Off-by-none: Issue #312

January 21, 2025

The biggest AWS feature ever? 🥇

In our previous issue, AWS launched the new AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region, the clock was ticking for Community Builder applications, and AWS lost another great serverless voice. This week, AWS launches its biggest feature ever, Mexico gets a new datacenter, and we get a much anticipated serverless recap. Plus, we have plenty of awesome content from the cloud and serverless communities!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

This might be the biggest announcement from AWS EVER: the AWS Management Console now supports simultaneous sign-in for multiple AWS accounts! This is HUGE from a productivity standpoint as I often find myself jumping between multiple dev accounts. I'm sure some horror stories will emerge from folks taking destructive actions in the wrong accounts, but for me, it's worth the tradeoff. 😉

In other AWS news, the new AWS Mexico (Central) Region is now open. That's two new regions in just a few weeks. I guess they need to put all those GPUs somewhere.

If you want to know what's been happening with serverless over at AWS, make sure you check out the Serverless ICYMI Q4 2024 post. It looks like the squeaky wheel gets the grease. 😀

Also, the Amazon Q Developer plugin for CloudZero is now generally available. This is probably not too exciting for most of you, but I led the team at CloudZero that has been working with AWS for quite some time to get this launched. It's just a start, but more good things to come.

Finally, Bun v1.1.43 recently launched, but what's more interesting is that it comes with 1st-class S3 support. On the one hand, I really like that S3 has been embraced as a standard, but on the other hand, it still feels too vendor-specific to be built into the runtime. I could go either way on this.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here are some useful tutorials from the past week:

• 3 Mistakes I made with Lambdas by Reginald Ross
• S3 Versioning: A Simple Guide by Felipe Trova de Araujo
• Advanced Threat Detection with AWS Security Hub and Amazon GuardDuty by Vasileios Sofroni
• AWS Serverless: Understanding and Managing Lambda Recursive Loops for Event-Driven Architectures by Girish Bhatia
• Invoking Private API Gateway Endpoints From Step Functions by Benoît Bouré
• Serverless Chat on AWS with AppSync Events by Marko Djakovic
• Caching AWS CDK Docker Builds by Zac Charles
• Serverless Agentic Workflows with AWS Bedrock & CDK in Python by Nwachukwu Chibuike
• Simplify Security, Governance, and WAF Management with AWS Firewall Manager by Yaron Ben Ezra

Serverless Reads 🤓

Lambda vs Fargate in Modern Architectures: Exploring the Trade-Offs
Jake Bazin shares his thoughts on when to use Fargate over Lambda. I'm a big fan of Fargate as well, and depending on how quickly you need a task to start, it's a great option even for asynchronous event-driven workloads.

Amazon Workers Write A Survival Guide As Many Struggle With RTO: Take A Shower And Wear Shoes
This has mostly nothing to do with serverless other than the fact that the mass exodus of talent due to RTO is likely going to have a meaningful impact on the serverless services we know and love. I hope to be pleasantly surprised.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

The Simplest Way To Deploy Your Containerized .NET Applications on Azure
James Eastham teaches you the simplest way to run modern, scalable containerized .NET applications on Azure using Azure Container Apps.

What Do We Want From LLMs?: Agents and Tool Use
Great video from Mike Chambers about why we shouldn't be using LLMs to answer simple factual questions, but instead, combine them with external tools and data sources through agents to create more practical and reliable applications.

Acceptance Testing Is the FUTURE of Programming
Dave Farley digs into why ensuring that AI-generated code runs correctly might be the last thing that'll require a human in the loop. He might be right, but I still think we're a long way off.

Building a Domain Specific GenAI Chatbot with Serverless • GOTO 2024
The great Eric Johnson shows you how to use serverless technologies and API-driven approaches to LLMs that leverage Retriever-Augmented Generation (RAG) and AWS Step Functions to streamline GenAI application development.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are a few more AWS announcements that caught my attention:

• AWS CodeBuild now supports test splitting and parallelism
• AWS Resource Explorer supports 29 new resource types
• AWS Step Functions adds integration for 36 services including AWS End User Messaging
• Amazon MemoryDB now supports Service Quotas
• AWS CodePipeline introduces new debugging experience in AWS Management Console
• Amazon Redshift announces support for two new geospatial H3 Indexing functions
• Amazon S3 Tables are now available in five additional AWS Regions
• Announcing AWS User Notifications GA on AWS CloudFormation
• AWS Encryption SDK for Go now generally available
• Amazon ElastiCache now supports Service Quotas

Upcoming Events 🗓

February 8, 2025 - AWS Community Day Ahmedabad

February 20, 2025 - ServerlessDays Manchester 2025

March 28, 2025 - Sem Servidor Conf 2025 – Florianópolis

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 🧑‍🏫

What new AWS Region was recently opened?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• AWS Brazil (South) Region
• AWS Mexico (Central) Region
• AWS Canada (East) Region
• AWS Argentina (North) Region
• AWS Chile (Central) Region

Final Thoughts 🤔

I'm on a train to NYC for some strategic planning sessions tomorrow. Super exciting to keep pushing the envelope with this AI/ML stuff. Hope you have a great week.

Until next time,
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.