Off-by-none: Issue #323

April 8, 2025

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

Cloudflare's Developer Week 🧑‍💻

In our previous issue, Azure Container Apps got serverless GPUs, we learned that serverless MCPs might be getting easier, and Bolt and Netlify announced they now power over a million websites built by robots. This week, AWS announces Amazon Nova Reel 1.1, Cloudflare dedicates a week to developers, and websites built by robots can now deploy straight from the IDE. Plus, we have plenty of content from the amazing serverless and cloud communities!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Not a whole lot of serverless news from AWS this week, but one that did catch my attention was that Amazon SES now offers attachments in sending APIs. Amazon SES is having a bit of a moment right now, and with all the latest features and capabilities, it's becoming a serious contender to take over most of your app's email needs. Also, if you missed out on any serverless news from Q1, check out the Serverless ICYMI 2025 Q1 post from Julian Wood.

In AWS AI news, they announced Amazon Nova Reel 1.1, which lets you create up to 2-minute multi-shot videos. I'm not a fan of AI slop, and yes, services like this can be used for nefarious purposes, but if put it in the hands of the right creative person, video gen has undeniable potential.

Also, Amazon Bedrock announced the general availability of prompt caching, reducing costs by up to 90% and latency by up to 85%, Meta’s Llama 4 models are now available on Amazon Web Services, and Swami Sivasubramanian shared some ways you can work with MCP across AWS today.

In other cloud news, it's Developer Week 2025 at Cloudflare and some of these announcements do not disappoint:

• Cloudflare Workflows is now GA: production-ready durable execution
• Introducing AutoRAG: fully managed Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Cloudflare
• "Just use Vite”… with the Workers runtime
• Your frontend, backend, and database — now in one Cloudflare Worker
• Meta’s Llama 4 is now available on Workers AI

Also, Windsurf and Netlify launched a first-of-its-kind AI IDE-Native deployment integration that lets developers use robots to build and deploy fullstack web applications without ever leaving their editor. Presumably without worrying about quality, maintainability, cost, performance, or app security as well. 🤖

Be sure to check out this week's sponsor, Kestra. Something I find really compelling about Kestra is how it treats workflow automation like code—declarative, versionable, and fully integrated into your DevOps toolchain. You can orchestrate everything from data pipelines to cloud infrastructure using clean YAML, and it scales effortlessly to millions of executions. With real-time monitoring and strong integrations across the modern data stack, it’s a powerful fit for automating complex systems. Explore the project on GitHub. Sponsored

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Just a few tutorials that caught my attention this week:

• Amazon Data Firehose to S3 Tables Caution by Matt Gillard
• How I built a spelling game with AWS Serverless and GenAI by Pubudu Jayawardana
• Deploy your Next.js app to Cloudflare Workers with the Cloudflare adapter for OpenNext

Serverless Reads 🤓

Your API might be someone else's model
Allen Helton is 100% right here. I've already seen several of these MCP proxy servers that could not only abuse your APIs (and potentially violate your ToS), but also potentially cause harm to your business' reputation if they don't perform correctly or call your APIs in a way that could mutate/lose data.

Three Quarters of Google's Code Is Written by Humans
A quick, but important bit of advice by Marco Troisi. It'll get worse before it gets better. 🤞

Serverless Is a Lie (But It’s Still Useful)
This is actually a thoughtful article by Ufuk Özdoğan, even if the title is a bit clickbaity. Couple of good zingers in here too. 😏

Why Single Function Lambdas is a terrible choice for Serverless development
Ankit Aabad shares some thoughts on why Lambdaliths are a better choice. I used to be on the other side of this issue (I probably still have some blogs and talks that advocate for single-purpose functions), but it's much more nuanced given the size and maintenance requirements of many modern serverless workloads.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

• AWS Bites #142. Escape from S3 with Eoin and Luciano
• So You Want To Pick A Topic For Your Next Conference Talk? by James Eastham
• Building Agents with AWS: Complete Tutorial (Java, Spring AI, Amazon Bedrock & MCP) with James Ward and Josh Long

New from AWS 🆕

Here are several more AWS announcements that you might find useful:

• AWS CDK L2 Construct for Amazon Cognito Identity Pools now generally available
• Announcing enhanced autoscaling for Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion pipelines
• Amazon Nova Canvas now supports fine-tuning
• AWS CDK Construct Library for Amazon EventBridge Scheduler now generally available
• Amazon EventBridge Archive and Replay now supports Customer Managed KMS Key
• AWS Backup introduces support for Amazon Redshift Serverless
• AWS CodeBuild now supports enhanced debugging experience
• AWS Step Functions expands SDK integrations with Amazon Backup Search and 137 additional APIs
• Amazon Neptune announces 99.99% availability Service Level Agreement
• Amazon RDS Proxy announces TLS 1.3 support for PostgreSQL on Aurora and RDS
• Amazon CloudFront supports VPC Origin modification with CloudFront Functions
• Amazon CloudWatch Logs increases maximum log event size to 1 MB

Serverless Tools 🛠

benward2301/dynq
dynq is an analytics query and data processing CLI tool for DynamoDB.

Thoughts from Social 🐦

vibe coding, where 2 engineers can now create the tech debt of at least 50 engineers

— I Am Devloper (@iamdevloper) March 20, 2025

We all see this right? I mean, I know that most people treat tech debt like it's no big deal, but once that interest starts to come due, your team will be spending the majority of their time just trying to keep up. I've been prototyping several things using vibe coding, and I really do enjoy it, but shipping that sh*t to prod? Only if I hate the developers that will be required to maintain it with every fiber of my being.

Upcoming Events 🗓

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 latest version of Ruby that AWS Lambda now supports?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• Ruby 2.7
• Ruby 3.0
• Ruby 3.2
• Ruby 3.4
• Ruby 4.0

Final Thoughts 🤔

Are you feeling overwhelmed by the constant flood of everything, everywhere, all at once? If so, it's not just you. Remember to breathe. 🧘

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.