Off-by-none: Issue #326

April 29, 2025

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CloudFront gets SaaSy 💁

In our previous issue, AWS introduced a new Well-Architected GenAI Lens, Amazon Q Developer launched a new agent, and Serverless, Inc. joined the MCP party. This week, CloudFront adds a SaaS Manager, AppSync Events adds better data source support, and Bedrock gets a few new serverless models. Plus, we've got some amazing serverless and cloud content from the community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

AWS had some noteworthy announcements this past week, including AWS AppSync Events now supporting data source integrations for channel namespaces. Glad that this exists, though I'm still 50/50 on how the execution environments are limited. I guess you can use a full Lambda if you need to, but would much rather something built in that was more robust.

In other AWS news, Amazon Cognito now supports refresh token rotation, continuing their investment there, and they announced SaaS Manager for Amazon CloudFront. There's more detail here about the CloudFront announcement. There definitely needs to be some innovation around use cases for this service, but I'm not sure exactly what they're going for with this one.

In AWS AI news, Prompt Optimization in Amazon Bedrock is now generally available, Amazon Bedrock Intelligent Prompt Routing is now generally available, and they've added some new models. Meta’s Llama 4 is now available fully managed and Writer’s Palmyra X5 and X4 models are now available in Amazon Bedrock.

Finally, EventCatalog now integrates with OpenAI allowing you to harness the power of OpenAI models and embeddings directly within your catalog.

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here are some of my favorite tutorials from the past week:

• Supercharge your Serverless Workflow by Elias Brange
• From Serverless Framework to AWS CDK: rebuilding our minimal serverless MCP server by Davide De Sio
• Spring Boot 3.4 application on AWS Lambda- Part 8 Optimization strategies for the cold and warm starts by Vadym Kazulkin
• Bye bye schema coupling, hello semantic coupling by Yan Cu
• AWS Responsive Templated Emails using Amazon SES & MJML by Lee Gilmore
• Building Serverless MCP Servers and What Does Peppa Pig Have To Do With It by Anton Aleksandrov
• JavaScript Lambda Functions Using a Bun Custom Runtime by Jason Butz

Serverless Reads 🤓

Trust will make or break AI agents
It is amazing how much trust people are putting in AI. Not just trusting it with their data, but trusting many of the grifters and hucksters that are selling you on capabilities that don't yet exist. I've been working with AI agents for quite some time now and have seen some amazing things. But I've also seen some really hard limitations and rogue behaviors without proper constraints and guardrails. Allen Helton points out that MCP servers installed on your machine often have elevated access, opening up new attack vectors for malicious actors. While that's certainly true, giving LLMs and agents privileged access can also result in unintended actions that systems take on your behalf. Even if you trust the author, are we ready to trust what the LLM does with it?

Cloudflare's Latest Product Could Be a Game Changer
Though this article is actually about investing, I thought the premise of it prompted an interesting discussion. Are Cloudflare Containers the missing piece of the Cloudflare ecosystem that will ultimately move the needle on broader adoption beyond their CDN? I really like a lot of their serverless offerings, and I've hinted time and time again that I believe there is a point where they could attract forward looking developers. That day may still come, but I'm not sure some form of container support is the tipping point.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

• Lessons & Best Practices from Leading the Serverless First Journey at CapitalOne from George Mao
• The #1 Pattern You Need To Know When Publishing Events from James Eastham
• So you have an MCP server...now what? with Allen Helton and Andres Moreno
• Building Systems That Listen: An Introduction to Event-Driven Architecture with Rejoice Mucheri
• Is Vibe Coding a Fad? Vibe Coding my Personal Website (Amazon Q CLI, React, Tailwind CSS, Vite) with Erik Hanchett

New from AWS 🆕

Here are several more announcements from AWS:

• AWS Amplify enhances developer tooling with refined output and CDK-style notices
• Amazon Bedrock Data Automation now supports modality controls, hyperlinks and larger documents
• Announcing AWS DMS Serverless automatic storage scaling
• Announcing Serverless Reservations, a new discounted pricing option for Amazon Redshift Serverless
• Automated HTTP validated public certificates with Amazon CloudFront
• Introducing a guided visual pipeline builder for Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion

Serverless Tools 🛠

Unofficial Powertools MCP Search Server by Michael Walmsley
Enable AI assistants to search and retrieve information from AWS Lambda Powertools docs across Python, TypeScript, Java, and .NET runtimes.

mikegc-aws/Lambda-MCP-Server
Creates a simple MCP tool server with "streaming" HTTP.

Upcoming Events 🗓

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 🧑‍🏫

According to Eric Schmidt, what percentage of the world's energy will be needed to power AI?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• 10 percent
• 25 percent
• 50 percent
• 75 percent
• 99 percent

Final Thoughts 🤔

There will be no issue next week, but we'll be back on May 13th. In the meantime, 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're building some very exciting serverless projects that you (or someone you know) might be interested in.

See you soon,
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.