Off-by-none: Issue #325

April 22, 2025

Serverless is good for the Earth Day 🌎

In our previous issue, Amazon Bedrock learned to speak with Nova Sonic, MongoDB tied into Knowledge Bases, and Cloudflare wrapped up a week dedicated for developers. This week, AWS introduces a new Well-Architected GenAI Lens, Amazon Q Developer launches a new agent, and Serverless, Inc. joins the MCP party. Plus, we have some excellent content from the serverless and cloud communities!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

It's Earth Day today, and what better way to celebrate that than by building more and more datacenters to power GenAI? 🙄 Amazon did just introduce the Well-Architected Generative AI Lens, which has a Sustainability Pillar, though I'm afraid it's more of an afterthought.

In other AWS news, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams increased default shard limits to up to 20,000, AWS Lambda now supports inbound IPv6 connectivity over AWS PrivateLink, and Amazon EventBridge now supports Customer Managed Keys (CMK) in API destinations connections.

Amazon Q Developer released a state of the art agent for feature development, so now you can supercharge your vibe coding skills even more, plus Amazon Bedrock RAG and Model Evaluations now support custom metrics.

We've seen that MCP servers have been all the rage lately, which is probably why Serverless, Inc. introduced the Serverless MCP to help you debug issues with AWS serverless resources. But since Google didn't want to be left out, they've announced the Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A). It'll probably end up in the Google Graveyard within a few months.

Shoutout to this week's sponsor, Aiven! If you’re building analytics dashboards, tracking real-time events, or crunching massive logs, Aiven for ClickHouse is your secret weapon. Get a fully managed, cloud-agnostic ClickHouse cluster running in under 10 minutes with seamless scaling, cloud migration, and forkable databases all from a single dashboard. Whether you're processing billions of rows per second or just getting started, Aiven makes it easy (and free) to try — check it out. Sponsored

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here are several excellent tutorials that I came across this week:

• How to Crater your Database, Part Three - Normalization by Seth Orell
• Streamlining trace sampling behavior for AWS Lambda functions with AWS X-Ray by Joshua Smith and Shridhar Pandey
• How to Automatically Compress Images in S3 with AWS Lambda by Muhammad Abdullah
• From Blind Book Hunts to Smart Shelf Picks: Scan, Parallel Scan, and Query in DynamoDB
• Tutorial: GPU-Accelerated Serverless Inference With Google Cloud Run by Janakiram MSV
• How to detect and prevent breaking changes in event schemas by Yan Cui
• Dedicated Outbound IP Address with AWS Lambda by Lee Gilmore
• How Smartsheet reduced latency and optimized costs in their serverless architecture by Anton Aleksandrov, Rony Blum, Donovan Allen, and Ted Bieber
• Observability for MCP servers with Kestra by Allen Helton
• Deploy a minimal MCP Server on AWS Lambda with Serverless Framework by Davide De Sio

Serverless Reads 🤓

Serverless is a Scam.
Tell me you've never built a production serverless app without telling me you've never built a production serverless app.

Serverless is NOT a Scam.
I'm glad someone had the energy to respond to the article above, because I'm too tired to do it myself. Serverless is what it is and has always been: another tool that makes sense when it makes sense.

The Problem with “Vibe Coding”
Dylan Beattie discusses the difference between a "program" and a "product". I very much agree that the program use case makes the most sense given the current state.

Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work
I know we're heavy on the vibe coding content today, but I thought this piece by Addy Osmani was a very thorough and level-headed analysis.

Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?
I'm sorry, but I just had to include this. Maybe I was a little punchy when I first read it, but I want to believe that there is a deeper Freudianism here that equates the quality of either's output.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Building serverless applications in the IDE | Serverless Office Hours
Eric Johnson shows you how to build and test a serverless application locally. The tooling for this has gotten so much better, so if you've complained (like everyone else) in the past, it might be worth another look.

New from AWS 🆕

And some more AWS announcements that caught my attention:

• Amazon EventBridge Connector for Apache Kafka Connect now generally available
• Amazon SQS now supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)
• Amazon S3 Tables now support server-side encryption using AWS KMS with customer-managed keys
• Amazon RDS Proxy is now available in 3 additional AWS regions
• Amazon MSK adds support for Apache Kafka version 3.9

Thoughts from Social 🐦

I saw what I consider a better way to refer to apps created with so-called "vibe coding".

"Deepfake applications"

They look like real applications until you start seeing what they can really do - and not do.

— Billy Hollis (@billyhollis) April 22, 2025

There has been lots of criticism of "vibe coding" lately, even as many continue to tout their success with it. I love using it for prototypes, but I'm definitely not ready to put anything I build into production. I don't know that I fully agree with Billy's "Deepfake application" language, but it feels directionally correct.

Upcoming Events 🗓

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 🧑‍🏫

When is Cloudflare planning to release Containers in open beta? Click the link next to an answer below to start the quiz.
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• Early May 2025
• Late June 2025
• Q3 2025
• December 2025
• No release date is planned

Final Thoughts 🤔

Be sure to check out the latest Research roles at CloudZero: AI Systems Engineer (Full-stack), Research Engineer (Full-stack), and Cloud Optimization Research Engineer (Azure). We've got a lot of exciting projects happening right now and we need smart folks like you! And almost everything we build is serverless. Did I mention that?

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.