here.

ICYMI calendar

Launches/New products

Amazon EventBridge was technically launched in this quarter although we were so excited to let you know, we squeezed it into the Q2 2019 update. If you missed it, EventBridge is the serverless event bus that connects application data from your own apps, SaaS, and AWS services. This allows you to create powerful event-driven serverless applications using a variety of event sources.

The AWS Bahrain Region has opened, the official name is Middle East (Bahrain) and the API name is me-south-1. AWS Cloud now spans 22 geographic Regions with 69 Availability Zones around the world.

AWS Lambda

In September we announced dramatic improvements in cold starts for Lambda functions inside a VPC. With this announcement, you see faster function startup performance and more efficient usage of elastic network interfaces, drastically reducing VPC cold starts.

VPC to VPC NAT

These improvements are rolling out to all existing and new VPC functions at no additional cost. Rollout is ongoing, you can track the status from the announcement post.

AWS Lambda now supports custom batch window for Kinesis and DynamoDB Event sources, which helps fine-tune Lambda invocation for cost optimization.

You can now deploy Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and Lambda functions together from the AWS Marketplace using using AWS CloudFormation with just a few clicks.

AWS IoT Events actions now support AWS Lambda as a target. Previously you could only define actions to publish messages to SNS and MQTT. Now you can define actions to invoke AWS Lambda functions and even more targets, such as Amazon Simple Queue Service and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, and republish messages to IoT Events.

The AWS Lambda Console now shows recent invocations using CloudWatch Logs Insights. From the monitoring tab in the console, you can view duration, billing, and memory statistics for the 10 most recent invocations.

AWS Step Functions

AWS Step Functions example

AWS Step Functions has now been extended to support probably its most requested feature, Dynamic Parallelism, which allows steps within a workflow to be executed in parallel, with a new Map state type.

One way to use the new Map state is for fan-out or scatter-gather messaging patterns in your workflows:

  • Fan-out is applied when delivering a message to multiple destinations, and can be useful in workflows such as order processing or batch data processing. For example, you can retrieve arrays of messages from Amazon SQS and Map sends each message to a separate AWS Lambda function.
  • Scatter-gather broadcasts a single message to multiple destinations (scatter), and then aggregates the responses back for the next steps (gather). This is useful in file processing and test automation. For example, you can transcode ten 500-MB media files in parallel, and then join to create a 5-GB file.

Another important update is AWS Step Functions adds support for nested workflows, which allows you to orchestrate more complex processes by composing modular, reusable workflows.

AWS Amplify

A new Predictions category as been added to the Amplify Framework to quickly add machine learning capabilities to your web and mobile apps.

Amplify framework

With a few lines of code you can add and configure AI/ML services to configure your app to:

  • Identify text, entities, and labels in images using Amazon Rekognition, or identify text in scanned documents to get the contents of fields in forms and information stored in tables using Amazon Textract.
  • Convert text into a different language using Amazon Translate, text to speech using Amazon Polly, and speech to text using Amazon Transcribe.
  • Interpret text to find the dominant language, the entities, the key phrases, the sentiment, or the syntax of unstructured text using Amazon Comprehend.

AWS Amplify CLI (part of the open source Amplify Framework) has added local mocking and testing. This allows you to mock some of the most common cloud services and test your application 100% locally.

For this first release, the Amplify CLI can mock locally:

amplify mock

AWS CloudFormation

The CloudFormation team has released the much-anticipated CloudFormation Coverage Roadmap.

Styled after the popular AWS Containers Roadmap, the CloudFormation Coverage Roadmap provides transparency about our priorities, and the opportunity to provide your input.

The roadmap contains four columns:

  • Shipped – Available for use in production in all public AWS Regions.
  • Coming Soon – Generally a few months out.
  • We’re working on It – Work in progress, but further out.
  • Researching – We’re thinking about the right way to implement the coverage.

AWS CloudFormation roadmap

Amazon DynamoDB

NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB has been released in preview. This is a free, client-side application available for Windows and macOS. It helps you more easily design and visualize your data model, run queries on your data, and generate the code for your application.

Amazon Aurora

Amazon Aurora Serverless is a dynamically scaling version of Amazon Aurora. It automatically starts up, shuts down, and scales up or down, based on your application workload.

Aurora Serverless has had a MySQL compatible edition for a while, now we’re excited to bring more serverless joy to databases with the PostgreSQL compatible version now GA.

We also have a useful post on Reducing Aurora PostgreSQL storage I/O costs.

AWS Serverless Application Repository

The AWS Serverless Application Repository has had some useful SAR apps added by Serverless Developer Advocate James Beswick.

  • S3 Auto Translator which automatically converts uploaded objects into other languages specified by the user, using Amazon Translate.
  • Serverless S3 Uploader allows you to upload JPG files to Amazon S3 buckets from your web applications using presigned URLs.

Serverless posts

July

August

September

Tech talks

We hold several AWS Online Tech Talks covering serverless tech talks throughout the year. These are listed in the Serverless section of the AWS Online Tech Talks page.

Here are the ones from Q3:

Twitch

July

August

September

There are also a number of other helpful video series covering Serverless available on the AWS Twitch Channel.

AWS re:Invent

AWS re:Invent

December 2 – 6 in Las Vegas, Nevada is peak AWS learning time with AWS re:Invent 2019. Join tens of thousands of AWS customers to learn, share ideas, and see exciting keynote announcements.

Be sure to take a look at the growing catalog of serverless sessions this year. Make sure to book time for Builders Sessions, Chalk Talks, and Workshops as these sessions will fill up quickly. The schedule is updated regularly so if your session is currently fully booked, a repeat may be scheduled.

Register for AWS re:Invent now!

What did we do at AWS re:Invent 2018? Check out our recap here: AWS re:Invent 2018 Recap at the San Francisco Loft.

Our friends at IOPipe have written 5 tips for avoiding serverless FOMO at this year’s re:Invent.

AWS Serverless Heroes

We are excited to welcome some new AWS Serverless Heroes to help grow the serverless community. We look forward to some amazing content to help you with your serverless journey.

Still looking for more?

The Serverless landing page has much more information. The Lambda resources page contains case studies, webinars, whitepapers, customer stories, reference architectures, and even more Getting Started tutorials.