Off-by-none: Issue #313

January 28, 2025

Only have a few minutes? Check out this week's MOST POPULAR links as chosen by our email subscribers.

EventBridge keeps getting better 🚀

In our previous issue, AWS launched its biggest feature ever, Mexico got a new datacenter, and we finally got a much anticipated serverless recap. This week, EventBridge launches a new killer feature, S3 Metadata goes GA, and AI video hits Bedrock. Plus, we have lots of amazing content from the cloud and serverless communities!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

There were some exciting launches from AWS this week. The biggest one for me was the Amazon EventBridge announcement of direct delivery to cross-account targets. In the past, you needed to create an EventBridge bus in the target account, send the event to that first, then create a rule to map events to the target services. This cuts out a ton of configuration and cost, making it even easier to choreograph events across multi-account set ups. More detail in the official blog post.

AWS also announced high-throughput mode for Amazon SNS FIFO Topics, Amazon CloudWatch alarming on data up to 7 days old, and Amazon Q Business support for insights from images uploaded in chat.

And, Amazon S3 Metadata is now generally available. I've just started playing around with this, and I already feel like the possible use cases are endless.

If you want your latest GenAI fix (besides DeepSeek, of course) Luma AI's Ray2 visual AI model is now on Amazon Bedrock. Channy Yun wrote a post that shares more of what this can do. Wild. 🎥

And finally, Sheen Brisals' new book, Speak Effectively At Conferences, is now available for sale. If you're thinking of speaking at conferences, or you already do and want to get better, Sheen is a great person to guide you.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here are some helpful tutorials I came across this week:

• Run TypeScript & Deno Natively in AWS Lambda by Zac Charles
• Build a fully server-less Web-socket API using AWS Lambda and DynamoDB by Avinash Asok
• Migrating From Redis to Valkey Serverless by Felipe Malaquias
• Data API for Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 with AWS SDK for Java - Part 12 Data API quotas, limitations and pricing by Vadym Kazulkin
• AWS Serverless: Understanding and Managing Lambda Recursive Loops for Event-Driven Architectures using AWS SAM! by Girish Bhatia
• AWS Lambda vs. Azure Functions: Key Differences and Considerations by Mahdi Azarboon
• Understanding Amazon Kinesis Data Streams: Indexing, Replay, and Consumer Flexibility by Emiliano Roberti

Serverless Security 🔒

How To Protect Your AWS S3 Buckets From Ransomware
Another good serverless security article where Miguel Calles puts the fear of god in all of us.

Serverless Reads 🤓

How Social Engineering Phishing Works: My Real-Life Encounter
Ran Isenberg shares the details of a rather elaborate phishing attempt, with the takeaway that AI makes this 100x worse because it's so easy to scale these types of attacks.

Considering design trade-offs when building serverless APIs on AWS
Heeki Park shares a comprehensive examination of the different approaches and organizational techniques used when building APIs backed by Lambda.

Render Services raises $80M to try to make AWS and other cloud infrastructure platforms obsolete
Render's founder, Anurag Goel, has some choice words about the traditional "serverless" approach. What are your thoughts?

Why I Migrated My Laravel App to AWS Serverless (And Why It Could Save You Time and Money)
Hermann Schimpf explains why migrating to serverless was the right choice for him, and depending on your workload, probably for you too.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

EventCatalog REVOLUTIONIZES Governance in Event-Driven Architectures | ft. David Boyne
Yan Cui chats with David Boyne, the creator of EventCatalog, to learn more about the most common challenges with Event-Driven Architectures and how EventCatalog can solve the governance problem.

New AWS Lambda Local IDE Experience!
Julian Wood demonstrates the new features that help easily author, build, debug, test, and deploy Lambda applications in your local IDE when using Visual Studio Code.

GPS clocks are changing databases (again)
AJ Stuyvenberg explores how new databases are breaking CAP theorem using highly accurate clocks, and what that means for the future of distributed systems.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are a few more AWS announcements that might interest you:

• Announcing general availability of AWS Managed Notifications
• Amazon Bedrock Flows announces preview of multi-turn conversation support
• Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Limitless Database now supports PostgreSQL 16.6
• Amazon Redshift introduces new SQL features for zero-ETL integrations
• Amazon DynamoDB introduces warm throughput for tables and indexes in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
• Amazon Redshift announces support for History Mode for zero-ETL integrations
• CloudWatch provides execution plan capture for Aurora PostgreSQL
• Amazon Bedrock now offers multimodal support for Cohere Embed 3 Multilingual and Embed 3 English

Serverless Tools 🛠

Keep your data on check with the most comprehensive DynamoDB studio
Thomas Aribart launched a new service that transforms your DynamoDB experience with a schema-aware UI, data monitors, and migration tools.

cremich/awesome-q-developer
A curated list of awesome things related to Amazon Q Developer. h/t Lee Gilmore

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 🧑‍🏫

Researchers at the Center for AI Safety and Scale AI created a test to measure AI capabilities. What is it called?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• AI Benchmark Test
• Humanity's Last Exam
• The AI Challenge
• World-Class AI Test
• Massive Multitask Language Understanding

Final Thoughts 🤔

How about that whole DeepSeek thing, huh? I hope you haven't cancelled all your other AI subscriptions and sold off your Nvidia stock just yet. It's definitely impressive, but I've seen about a thousand people reference Jevons Paradox. The thirst for datacenters filled with GPUs is far from quenched.

Take care,
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.