Off-by-none: Issue #319

March 11, 2025

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

Serverless DeepSeek 🐳

In our previous issue, Amazon Bedrock Data Automation went GA, AWS Chatbot got renamed, and EventCatalog let you chat with your architecture. This week, DeepSeek goes serverless on Bedrock, multi-agent collaboration is now GA, and AWS enhances the serverless developer experience in VS Code. Plus, we have plenty of content from the serverless and cloud communities!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Lots of exciting announcements out of AWS this week. The new AWS Step Functions Workflow Studio for the VS Code IDE is a great step towards providing an enhanced local IDE experience. Couple that with AWS Lambda adding support for Amazon CloudWatch Logs Live Tail in VS Code and we might just be getting closer to an enjoyable AWS-native serverless developer experience. I said "might". 😉

In AWS AI news, Amazon Bedrock now supports multi-agent collaboration. Love or hate the term "agents", this is actually very cool and is making Amazon Bedrock increasingly more useful and integrated. Speaking of useful, Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases now supports GraphRAG. Standard vector similarity search for RAG has been good, but add graph traversal to connect relevant data and the accuracy and explainability is taken to a whole new level.

And, DeepSeek-R1 is now available fully-managed in Amazon Bedrock. No more complex set up and running your own instances. Specify the new model id and you have a fully managed serverless model at half the price of Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet input tokens and a third of the cost of their output tokens.

Amazon Q Developer announced a new CLI agent within the command line to kind of sort of compete with Claude Code I guess. It too uses Claude 3.7 Sonnet under the hood to write code, test it, and help debug issues. Not sure of the cost comparison here.

We also want to welcome the new batch of AWS Heroes! So many amazing people doing amazing things. Congrats to all of you. 👏

Finally, Cloudflare announced Media Transformations, a new serverless service that lets you dynamically optimize, clip, and resize video from any origin.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here are some of my favorite tutorials from last week:

• AWS EventBridge Transforms: Making Alerts Readable by Jason Wood
• Automating Workflows with Amazon EventBridge Scheduler: A Smarter Alternative to Cron Jobs by Faisal Naseer
• Optimizing AWS EventBridge - Default vs. Custom Event Buses and Best Practices by John Ajera
• Blazingly Fast Lambda Functions With Rust by Aidan Lowson
• Building Production Ready Lambda Extensions: Best Practices from 6 years of Serverless Experience by Subbusainath Rengasamy
• Building a Scalable Batch Processing Serverless Pipeline with AWS Step Functions and Batch by Yasser Hobballah
• Real-Time Streaming of Amazon Bedrock Responses Using AWS AppSync Events by Ike Gabriel Yuson
• How my kids learned English with Serverless and GenAI by Evandro Pires
• Spring Boot 3.4 application on AWS Lambda- Part 7 GraalVM Native Image with AWS Serverless Java Container by Vadym Kazulkin
• ECS scale to zero using CloudFront by Patrik Valkovic
• Supercharging Retail Feedback Analysis with Serverless AI (Bedrock + SFN + MCP) by Marcos Henrique
• Enforce CloudFront-Only Access for AWS API Gateway by Pubudu Jayawardana

Serverless Reads 🤓

Agentic AI is the New Web App, and Your AI Strategy Must Evolve
I hope you're not sick of hearing the term "Agent". Kevin Cochrane explains why agents are the next evolution in AI, how serverless fits in, and why RAG is important for data sovereignty.

Develop software quickly by starting slowly
Luc van Donkersgoed explains how using onion architecture and principles like separation of concerns can help develop software that is maintainable and adaptable. And most importantly, why investing time in architecture upfront pays off in the long run, even if it seems to slow down initial development.

Vercel Fluid: A New Compute Model and an Alternative to Serverless?
Renato Losio does a round up of opinions on Vercel's new compute offering. I really like the idea behind it, and as I've mentioned before, AWS can do this, but the economics are the limiting factor.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Wait, GPU's can be serverless too? Running LLM's on Google Cloud Run
James Eastham is joined by Paul Gledhill, Serverless Engineering Lead at the Lloyds Banking Group, to show how you can leverage Google Cloud Run alongside GPUs to run LLMs in the cloud.

Scaling Apache Kafka processing | Serverless Office Hours
Julian Wood is joined by a panel to dive into all things Kafka with AWS Lambda, including how it integrates with various Kafka platforms, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka, Confluent Cloud, and self-managed Kafka clusters.

The Kiu Journey: From Idea to Global Solution
Andres Moreno chats with Hazel Saenz, the creator of Kiu, an AI-powered virtual assistant, about how the project started, its evolution, and how it can be your guide in your cloud journey.

Simplify Integrations with Private APIs using Amazon EventBridge and AWS Step Functions
Eric Johnson explains how to use the new VPC Lattice Resource Gateway and Resource Configurations to enable new EventBridge private connections to directly and securely connect to private endpoints without additional compute layers.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some more AWS announcements that might interest you:

• AWS Secrets Manager increases the API Requests per Second limits
• AWS WAF now supports PCI DSS4.0 compliance protection with partner solutions
• AWS CodeBuild now supports non-container builds in on-demand fleets
• Amazon Redshift Data API now supports single sign-on (SSO) with AWS IAM Identity Center
• Amazon ECS now offers GPU-Optimized AMI for Amazon Linux 2023
• AWS WAF adds JA4 fingerprinting and aggregation on JA3 and JA4 fingerprints for rate-based rules
• Amazon SageMaker Inference now supports rolling update for inference component endpoints
• Announcing latency-optimized inference for Amazon Nova Pro foundation model in Amazon Bedrock
• Amazon Cognito is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US East) Region
• Application Load Balancer announces integration with Amazon VPC IPAM

Serverless Tools 🛠

Serverless UDP Communication Made Simple
Proxylity UDP Gateway connects your UDP traffic directly to AWS serverless resources, eliminating the need to manage servers and infrastructure.

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 feature does the latest update to the ChatGPT app for macOS introduce?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• Voice commands for coding
• Integration with Apple's Swift Playgrounds
• Ability to directly edit code in IDEs
• Automatic code refactoring
• Real-time collaboration for coding

Final Thoughts 🤔

Hope you're all doing well. Don't forget, I've got three new job openings at CloudZero for Cloud Optimization Research Engineers that specialize in AWS, Azure, and GCP. If you or anyone you know might be interested, I'd love to hear from you!

Also, have you been keeping up with all the Amazon Bedrock releases, MCP buzz, and other AI-related news? I feel like just reading all the updates is a full-time job in and of itself. Feels like the early days of serverless, just with a lot more people interested and a lot more money invested.

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.