Off-by-none: Issue #317

February 25, 2025

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

Hanging up Amazon Chime ☎️

In our previous issue, Lambda added APMs for Java and .NET, YouTube turned 20, and AI took more support jobs. This week, Amazon Chime gets ready to hang up for good, Bedrock adds Anthropic's new hybrid reasoning model, and Cloudflare goes all in on agents. Plus, we have lots of great content from the cloud and serverless communities!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

It looks like Amazon is finally shutting down Chime! According to an Amazon spokesperson, "its use outside of Amazon was limited." Yeah, that's because it was terrible and Amazon employees were forced to use it. Let's hope they don't replace it with something even worse, like WebEx. 😬

In more positive AWS news, Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet is now available in Amazon Bedrock. This is a major upgrade that provides a hybrid reasoning model enabling both standard and extended thinking modes. It even lets you control the reasoning budget by specifying a token limit to better control costs (which is an interesting new challenge for agentic workflows).

Also, AWS announced AWS DMS Serverless comprehensive premigration assessments, Amplify Hosting announced support for IAM roles for server-side rendered (SSR) applications, and the AWS CDK released L2 construct support for Amazon Data Firehose delivery streams.

Cloudflare continues to push on all fronts as well. They announced a new `agents-sdk` and some other upgrades hoping to make Cloudflare the best platform for building AI Agents. Also, be prepared to hear the words "agents" and "agentic workflows" a lot this year.

Finally, Chase Douglas, founder of Stackery and innovator behind what is now known as AWS Infrastructure Composer, built a Vaultwarden Serverless implementation using AWS Aurora DSQL.

Be sure to check out this week's sponsor, Bufstream! Bufstream is the only cloud-native Kafka implementation validated by Jepsen. Kafka wasn’t built for the cloud—but Bufstream is. It’s a drop-in replacement that eliminates cluster sprawl, scales seamlessly without a massive ops team, and validates data at the source to prevent bad events from ever getting in. Plus, it runs entirely in your cloud, keeping all data and metadata private. If you want simpler, more secure event streaming at 8x lower cost, it’s time to check out Bufstream. Sponsored

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here are some of my favorite tutorials from last week:

• Building a Data Ingestion Solution for Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases by Anthony Wat
• WellRight modernizes to an event-driven architecture to manage bursty and unpredictable traffic by John Lee, Girish Sukhatankar, and Ryan Teague
• Aurora Serverless v2 vs. v1: A Concise Comparison of Key Differences by Muhammad Uzair
• Masking sensitive data in real-time with AWS serverless services by Arpad Toth
• Don’t use Step function if you want to unit test it by Vigneshwar Somasundaram
• Husband mission on a Saturday: mass conversion of HEIC images by Evandro Pires
• Spring Boot 3.4 application on AWS Lambda- Part 4 Docker Container Image with Spring Cloud Function AWS by Vadym Kazulkin
• Spring Boot 3.4 application on AWS Lambda- Part 3 Spring Cloud Function AWS by Vadym Kazulkin
• AWS Fargate on a Budget by Danielle Heberling
• AWS: A Step Functions Workflow Orchestration Guide by Michael Ortiz
• PEP and PDP for Secure Authorization with AVP by Jimmy Dahlqvist

Serverless Reads 🤓

Vercel’s Fluid Compute and what it means for AWS Lambda
Andreas Casen gives his thoughts on Vercel's new offering that minimizes idle time in Lambda functions. He also asks how the Lambda team is going to respond, and I'm afraid he isn't going to like the answer.

How I convinced my k8s team to go AWS serverless
I don't know who "Dnsearching" is, but in this self-described piece of clickbait, they do point out a few amusing back-and-forths between the typical K8s engineer and the serverless advocate. I've had some of these conversations myself.

Scalable and Cost-Efficient ML Inference: Parallel Batch Processing with Serverless Functions
I think we already knew this, but this paper explores how serverless architectures can make large-scale ML inference tasks faster and more cost-effective by decomposing monolithic processes into parallel functions.

Improving Developer Experience in AWS Lambda: Bridging CDK and Functions
This tutorial by Anna Chiara shows an interesting approach to connect the CDK and app code using shared TypeScript types, but more importantly, it points out the continued disconnect of the "two worlds" that modern IaC forces you into. There is a better alternative future if people are willing to pursue it.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

The Art of Embracing Failures with Serverless Architectures
Anahit Pogosova is one of my favorite people, and in this talk she discusses the most common challenges and pitfalls of distributed systems and how to mitigate them using AWS Lambda and Amazon Kinesis.

AWS Bites #140. DuckDB Meets AWS: A Match Made in Cloud
Eoin and Luciano discuss this open-source analytical database and compare it to other tools like SQLite, Athena, Pandas, and Polars. They also demonstrate integrating it with AWS Lambda and Step Functions for serverless analytics.

Delivery Hero scales to handle 10M daily orders using Amazon EventBridge Scheduler
This is a highly produced case study video by AWS, but seriously, Amazon EventBridge Scheduler is an absolute beast that should almost certainly be part of your architecture.

The Tests You SHOULD Be Writing In Event-Driven Systems
Another great video by James Eastham, this time focusing on the importance of schema and contract tests when building an event-driven system.

New from AWS 🆕

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

• AWS WAF enhances Data Protection and logging experience
• AWS WAF enhances integration with Service Quotas
• Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift now available in 18 additional regions
• Amazon Timestream for InfluxDB Adds Read Replica support
• Amazon Verified Permissions now supports the Cedar JSON entity format
• SES Outbound now delivers to Mail Manager Archives
• CloudWatch Database Insights adds support for RDS databases
• Amazon MSK adds support for Apache Kafka version 3.8

Upcoming Events 🗓

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

May 15, 2025 - ServerlessDays Belfast 2025

Please send me your serverless events!

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

This first question should be an easy one… 😉

What is the name of Amazon's video conferencing service that is shutting down?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• Amazon Zoom
• Amazon TalkTime
• Amazon WorkSpaces
• Amazon Chime
• Amazon Soul Crusher

Final Thoughts 🤔

I had an awesome time down in NYC this past week at the AI Engineer Summit. Kudos to Swyx and his team for putting on such an amazing event. Plenty of takeaways, but most importantly, there is real work being done with AI/ML and companies need a lot of talent – including my team at CloudZero! We're looking for a Principal Data Scientist - AI/ML and a Manager of Cloud Optimization Research with several more roles to come. If you or someone you know is interested, please reach out!

See you 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.