Off-by-none: Issue #324

April 15, 2025

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Bedrock learns to Speak 🗣️

In our previous issue, AWS announced Amazon Nova Reel 1.1, Cloudflare dedicated a week to developers, and websites built by robots started deploying straight from your IDE. This week, Amazon Bedrock learns to speak, MongoDB ties into Knowledge Bases, and Cloudflare wraps up Developer Week. Plus, we have lots of amazing content from the serverless and cloud communities!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

AWS was busy last week. In serverless news, AWS Lambda@Edge announced advanced logging controls, but unfortunately, the logs are still sent to the region the function runs in. Also, Amazon SES now supports logging email sending events through AWS CloudTrail, which is another feather in this service's ever expanding features cap.

In AWS AI news (or A1 – depending on which school you went to), AWS announced Amazon Nova Sonic, a new speech-to-speech model that brings real-time voice conversations to Amazon Bedrock. Very cool. Check out the official deep dive.

Also, Amazon Bedrock now offers Pixtral Large 25.02, a multimodal model from Mistral AI, PartyRock introduced image playground, powered by Amazon Nova Canvas, and Amazon Bedrock Guardrails announced new capabilities to safely build generative AI applications.

And, Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases now supports hybrid search for Aurora PostgreSQL and MongoDB Atlas vector stores and Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet is now available on Amazon Bedrock in Europe.

In other cloud news, Cloudflare wrapped up Developer Week 2025 with several exciting announcements. Here are some of my favorite:

• R2 Data Catalog to Managed Apache Iceberg tables with zero egress fees
• Cloudflare Secrets Store (Beta) to secure your secrets, simplify your workflow
• Interactive apps with Cloudflare Realtime and RealtimeKit
• Cloudflare Snippets are now Generally Available
• AND… Containers are coming to Cloudflare Workers in June 2025

Shoutout to this week's sponsor, Aiven and their very cool Aiven for PostgreSQL offering. Aiven for PostgreSQL is a fully managed, self-healing Postgres service with 99.99% uptime, 100% human support, and setup in under 10 minutes via the console, API, CLI, Terraform, or K8s. Now with AI-powered performance insights, including smart indexing and SQL rewrite suggestions, you can optimize queries without lifting a finger — check it out. Sponsored

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here are a few excellent tutorials I came across this week:

• How to Build a Scalable and Cost-Effective Mass Email Service with AWS SES, SQS, Lambda, S3, and CloudWatch by Dandi Pangestu
• Step Functions: Forget JSONPath, JSONata is here by Gerard Alquezar Artieda
• 4 Cognito User Pools features you might not know about by Arpad Toth
• Enriching and customizing notifications with Amazon EventBridge Pipes by Elie Elmalem
• Event versioning strategies for event-driven architectures by Yan Cui
• Everything You Need to Know About Caching with API Gateway by Bhargav Katabathuni
• AWS Fault Injection Service for AWS Lambda - Part 1 Introduction by Vadym Kazulkin
• Building OpenAI-Compatible AWS Lambda Service by Chirag Yaduwanshi
• AWS Lambda Extensions and Impact of Nodejs native fetch by Omid Eidivandi

Serverless Reads 🤓

The Great Serverless vs. Traditional Server Debate
I feel like we've evolved to the point where this shouldn't be a debate anymore, but if you're on the serverless silver bullet train, this story by Jotham Arinze is worth a few minutes of your time.

How we tripled our innovation capacity and cut costs by 75% with a Serverless-First Approach
Evandro Pires asks an important question, "How many ideas are going untested in your organization because of high costs or slow cycles?" It's definitely time to rethink how you approach innovation.

Is it just me, or is Google Cloud (Run) Function way easier to handle than AWS Lambda?
I'm not sure the problems outlined by Sacha Storz accurately reflect the daylight between the two services. AWS is definitely missing a service like this, but makes up for it with their larger ecosystem.

Chain-of-Thought is (probably) a Lie, and that’s a Problem
I've been working with this stuff for a while, and most of the magic is slight-of-hand. We've been able to do some incredible things with LLMs and CoT, but don't let that convince you it's something it's not.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

• AWS Lambda and .NET Aspire | Serverless Office Hours with Eric Johnson and Norm Johanson
• Generate serverless apps faster using Diagrams & Q Developer with Danielle Heberling and Olivier Lemaitre
• Spring into MCP with Allen Helton and Andres Moreno

New from AWS 🆕

Here are several more AWS announcements worth perusing:

• Amazon S3 Express One Zone reduces storage and request prices
• Announcing vertical scaling in Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached
• Meta’s Llama 4 now available in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart
• AWS CodeBuild adds Node 22, Python 3.13 and Go 1.24 to Lambda Compute images
• Announcing horizontal autoscaling in Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached
• AWS SAM now supports Amazon API Gateway Custom Domain Names for private REST APIs
• Amazon Q Business launches support for hallucination mitigation in chat responses
• Amazon SageMaker Studio now supports recovery mode for applications
• New Guidance in the Well-Architected Tool
• Cost Optimization Hub supports DynamoDB and MemoryDB reservation recommendations
• Amazon Q Developer expands multi-language support within the IDE and CLI
• Announcing pgvector 0.8.0 support in Aurora PostgreSQL

Upcoming Events 🗓

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 name of the new serverless durable execution engine that Cloudflare has made generally available?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• Cloudflare Pages
• Cloudflare Workers
• Cloudflare Tunnels
• Cloudflare Durable Objects
• Cloudflare Workflows

Final Thoughts 🤔

Hey all, I'm doing a ton of hiring over here at CloudZero, including two new exciting Research roles: AI Systems Engineer (Full-stack) and Research Engineer (Full-stack). Lots of very cool AI projects in the works, so let me know if you're interested. We're also still looking for a dynamic Cloud Optimization Research Engineer (Azure) to help us build out our Insights product. We've got an amazing team and it is growing fast.

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.