Title: Issue #133: Just in time for Halloween - the Lambda doom loop
Publication: Ready, Set, Cloud!
Series: Ready, Set, Cloud Picks of the Week
Author: Allen Helton
Published: October 14, 2024
URL: https://www.readysetcloud.io/newsletter/133/

There are many ways to get yourself into a sticky situation in the cloud, with the latest being something we're calling "the Lambda doom loop"


### Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is [Steve Sanders](https://rdyset.click/gTjGM4), CTO at [DonorSpring](https://rdyset.click/OLH7Pj). Steve is an active member of the [Believe in Serverless community](https://rdyset.click/pQCEOZ), regularly offering his insights and experiences on everything from EDA to front-end tips. He also works on really neat open source side projects like [episode ninja](https://rdyset.click/0LaPAG) that are great resources to learn from. Thanks for all you do for the community, Steve!

### Interesting Content

When I think of event-driven architectures, I often think of [James Eastham](https://rdyset.click/Lo7huU). He is one of the few content creators out there today that explains EDA in a way that is approachable to beginners and advanced practitioners alike. His recent talk from AWS ComSum about [observability in an asynchronous world](https://rdyset.click/t5qRD4) was published on YouTube last week and one word comes to mind: *wow*. It's a fantastic talk that needs to be on everybody's watch list no matter how much you've worked with events. Fantastic job, James!



[Khawaja Shams](https://rdyset.click/95iGgs) dropped some gold on us last week. He wrote a blog post about how [S3 is amazing, but not as a live media origin](https://rdyset.click/klk57m). If you don't know what a live media origin is - don't worry, Khawaja explains what that is beautifully. He also has that really cool math you didn't know you didn't know and when you see it in front of you things just... make sense. I love this article so much. The ethos of it being "use the right tool for the job."

Strong opinions are always fun. Mostly. Ok sometimes they can be a total disaster. But that was not the case with [Pete Naylor](https://rdyset.click/Qd28bh) last week when he talked about [the state of databases in 2024](https://rdyset.click/OwwW7r). For those of you that don't know Pete, he's the one you want to listen to for topics like this. Pete was on the DynamoDB team for years during a pivotal time for the service. He now works at EDB and is neck deep in Postgres. The talk itself was great, but my favorite part were the hard hitting questions at the end from the live viewers.

Alongside strong opinions are of course... unpopular opinions. Which is exactly what [Eyal Estrin](https://rdyset.click/Uth1hG) called his article about [moving back to on-prem](https://rdyset.click/sphJtH). The article talks about staying in the public cloud and how he views it as the future for the tech industry. There's a lot of what we've heard before for arguments for the cloud, but Eyal has a couple of points in there I hadn't seen before and thought were really insightful.

### Spotlight

I'm not exactly sure how he does it, but [AJ Stuyvenberg](https://rdyset.click/hKAK6S) always seems to find super important issues with how Lambda works. Last week he shared a blog post on something he calls the [Lambda doom loop](https://rdyset.click/NB4C5f) which has started cropping up as a result of a recent behavior change in Lambda. Apparently subsequent initializations of a Lambda function now count toward your overall timeout, which can lead to a devastating effect if not handled appropriately. AJ explains the issue and offers four ways to get around it in his article.

### Tip of the Week

The Believe in Serverless party is coming back to re:Invent!! Momento just teasted the party with a fun little highlight reel of last year's event. Can't wait to see you all there!



### New Releases

OpenSearch Serverless got a [bunch of updates](https://rdyset.click/T9GyCG) last week, including a flat object data type, faster indexing and search performance, support for geospatial features, and surprisingly a lot more.

Valkey got some serious love last week with [ElastiCache](https://rdyset.click/UY5qYg) and [MemoryDB](https://rdyset.click/S7jW6T) support. Both services are seeing some serious price drops as a result. It's a great step forward for caching, but you know where my heart lies when it comes to [actual serverless caching](https://rdyset.click/AY6fG9) 💙

### Last Words

Halloween is coming up! Right now I'm talking to people from the tech community to get their scary production horror stories. If you're interested in telling me about what went horribly, horribly wrong, send me a DM or reach out on [Discord](https://rdyset.click/fLrJA1). I'd love to learn about it and help you share the story with others!

If you'd like to make a recommendation for the serverless superhero or for an article you found especially useful, send me a message on [Twitter](https://rdyset.click/OC9ze9), [LinkedIn](https://rdyset.click/Lc2BLY), or [email](mailto:allenheltondev@gmail.com).

Happy coding!

Allen