Off-by-none: Issue #322

April 1, 2025

Serverless isn't a Joke 🃏

In our previous issue, Amazon Bedrock upped its Evals game, Fauna made a hard choice, and Cloudflare created an AI Labyrinth for disrespectful crawlers. This week, Azure Container Apps get serverless GPUs, serverless MCPs might be getting easier, and Bolt and Netlify announce they power over a million websites built by robots. Plus, we've got lots of awesome content from the serverless and cloud communities!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

In AWS news, AWS Lambda added support for Ruby 3.4 and Amazon DynamoDB Streams APIs now support AWS PrivateLink, giving you a nice little security boost. Plus, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails announced the general availability of industry-leading image content filters. We've been using them quite a bit and they are pretty darn good.

AWS also announced Amazon Q Developer in Amazon OpenSearch Service, providing AI-assisted capabilities to help you investigate and visualize operational data using natural language. And, Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases now supports Amazon OpenSearch Managed Cluster for vector storage, giving you yet another option for RAG.

In other cloud news, Azure Container Apps Serverless GPUs Reach General Availability with NVIDIA NIM Support. Not sure how I missed it, but it happened two weeks ago.

You can now build and deploy Remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to Cloudflare, which is pretty cool. I also saw this Why serverless MCPs are especially hard post by Dheeraj Pai. Apparently there was an accepted proposal for Streamable HTTP that will no longer require a dedicated, long-lived SSE channel, making serverless MCPs much less hard.

Pulumi announced the Next-Generation of Pulumi Components, EventCatalog introduced Custom Documentation, and according to their own press release, Bolt.new and Netlify now power 1 Million AI-Generated Websites, marking a new era of AI-Driven Web Development slop. 😑

And if you think serverless is a lie, maybe try lttle.cloud, a microvm manager for tiny clouds with sub 10 ms cold starts. 🤷‍♂️

Be sure to check out this week's sponsor, Kestra. What I love about Kestra is how it brings the power of infrastructure-as-code to workflow automation. You define complex, multi-system workflows in YAML, just like your cloud configs, making it the perfect companion for DevOps teams. It’s open-source, massively scalable, and integrates with all your cloud and data tools. Check it out on GitHub. Sponsored

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here are a few tutorials I came across this week that you might find useful:

• Stop Using Lambdas in Step Functions! by Emiliano Sgrano
• AWS SnapStart - Part 27 Using insights from AWS Lambda Profiler Extension for Java to reduce Lambda cold starts by Vadym Kazulkin
• Create Stateful Serverless Workflows with AWS Step Functions and JSONata by Matt Morgan
• Implementing advanced authorization with AWS Lambda for endpoint-specific access by Arpad Toth
• Log buffering with Lambda Powertools by Andres Moreno
• How I Managed to Take My Laravel Application to the Serverless World (And How I Almost Died Trying) by Hermann D. Schimpf
• AWS Lambda Profiler Extension for Java- Part 2 Improving Lambda performance with Lambda SnapStart and priming by Vadym Kazulkin
• Deploying FastAPI Application to AWS Fargate using Serverless Container Framework by Michael Villaverde
• The pros and cons of Lambdalith by Yan Cui

Serverless Reads 🤓

Stop Building Internal Tools Nobody Wants: A Platform Engineer’s Guide
Ran Isenberg shares lessons learned from creating internal tools for developers at CyberArk. There is some great advice here for gathering feedback, ensuring good developer experience to drive adoption, and the importance of documentation, maintenance, and knowledge sharing to keep tools relevant and effective.

From virtual machine to Kubernetes to serverless: How dacadoo saved 78% on cloud costs and automated operations
AWS says converting to serverless resulted in a cost reduction of 78% and an infrastructure maintenance requirement of less than an hour per year. 60% of the time, serverless works every time. 😉

The Software Engineering Identity Crisis
Annie Vella says the rise of AI coding assistants is changing the role of software engineers from creators to overseers, aka, managers. Engineers need to find a way to preserve the joy of building and solving problems while embracing the benefits of AI tools.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Here are few of my favorite videos from last week:

• Navigating complexity in event-driven architectures: A domain-driven approach - David Boyne
• Balancing Coupling in Software Design • Vlad Khononov & Sheen Brisals • GOTO 2025
• Will AI replace programmers? | ThePrimeagen and Lex Fridman
• Data processing with AWS Step Functions | Serverless Office Hours
• The Virtual Office: Building a multi-agent party planning committee

New from AWS 🆕

And a few more announcements from AWS:

• AWS Amplify Hosting announces Web Application Firewall Protection in general availability
• Amazon Q Developer is now generally available in Amazon OpenSearch Service
• AWS App Studio introduces a prebuilt solutions catalog and cross-instance Import and Export
• API Gateway launches support for dual-stack (IPv4 and IPv6) endpoints
• Amazon Bedrock Custom Model Import introduces real-time cost transparency
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports retrieving secrets and configuration from AWS Secrets Manager and AWS Systems Manager
• Amazon DynamoDB now supports percentile statistics for request latency
• AWS CloudFormation now supports targeted resource scans in the IaC generator
• Amazon QuickSight launches Amazon Q in embedded QuickSight
• AWS Resource Explorer supports 32 new resource types
• Amazon EventBridge Scheduler now supports AWS PrivateLink

Upcoming Events 🗓

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 is the main breakthrough made by Anthropic researchers in understanding large language models (LLMs)?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• A new training method to reduce hallucinations
• A tool for deciphering how LLMs "think"
• A new language model called Claude 3.5 Haiku
• A method for improving LLM guardrails
• A technique for scaling LLMs to longer prompts

Final Thoughts 🤔

Things keep getting busier for me it seems (hence the later than normal newsletter). If you're an AI Engineer (or an aspiring one), be sure to follow me on LinkedIn, because I have a few new job posts coming soon for CloudZero. 🔥

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.