AWS Compute Blog

Serverless ICYMI Q1 2024

Welcome to the 25th edition of the AWS Serverless ICYMI (in case you missed it) quarterly recap. Every quarter, we share all the most recent product launches, feature enhancements, blog posts, webinars, live streams, and other interesting things that you might have missed!

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

2024 Q1 calendar

2024 Q1 calendar

Adobe Summit

At the Adobe Summit, the AWS Serverless Developer Advocacy team showcased a solution developed for the NFL using AWS serverless technologies and Adobe Photoshop APIs. The system automates image processing tasks, including background removal and dynamic resizing, by integrating AWS Step Functions, AWS Lambda, Amazon EventBridge, and AI/ML capabilities via Amazon Rekognition. This solution reduced image processing time from weeks to minutes and saved the NFL significant costs. Combining cloud-based serverless architectures with advanced machine learning and API technologies can optimize digital workflows for cost-effective and agile digital asset management.

Adobe Summit ServerlessVideo

Adobe Summit ServerlessVideo

ServerlessVideo is a demo application to stream live videos and also perform advanced post-video processing. It uses several AWS services, including Step Functions, Lambda, EventBridge, Amazon ECS, and Amazon Bedrock in a serverless architecture that makes it fast, flexible, and cost-effective. The team used ServerlessVideo to interview attendees about the conference experience and Adobe and partners about how they use Adobe. Learn more about the project and watch videos from Adobe Summit 2024 at video.serverlessland.com.

AWS Lambda

AWS launched support for the latest long-term support release of .NET 8, which includes API enhancements, improved Native Ahead of Time (Native AOT) support, and improved performance.

AWS Lambda .NET 8

AWS Lambda .NET 8

Learn how to compare design approaches for building serverless microservices. This post covers the trade-offs to consider with various application architectures. See how you can apply single responsibility, Lambda-lith, and read and write functions.

The AWS Serverless Java Container has been updated. This makes it easier to modernize a legacy Java application written with frameworks such as Spring, Spring Boot, or JAX-RS/Jersey in Lambda with minimal code changes.

AWS Serverless Java Container

AWS Serverless Java Container

Lambda has improved the responsiveness for configuring Event Source Mappings (ESMs) and Amazon EventBridge Pipes with event sources such as self-managed Apache Kafka, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK), Amazon DocumentDB, and Amazon MQ.

Chaos engineering is a popular practice for building confidence in system resilience. However, many existing tools assume the ability to alter infrastructure configurations, and cannot be easily applied to the serverless application paradigm. You can use the AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) to automate and manage chaos experiments across different Lambda functions to provide a reusable testing method.

Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now provides managed instance draining as a built-in feature of Amazon ECS capacity providers. This allows Amazon ECS to safely and automatically drain tasks from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances that are part of an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Group associated with an Amazon ECS capacity provider. This simplification allows you to remove custom lifecycle hooks previously used to drain Amazon EC2 instances. You can now perform infrastructure updates such as rolling out a new version of the ECS agent by seamlessly using Auto Scaling Group instance refresh, with Amazon ECS ensuring workloads are not interrupted.

Credentials Fetcher makes it easier to run containers that depend on Windows authentication when using Amazon EC2. Credentials Fetcher now integrates with Amazon ECS, using either the Amazon EC2 launch type, or AWS Fargate serverless compute launch type.

Amazon ECS Service Connect is a networking capability to simplify service discovery, connectivity, and traffic observability for Amazon ECS. You can now more easily integrate certificate management to encrypt service-to-service communication using Transport Layer Security (TLS). You do not need to modify your application code, add additional network infrastructure, or operate service mesh solutions.

Amazon ECS Service Connect

Amazon ECS Service Connect

Running distributed machine learning (ML) workloads on Amazon ECS allows ML teams to focus on creating, training and deploying models, rather than spending time managing the container orchestration engine. Amazon ECS provides a great environment to run ML projects as it supports workloads that use NVIDIA GPUs and provides optimized images with pre-installed NVIDIA Kernel drivers and Docker runtime.

See how to build preview environments for Amazon ECS applications with AWS Copilot. AWS Copilot is an open source command line interface that makes it easier to build, release, and operate production ready containerized applications.

Learn techniques for automatic scaling of your Amazon Elastic Container Service  (Amazon ECS) container workloads to enhance the end user experience. This post explains how to use AWS Application Auto Scaling which helps you configure automatic scaling of your Amazon ECS service. You can also use Amazon ECS Service Connect and AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) in Application Auto Scaling.

AWS Step Functions

AWS workloads sometimes require access to data stored in on-premises databases and storage locations. Traditional solutions to establish connectivity to the on-premises resources require inbound rules to firewalls, a VPN tunnel, or public endpoints. Discover how to use the MQTT protocol (AWS IoT Core) with AWS Step Functions to dispatch jobs to on-premises workers to access or retrieve data stored on-premises.

You can use Step Functions to orchestrate many business processes. Many industries are required to provide audit trails for decision and transactional systems. Learn how to build a serverless pipeline to create a reliable, performant, traceable, and durable pipeline for audit processing.

Amazon EventBridge

Amazon EventBridge now supports publishing events to AWS AppSync GraphQL APIs as native targets. The new integration allows you to publish events easily to a wider variety of consumers and simplifies updating clients with near real-time data.

Amazon EventBridge publishing events to AWS AppSync

Amazon EventBridge publishing events to AWS AppSync

Discover how to send and receive CloudEvents with EventBridge. CloudEvents is an open-source specification for describing event data in a common way. You can publish CloudEvents directly to EventBridge, filter and route them, and use input transformers and API Destinations to send CloudEvents to downstream AWS services and third-party APIs.

AWS Application Composer

AWS Application Composer lets you create infrastructure as code templates by dragging and dropping cards on a virtual canvas. These represent CloudFormation resources, which you can wire together to create permissions and references. Application Composer has now expanded to the VS Code IDE as part of the AWS Toolkit. This now includes a generative AI partner that helps you write infrastructure as code (IaC) for all 1100+ AWS CloudFormation resources that Application Composer now supports.

AWS AppComposer generate suggestions

AWS AppComposer generate suggestions

Amazon API Gateway

Learn how to consume private Amazon API Gateway APIs using mutual TLS (mTLS). mTLS helps prevent man-in-the-middle attacks and protects against threats such as impersonation attempts, data interception, and tampering.

Serverless at AWS re:Invent

Serverless at AWS reInvent

Serverless at AWS reInvent

Visit the Serverless Land YouTube channel to find a list of serverless and serverless container sessions from reinvent 2023. Hear from experts like Chris Munns and Julian Wood in their popular session, Best practices for serverless developers, or Nathan Peck and Jessica Deen in Deploying multi-tenant SaaS applications on Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate.

Serverless blog posts

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Serverless container blog posts

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December

Serverless Office Hours

Serverless Office Hours

Serverless Office Hours

January

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Containers from the Couch

Containers from the Couch

Containers from the Couch

January

February

March

FooBar Serverless

FooBar Serverless

FooBar Serverless

January

February

March

Still looking for more?

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

You can also follow the Serverless Developer Advocacy team on Twitter to see the latest news, follow conversations, and interact with the team.

And finally, visit the Serverless Land and Containers on AWS websites for all your serverless and serverless container needs.