Off-by-none: Issue #320

March 18, 2025

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Truly Serverless WebSockets? 👏

In our previous issue, serverless DeepSeek was added to Bedrock, multi-agent collaboration went GA, and AWS enhanced the serverless developer experience in VS Code. This week, AppSync Events bring us even closer to truly serverless WebSockets, Serverless Land Patterns land in your IDE, and S3 Tables try to compete with sliced bread. Plus, we have some amazing content from the serverless and cloud communities!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Super excited that AppSync Events added publishing over WebSockets for real-time pub/sub. If you remember, at launch, AppSync Events required using a separate endpoint to publish messages, creating additional complexity and not quite checking the box for truly serverless WebSockets. We're getting much closer.

I'm a big fan of the Serverless Land Patterns, and now you can accelerate serverless development with ready-to-use Serverless Land Patterns in Visual Studio Code. Proof that sometimes going rogue to solve customer problems is the right thing to do.

In other AWS news, S3 Tables keep getting better. You can now create and query tables in the S3 console and Amazon Data Firehose now delivers real-time streaming data into them. Also, AWS Amplify Hosting announced deployment skew protection support and Amazon EventBridge expanded IAM execution role support to all targets.

In AWS AI news, Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio is now generally available (read more here) as well as Amazon Bedrock’s capabilities are now generally available within Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio.

And finally, Microsoft announced a 10x Faster TypeScript. I think I still prefer JSDoc. 🙂

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here are some interesting tutorials I came across this past week:

• Implementing Automated End-to-End Testing: Leveraging Your CI/CD with Your Cloud Development Kit (CDK) App by Dr. Malte Polley
• Building a Serverless Document Extraction Service with Bedrock by Josh Thorne
• How to implement Durable Execution for Lambda (without frameworks) by Yan Cui
• AWS EventBridge & Lambda: Get Real-Time Slack Alerts for S3 Bucket Changes by Aybuke Yaren
• Implementing a serverless architecture to detect absence of Guardrails in Amazon Bedrock inference API calls by Sayan Chakraborty
• Data Masking of AWS Lambda Function Logs by Matthieu Lienart
• Use GCP Cloud Run with HAProxy to act like a serverless load-balancer service by Tingli Tan
• Manual Cognito user registration approvals with Step Functions by Arpad Toth
• Lambda function with GraalVM Native Image - Part 6 Measuring cold and warm starts with GraalVM 23 and AWS CRT HTTP Client by Vadym Kazulkin
• GitHub - Improve your Code with DeepSeek and Serverless App by Gustavo Mainchein
• Migrating from Serverless Framework to CDK by David Behroozi

Serverless Reads 🤓

The Serverless Trilemma: Cost, Performance, and Complexity
Luc van Donkersgoed argues that the classic performance-cost-reliability trilemma does not fit Serverless architectures, but instead requires evaluating the additional complexity required to adopt it.

Why Your Tech Stack is Overrated (And What Actually Matters)
Jason Joseph Nathan says that successful software development relies more on good architecture than on trendy frameworks. Even though AI is eating the world, lasting success requires prioritizing thoughtful design choices over temporary technologies.

Handling billions of invocations – best practices from AWS Lambda
Anton Aleksandrov and Rajesh Kumar Pandey explain some very handy serverless patterns along with best practices for implementing them successfully.

We don't need DynamoDB when we have Aurora Postgres
I don't fully agree with this statement, but with new services like Aurora DSQL making RDBMS more "serverless", are we moving into a world where DynamoDB might not shine so bright?

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Real-World Serverless Ep #114 - How to Build a Multi-Tenant System (Best Practices)
Yan Cui chats with Khawaja Shams, co-founder of Momento, about cell-based architectures and how it allows Momento to scale to millions of transactions per second (TPS) while maintaining a healthy blast radius within their multi-tenant system.

Local AWS step functions dev | Serverless Office Hours
Dan Ronald and Pooya Paridel join Julian Wood to show how to use Step Functions Workflow Studio within VS Code to iterate on your workflows without ever leaving your IDE.

Battling ships with v0 by Vercel
Allen and Andres were almost left speechless by how well v0 created a working application in just a matter of minutes. Which brings us to…

The Future of U.S. AI Leadership with CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei
Dario Amodei says within 3 to 6 months, 90% of code will be written by AI, and in 12 months, 100% of code will be written by AI. I'd argue that writing code is only about 10% of software development, with the rest requiring deep domain expertise to understand what actually needs to be coded. But given the depth of knowledge these frontier models have, the latter might no longer be a seasoned engineer's differentiator.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some additional AWS announcements that caught my attention:

• Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift now supports multiple integrations
• Amazon S3 reduces pricing for S3 object tagging by 35%
• Manage SLO exclusion time windows using CloudWatch Application Signals
• Amazon Bedrock now available in the Europe (Milan) and Europe (Spain) Regions
• AWS CodePipeline supports invoking pipeline execution with a new action type
• Amazon S3 Tables integration with SageMaker Lakehouse is now generally available
• AWS CodePipeline introduces CodeBuild and Commands rule for stage level condition
• Amazon S3 Tables add Apache Iceberg REST Catalog APIs
• Announcing support of AWS Glue Data Catalog views with AWS Glue 5.0
• Amazon Kinesis Data Streams now supports Internet Protocol version 6
• Amazon Redshift Serverless now supports Current and Trailing Tracks for release updates
• Amazon Nova Creative Models now available in Europe
• Meta’s Llama 3.2 models are now available for fine-tuning in Amazon Bedrock
• Amazon S3 Access Grants simplify authentication when using both IAM and Identity Provider permissions
• Amazon DynamoDB zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift now available in 3 additional regions
• Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow introduces a new visual editor to improve DNS
• Amazon EMR Serverless achieves FedRAMP High authorization

Thoughts from Social 🐦

If we offered a first-party MCP server for Aurora DSQL (or Aurora generally), is that something you would find useful?

— Marc Brooker (@MarcJBrooker) March 11, 2025

I can't believe this is even a question. Of course we would! 😀

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

April 29, 2025 - AWS Community Day CZ

May 15, 2025 - ServerlessDays Belfast 2025

October 16, 2025 - AWS North Community Conference

Please send me your serverless events!

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

What popular AI model was recently made available as a fully managed, serverless model in Amazon Bedrock?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• GPT-4
• DeepSeek-R1
• PaLM
• Claude
• AlphaFold

Final Thoughts 🤔

I've been spending a lot of time with Bedrock Agents lately, especially the multi-agent collaboration stuff, and the documentation is incredibly thin. I know things are moving fast, but when you're a multi-billion dollar company, you simply have to have good documentation. I mean, everyone should have good documentation, but at AWS's scale, there's no excuse not to.

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.