AWS Compute Blog

ICYMI: Serverless Q2 2021

Welcome to the 14th 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!

Q2 calendar

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

AWS Step Functions

Step Functions launched Workflow Studio, a new visual tool that provides a drag-and-drop user interface to build Step Functions workflows. This exposes all the capabilities of Step Functions that are available in Amazon States Language (ASL). This makes it easier to build and change workflows and build definitions in near-real time.

For more:

Workflow Studio

The new data flow simulator in the Step Functions console helps you evaluate the inputs and outputs passed through your state machine. It allows you to simulate each of the fields used to process data and updates in real time. It can help accelerate development with workflows and help visualize JSONPath processing.

For more:

Data flow simulator

Also, Amazon API Gateway can now invoke synchronous Express Workflows using REST APIs.

Amazon EventBridge

EventBridge now supports cross-Region event routing from any commercial AWS Region to a list of supported Regions. This feature allows you to centralize global events for auditing and monitoring or replicate events across Regions.

EventBridge cross-Region routing

The service now also supports bus-to-bus event routing in the same Region and in the same AWS account. This can be useful for centralizing events related to a single project, application, or team within your organization.

EventBridge bus-to-bus

You can now use EventBridge as a resource within Step Functions workflows. This provides a direct service integration for both standard and Express Workflows. You can publish events directly to a specified event bus using either a request-response or wait-for-callback pattern.

EventBridge added a new target for rules – Amazon SageMaker Pipelines. This allows you to use a rule to trigger a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) service for your machine learning workloads.

AWS Lambda

Lambda Extensions

AWS Lambda extensions are now generally available including some performance and functionality improvements. Lambda extensions provide a new way to integrate your chosen monitoring, observability, security, and governance tools with AWS Lambda. These use the Lambda Runtime Extensions API to integrate with the execution environment and provide hooks into the Lambda lifecycle.

To help build your own extensions, there is an updated GitHub repository with example code.

To learn more:

  • Watch a Tech Talk with Julian Wood.
  • Watch the 8-episode Learning Path series covering all aspects of extensions.

Extensions available today

Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights support for Lambda container images is now generally available.

Amazon SNS

Amazon SNS has expanded the set of filter operators available to include IP address matching, existence of an attribute key, and “anything-but” matching.

The service has also introduced an SMS sandbox to help developers testing workloads that send text messages.

To learn more:

Amazon DynamoDB

DynamoDB announced CloudFormation support for several features. First, it now supports configuring Kinesis Data Streams using CloudFormation. This allows you to use infrastructure as code to set up Kinesis Data Streams instead of DynamoDB streams.

The service also announced that NoSQL Workbench now supports CloudFormation, so you can build data models and configure table capacity settings directly from the tool. Finally, you can now create and manage global tables with CloudFormation.

Learn how to use the recently launched Serverless Patterns Collection to configure DynamoDB as an event source for Lambda.

AWS Amplify

Amplify Hosting announced support for server-side rendered (SSR) apps built with the Next.js framework. This provides a zero configuration option for developers to deploy and host their Next.js-based applications.

The Amplify GLI now allows developers to make multiple DynamoDB GSI updates in a single deployment. This can help accelerate data model iterations. Additionally, the data management experience in the Amplify Admin UI launched at AWS re:Invent 2020 is now generally available.

AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM)

AWS SAM has a public preview of support for local development and testing of AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) projects.

To learn more:

Serverless blog posts

Operating Lambda

The “Operating Lambda” blog series includes the following posts in this quarter:

Streaming data

The “Building serverless applications with streaming data” blog series shows how to use Lambda with Kinesis.

Getting started with serverless for developers

Learn how to build serverless applications from your local integrated development environment (IDE).

April

May

June

Tech Talks & Events

We hold AWS Online Tech Talks covering serverless topics throughout the year. These are listed in the Serverless section of the AWS Online Tech Talks page. We also regularly deliver talks at conferences and events around the world, speak on podcasts, and record videos you can find to learn in bite-sized chunks.

Here are some from Q2:

Serverless Live was a day of talks held on May 19, featuring the serverless developer advocacy team, along with Adrian Cockroft and Jeff Barr. You can watch a replay of all the talks on the AWS Twitch channel.

Videos

YouTube ServerlessLand channel

Serverless Office Hours – Tues 10 AM PT / 1PM EST

Weekly live virtual office hours. In each session we talk about a specific topic or technology related to serverless and open it up to helping you with your real serverless challenges and issues. Ask us anything you want about serverless technologies and applications.

YouTube: youtube.com/serverlessland
Twitch: twitch.tv/aws

April

May

June

DynamoDB Office Hours

Are you an Amazon DynamoDB customer with a technical question you need answered? If so, join us for weekly Office Hours on the AWS Twitch channel led by Rick Houlihan, AWS principal technologist and Amazon DynamoDB expert. See upcoming and previous shows

Learning Path – AWS Lambda Extensions: The deep dive

Are you looking for a way to more easily integrate AWS Lambda with your favorite monitoring, observability, security, governance, and other tools? Welcome to AWS Lambda extensions: The deep dive, a learning path video series that shows you everything about augmenting Lambda functions using Lambda extensions.

There are also other helpful videos covering serverless available on the Serverless Land YouTube channel.

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.