Symphonia's Serverless Insights — December 2017

This is the latest edition of our newsletter. To receive the email version please subscribe here.

Hello everyone, and welcome to the last Serverless Insights of 2017!

Before we get going on the content, we want to say thanks to all of our clients, partners, and friends that we've worked and interacted with this year. As we enter January, Symphonia enters its second year of business. Our mission for this coming year remains the same: to improve the effectiveness of organizations through Serverless, DevOps, and related practices and philosophies. We invite you to join us at our upcoming events throughout 2018, including tutorials and workshops in New York in February, in London in May, and in Rome in June. And of course if you'd like to chat about what you're doing with Serverless please send us an email.

re:Invent re:View

AWS re:Invent was the expected cloud-fest of mind-boggling proportions. We survived intact, and in fact had a wonderful time meeting with a lot of fellow cloud enthusiasts. We were especially grateful for how well our ‘chalk talks’ were received — John's on AWS Lambda and the JVM (which needed 2 repeats) and Mike's on Serverless and Organizational Effectiveness.

Too many announcements were made to fit in one newsletter, even just in the Serverless realm. The big Serverless updates were an increase to 3GB memory / dual CPU max Lambda runtime; automated canary deployments for Lambda and API Gateway; upcoming Go support; and reserved concurrency (which we describe in detail, here) .

Beyond the Lambda / API Gateway realm we saw first class Kubernetes support; ‘Serverless Containers’ with Fargate; Serverless Aurora; Multi-region DynamoDB (and finally a decent backup solution); AppSync; and S3 Select. For our more detailed review of re:Invent announcements, read our article here.

Those among you who are avid newsletter followers may remember that your editor made some predictions before flying to Las Vegas. How did I do? Hmm, well, maybe I shouldn't pursue fortune-telling as a second job:

Beyond the obligatory press-release-storm, there were a lot of great talks. Since our's were chalk talks they're not available online, but here are some fascinating alternatives that are:

• Tim Wagner, GM of Lambda and API Gateway, gave a comprehensive update of his dominion within AWS (SRV305) . He also dressed up in a squirrel costume for his team's happy hour. So that happened.
• Chris Munns (AWS) and Ben Kehoe (iRobot) talked about Serverless CI/CD, including all the fascinating new features of automated Canary deployment. (SRV302)
• Ajay Nair (AWS) and Peter Sbarski (A Cloud Guru) gave a true expert-level ‘tips and tricks’ talk to using AWS Lambda and its associated ecosystem. (SRV401)
• Niall Mullen (AWS) talked about Serverless Data Pipelines and fascinatingly how the AWS Lambda team eat their own dog food, using these techniques themselves (SRV402)

We still have a backlog of videos to get through — so watch out for choice cuts in future newsletters.

Closing out

Thanks for reading our latest newsletter, and we trust you found something useful here. We continue to enjoy your suggestions for improvements and additions for future issues.

Our mission at Symphonia is to improve the effectiveness of organizations through Serverless, DevOps, and related practices and philosophies. Drop us a line at johnandmike@symphonia.io to chat about how we might help you, or just to share ideas how the Cloud is helping your team, and your business.

Best wishes for the festive season to you, your teams, and your families!

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