Off-by-none: Issue #321

March 25, 2025

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An AI Labyrinth 🧩

In our previous issue, AppSync Events brought us closer to truly serverless WebSockets, Serverless Land Patterns landed in your IDE, and S3 Tables kept delivering more value. This week, Amazon Bedrock ups its Evals game, Fauna makes a hard choice, and Cloudflare creates an AI Labyrinth for disrespectful crawlers. Plus, we've got some amazing content from the serverless and cloud communities!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Not much in terms of AWS Serverless specific announcements, but some great releases from Amazon Bedrock that'll help ensure better AI outputs. Amazon Bedrock Model Evaluation LLM-as-a-judge and Amazon Bedrock RAG Evaluation are now both Generally Available. Picking the right model for your use case can dramatically improve your accuracy, as does ensuring your RAG pipelines are feeding in the best possible context. Both of these tools make benchmarking these much easier.

Amazon Bedrock Guardrails announced policy based enforcement for responsible AI with a new feature that lets you use Identity and Access Management (IAM) to reject calls that don't apply the required guardrails. AWS has done some interesting work around guardrails, and I like the approach they're taking here. Plus, Amazon Nova expanded Tool Choice options for Converse API, giving you similar Claude-like tool controls in your workflows.

And let's not forget about Cloudflare! It was their "security week", but some of the more interesting announcements were around AI. I particularly liked their new AI Labyrinth product that "uses AI-generated content to slow down, confuse, and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and other bots that don’t respect 'no crawl' directives." This likely falls into the "what could possibly go wrong?" category that ends up wasting an enormous amount of power by letting AI bots get trapped in endless loops. Even worse, the crawlers could actually train themselves on AI generated content and we end up with model collapse.

In sadder news, the Future of Fauna looks like a move to open source as the service stops accepting new customers and plans to spin down completely later this year. FQL was a hard sell from the beginning, IMO, but the underlying technology could be something an OSS community would invest in.

We mentioned the exploding popularity of MCP recently, and it looks like everyone is jumping onboard. EventCatalog introduced their MCP Server last week, but so did Zapier, letting you connect your AI to any app instantly. If you haven't tried using MCP Servers with Claude Desktop or another supporting client, you are missing out on some truly amazing capabilities.

And finally, Alphabet is buying Wiz for $32 billion! 🤯

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Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here are a few of my favorite tutorials from this past week:

• Thumbnail Generation for Images and Videos using AWS Lambda by Shivam Saxena
• Building a Serverless Social Media Sentiment Analytics Dashboard on AWS by Ogooluwa Akinola
• AWS Lambda Profiler Extension for Java- Part 1 Introduction by Vadym Kazulkin
• How to Crater Your Database, Part Two - Aggregations by Seth Orell
• How I Reduced S3 Pricing by Compressing Images into WebP and Optimized Frontend Load Time by Abdul
• Modifying DynamoDB TTL with CDK by Ricardo Cino
• Simplifying Automation with DynamoDB Streams and EventBridge Pipes
• Five alternatives to Cognito M2M by Yan Cui
• Optimizing network footprint in serverless applications by Anton Aleksandrov and Daniel Abib
• Beyond the 10MB Limit: The Smart Way to Handle File Uploads in AWS 🚀 by Sai Kiran Meda
• Egress Rate Controlling in Distributed Systems (Part 1) by Omid Eidivandi
• How to Efficiently Unzip Large Files in Amazon S3 with AWS Step Functions by Ahmed Amer
• Beat The Burst: Optimizing AWS ALB and ECS Fargate for Sudden Traffic Spikes by Oleksandr Hanhaliuk

Serverless Security 🔒

An early look at cryptographic watermarks for AI-generated content
Lots of necessary work is going into this space. Sadly, the most dangerous forms of abuse will be from models and providers who don't participate.

AWS S3 GuardDuty Malware Protection: A Game-Changer for Cloud Security
James Crozier shares his thoughts on why integrated security tech makes the cloud safer for everyone.

Serverless Reads 🤓

Can a product release too often? Yes, I think it can.
David Boyne, creator of EventCatalog, shares his thoughts on shipping fast in the new world of AI and how that pace affects your customers' ability to process new releases. There is a lot more that goes into shipping good software (as David points out), and I would agree that just because you can ship fast, doesn't mean you should. It's a balance, but you need time to learn if you're actually shipping the right things before you build a mountain of features that no longer resonate with your audience.

What Serverless Is — And Why It’s A Mistake
Andrew Zuo is at it again. 😂 There are valid points throughout, but still a fundamental misunderstanding of modern cloud architecture, TCO, and the value that serverless workloads bring, despite the irrational fear of vendor lock-in.

Enterprise IT Spending Is Broken: How To Unlock Real AI Value
"Without structured, unified data, AI investments are doomed to fail" and "85% of AI projects fail due to poor data quality and fragmentation." Pro tip: invest in your data, because it's likely the only moat you'll have.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Cloud Run & Serverless | Google Cloud: Passport to Containers
Steren Giannini and Yunong Xiao chat with Savannah Peterson to discuss the evolution of serverless tech and how Google Cloud Run has redefined serverless technology by merging it with containerization.

How to Build Real-Time Push Notifications the Easy Way with AWS
Allen Helton shows you how to build real-time push notifications using EventBridge API Destinations, Momento Topics, and Step Functions. Very cool.

AWS Bites #141: Step Functions with JSONata and Variables
Eoin and Luciano give an overview of AWS Step Functions and do a dive deep into the new JSONata and variables features that let you perform complex JSON transformations without custom Lambda functions.

AI Agents are Dumb Robots, Calling LLMs
Mark Hinkle explains why AI agents are set to transform software development, but that software itself isn’t going anywhere, despite the predictions.

New private API integrations | Serverless Office Hours
Michael Gasch joins Eric Johnson to show how EventBridge and Step Functions with AWS PrivateLink and Amazon VPC Lattice help you easily integrate and orchestrate across public and private environments.

New from AWS 🆕

Here are some more AWS announcements you might find useful:

• AWS WAF now supports URI fragment field matching
• Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) SDK for Go version 2 is now available
• Amazon CloudWatch RUM now supports monitoring multiple domains with a single App Monitor
• AWS announces expanded service support in the AWS Console Mobile App
• CloudWatch RUM now supports JavaScript source maps for easier error debugging
• Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) SDK for JavaScript version 3 is now available
• Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) adds Multi-Region support for User Defined Types (UDTs)
• AWS adds currency selection to Payment Profiles

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 new capability was recently added to Claude?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• Speech recognition
• Web search
• Video processing
• Code generation
• Virtual reality simulation

Final Thoughts 🤔

I spent quite a bit of time with MCP this past week and even got several hours of vibe coding in with both Claude Code and Cursor. I don't do nearly as much coding as I wish I could anymore, but these tools are letting me prototype ideas faster than I ever thought possible. I still spend most of my time getting them unstuck, but I can't possibly see how anyone could go back to the beforetimes. 😬

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.