Off-by-none: Issue #311

January 14, 2025

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What's the next big cloud innovation? 🔮

In our previous issue, the AWS CDK started looking for your input, Node.js (kinda) started to support TypeScript, and we caught up on three weeks of serverless content. This week, AWS launches a new region, the clock's ticking for Community Builder applications, and AWS loses another great serverless voice. Plus, we share lots of knowledge from the cloud and serverless community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Another relatively quiet week over at AWS. The most interesting announcement for me was that Amazon DynamoDB now supports configurable point-in-time-recovery periods. This doesn't appear to save you any money, but helpful for better aligning with compliance requirements.

AWS CodeBuild now supports batch builds with reserved capacity and Lambda compute. I like using Lambda for builds (depending on the use case), so it's nice to see this as an option. AWS also announced the new AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region, making it the fourteenth Region in Asia Pacific.

If you're interested in becoming an AWS Community Builder for 2025, the deadline is January 20th. Fill out the application form and be sure to follow Stephen Sennett’s tips.

And…the AWS exodus continues, with Michael Liendo, aka Focus Otter, being the latest canary in the coal mine. There are still plenty of amazing folks at AWS (I get to collaborate with many of them), but this is another huge loss for AWS (and the AWS serverless community he was connected to).

Cloudflare has open sourced all their developer documentation and migrated from Hugo to the Astro, with the JavaScript ecosystem claiming another victim. 😀 No matter how good your documentation is, user feedback is essential to keeping it up-to-date and accessible to all.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Always lots of great tutorials from the community. Here are a few that caught my attention:

• Intelligent Traffic Mirroring With API Gateway by Victor Okafor
• I spent 6 hours learning AWS Glue. Here is what I found by Vu Trinh
• Managing Secrets in an AWS Serverless Application by Joanne Skiles
• Invoking Private API Gateway Endpoints From Step Functions by Benoît Bouré
• AWS Step Functions Distributed Map by Omid Eidivandi
• AWS CDK: Serverless Container with Fargate by Sebastian Müller
• Building an NBA Game Data Fetcher with AWS Lambda, S3, SNS, EventBridge, and React by Harshal Jethwa
• Serverless Image Processing: Node.js vs Go in AWS Lambda by Tameem Rafay
• Building Social Media Automation: LinkedIn Sharing with Serverless Function by Maya Shavin
• Testing AppSync Subscriptions by Seth Orell
• Taming the Map State Beast in AWS Step Functions with CDK by Marcos Henrique

Serverless Reads 🤓

5 Technical JavaScript Trends You Need To Know About in 2025
I'm not sure this article is particularly useful, but I'm including it because whether you love JavaScript or hate it, it remains a dominant force, and it aint going nowhere. 🤷‍♂️

Cloud providers are running out of ‘next big things’
David Linthicum is probably just pointing out the obvious here, because many of us have been saying this for a while. I'm happy to concede that the innovation around GenAI is sucking a lot of the air out of the room, but like David says, the hyperscalers don't seem to be the innovators here.

Becoming an AWS (Serverless) Hero
Vadym Kazulkin's work exemplifies what it means to be an AWS Hero. In this post he shares details of his journey and the incredible contributions he made over the years.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Protecting my App from AI Unpredictability (Amazon Bedrock Guardrails Setup, Best Practices, & More)
Stuart Clark provides a hands-on tutorial where you'll learn how to safeguard sensitive data and prevent AI mishaps using Amazon Bedrock Guardrails.

How I Created an App to Summarize Meeting Outcomes in VS Code
Antje Barth demonstrates how to use Amazon Q Developer to create an AI meeting summarizer that generates a video along with an animated AI avatar. I have a feeling that, "the first version might not be exactly what you want, so I did a few iterations along with the coding assistant" will become standard disclaimers on all these coding tool videos.

The RAG Really Ties the App Together • GOTO 2024
Jeff Vestal shares some really deep insights and techniques for implementing RAG into your GenAI powered applications.

Serverless Applications Cost and Performance Optimization
Roman Boiko does a deep dive into AWS Serverless Cost and Performance covering how to design cost-efficient architectures, tweaking resource allocation for optimal performance, and combatting
cold starts.

Pre-warming Amazon DynamoDB tables with warm throughput | Amazon Web Services
Lee Hannigan explains how warm throughput allows you to pre-warm your DynamoDB tables and indexes to ensure they can handle large traffic surges from the moment they're accessed.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are few more AWS announcements that you might find useful:

• Amazon MSK Connect now supports updating connector configuration
• AWS Compute Optimizer now expands idle and rightsizing recommendations for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups
• Amazon Q Developer is now available in Amazon SageMaker Code Editor IDE
• Announcing the general availability of a new AWS Local Zone in New York City
• Amazon MSK Connect APIs now support AWS PrivateLink

Serverless Tools 🛠

• I Built A Serverless Ephemeral AWS Account Vending Machine
• Bridging Claude AI and DynamoDB: Introducing the DynamoDB MCP Server
• vlt Introduces new JavaScript Package Manager and Serverless Registry

Upcoming Events 🗓

February 20, 2025 - ServerlessDays Manchester 2025

April 2, 2025 - AWS Community Day Italy

April 10, 2025 - AWS Community Day Romania

April 19, 2025 - AWS Community Day Türkiye 2025

June 12, 2025 - ServerlessDays Milano 2025

Please send me your serverless events!

Take the latest Off-by-none Cloud Quiz 🧑‍🏫

The Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments that could decide the fate of which popular social media app?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• Instagram
• Facebook
• TikTok
• SnapChat
• Twitter/X

Final Thoughts 🤔

It was another busy week for me (what else is new?), but always excited to catch up on all the serverless and cloud happenings out there and share them with all of you. Hope you're doing well.

Until next week,
Jeremy

I hope you enjoyed this newsletter. We're always looking for ideas and feedback to make it better and more inclusive, so please feel free to reach out to me via Bluesky, LinkedIn, X, or email.