Off-by-none: Issue #318

March 4, 2025

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

Precision Matters 📐

In our previous issue, Amazon Chime was preparing to hang up for good, Bedrock added Anthropic's new hybrid reasoning model, and Cloudflare went all in on agents. This week, Amazon Bedrock Data Automation goes GA, AWS Chatbot gets swallowed by the Q brand, and EventCatalog lets you chat with your architecture. Plus, we have a ton of excellent serverless content from the community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Lots happening this week at AWS! Amazon Bedrock Data Automation is now generally available, which is actually a really good product. Rather than building bespoke parsing engines, Amazon Bedrock Data Automation makes it incredibly easy to extract structured data and insights from most document types.

Amazon Bedrock launched Session Management APIs for GenAI applications in Preview, letting you securely manage state and conversation context across multi-step GenAI workflows. I've been doing a lot of work with these types of workflows, so eliminating the need to build, maintain, or scale custom backend solutions is a major timesaver.

Also, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails announced an increase in service quota limits, you can now monitor and observe apps across multiple accounts with Application Signals, and Amazon RDS Data API for Aurora is now available in 10 additional AWS regions.

AWS also renamed AWS Chatbot to Amazon Q Developer, something that Corey Quinn thinks is a step backwards. He's not wrong.

In other cloud news, Cloudflare announced Guardrails in AI Gateway, EventCatalog introduced EventCatalog Chat, and Serverless cloud platform Koyeb now lets developers spin up Tenstorrent’s AI accelerators.

Also, remember Fastly? They recently announced the Pub/Sub Compute app that runs on their edge platform. Where have they been the last few years?

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Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here are some tutorials from this past week that caught my attention:

• Amazon CloudWatch Composite Alarms by Lee Gilmore
• Multi-Agent Collaboration: Serverless AI Agents using AWS CDK, Bedrock, and Python by Nwachukwu Chibuike
• DynamoDB Single Table Design by Sunil Parte
• Spring Boot 3.4 application on AWS Lambda- Part 5 Docker Container Image with AWS Serverless Java Container by Vadym Kazulkin
• Spring Boot 3.4 application on AWS Lambda- Part 6 GraalVM Native Image with Spring Cloud Function AWS by Vadym Kazulkin
• Optimising AWS Lambda Database Connections with SQLAlchemy and RDS Proxy by Siddarth Patil
• Building a Serverless Backend With Generative AI Using AWS Lambda & Amazon Bedrock by Deniz Yilmaz
• Using YubiKeys for passwordless authentication in Cognito user pools by Arpad Toth
• Deploy a Serverless API with AWS SAM & GitHub Actions — Step-by-Step Guide by Wesley Huber
• Why is unit & integration testing still relevant and must have for development in 2025 (Serverless Guide) by Mark Kravinskiy
• Dealing with CDK Custom Resources and failures by Marco Streng
• CodeBuild Meets GitHub Actions: A Seamless CI Workflow with Lambda by Kasun de Silva

Serverless Reads 🤓

Radical Simplicity in Cloud Architecture
Sebastian Bille argues that the main benefit of serverless is the ability to focus on the things that truly differentiate your business. This message often gets lost in a sea of boilerplate criticisms.

How to Crater Your Database, An Introduction
Seth Orell makes a compelling case for choosing a serverless-first approach to database selection. If you're lucky enough to get to "scale", optimizing costs will be a good problem to have.

Serverless future: Why many businesses are saying goodbye to servers
Max Golikov interviews Michael Dowden about the decreasing significance of servers today, as well as the benefits businesses can gain from taking a serverless-first approach.

AWS Service Catalog: A Game Changer for Platform Engineering
Ran Isenberg explains how the AWS Service Catalog helps platform engineering teams manage and deploy IT services consistently across an organization.

Legacy software & Expanding Software Capabilities with Serverless Event-Driven Architectures
Marcin Sodkiewicz argues that EDAs liberate data from legacy systems, allowing organizations to better adapt to modern requirements while maintaining effective communication between old and new systems.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Is the Serverless Container Framework taking care of the heavy lifting?
Allen Helton and Andres Moreno are joined by Austen Collins, founder and CEO of Serverless Inc. to set up and test a new project with the Serverless Container Framework.

The Smartest Way To Manage Callbacks in An Event-Driven System
James Eastham teaches you how to build schema and contract tests when building an event-driven system.

What’s new in Serverless for 2025 | Serverless Office Hours
Julian Wood and Eric Johnson are back with new episodes of Serverless Office Hours! Love seeing these two together again. Be sure to subscribe to stay up-to-date with all things serverless at AWS.

AWS Step Functions: What's new | Serverless Office Hours
In their latest episode, Julian and Eric chat about the latest updates to AWS Step Functions including variables, JSONata support, and private endpoints.

New from AWS 🆕

AWS was incredibly busy last week. Here are several more announcements that are worth a quick look:

• AWS CodeBuild adds support for managed runners for GitLab Self-Managed
• Amazon RDS now provides visibility into IAM DB Authentication metrics and logs
• AWS CodeBuild adds support for Node 22, Python 3.13, and Go 1.23
• Amazon Nova understanding models available in Europe and Asia Pacific
• Amazon Cognito now supports access token customization for machine-to-machine (M2M) authorization flows
• Amazon Q Developer is now generally available in Amazon SageMaker Canvas
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Ruby 3.4 on Amazon Linux 2023
• AWS CodeBuild now supports merging parallel test reports and new compute options
• Amazon Nova Creative Models now available in Asia Pacific
• Amazon CloudWatch RUM introduces resource-based policy support for data ingestion access
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Corretto 17 and 21 with Tomcat 11
• Database Insights provides on-demand analysis for RDS MySQL and RDS MariaDB
• AWS CodePipeline introduces new console experience for viewing pipeline releases
• AWS Amplify supports HttpOnly cookies for server-rendered Next.js applications
• AWS CodeBuild adds support for macOS 15.2

Thoughts from Social 🐦

Hey #Serverless developers, many of you have asked me if AWS SAM is still a thing. In all fairness, we have backed off a bit over the last year or so. However, I am happy to say I just met with our dedicated team that is STOMPING on the gas to pump out some really cool things for… pic.twitter.com/31MBMHndcD

— Eric Johnson (@edjgeek) February 28, 2025

I too was wondering if AWS SAM was going the way of Chime, Cloud9, and other AWS products as of late. I'm not the biggest fan, but I think we live in a time where there need to be plenty of alternatives.

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 🧑‍🏫

What is the name of the new Anthropic model released on Amazon Bedrock?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• Claude 3.5 Sonnet
• Claude 3.7 Haiku
• Claude GPT-4
• Claude 3.7 Sonnet
• Claude 3.8 Haiku

Final Thoughts 🤔

Busy times for me over at CloudZero. I've got three new job openings for Cloud Optimization Research Engineers that specialize in AWS, Azure, and GCP. If you or anyone you know might be interested, please be sure to 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.