Off-by-none: Issue #327

May 20, 2025

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No more free lunch for Lambda INIT 💰

Hey all! 👋 It's been a minute! Apologies that last week's issue didn't get published. Unfortunately, I had to deal with the aftermath of a driver falling asleep, drifting into oncoming traffic, and hitting the truck my 17 year old daughter was driving to school. Luckily, she's okay with only minor bumps and bruises, but the truck was totaled, and as I'm sure you can imagine, we were all a bit shaken up.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…

In our previous issue, CloudFront added a SaaS Manager, AppSync Events added better data source support, and Bedrock got a few new serverless models. This week, we play a bit of catch up, .NET learns to transform itself, and Lambda standardizes INIT billing. Plus, we've got a ton of great serverless and cloud content from the last few weeks!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

Since it's been a few weeks, I want to make sure we catch up on some of the big stories. On the AWS side, they launched Amazon Nova Premier, their most capable model for complex tasks and teacher for model distillation, they introduced Strands Agents, an Open Source AI Agents SDK, and Amazon Q Developer announced a new agentic coding experience in the IDE, making further strides into the vibe coding market.

AWS also announced Amazon Q Developer CLI support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), Amazon Q Developer in GitHub (in preview) to accelerate code generation, and a number of AWS service changes that include deprecations and EOL for support (probably nothing you're using).

Even more interesting is the GA of AWS Transform for mainframe, AWS Transform for VMware, and AWS Transform for .NET. These services all sound rather exciting, with AWS Transform for .NET claiming to be the first agentic AI service for modernizing .NET applications at scale. Leave it to Corey Quinn to catch a sneaky term of service they added (then quickly removed).

In serverless news, AWS Lambda introduced tiered pricing for Amazon CloudWatch logs and additional logging destinations. This sounds like it could save you some money. On the other side of the coin, they're going to start charging for all INIT phases in AWS Lambda, which could increase the cost for some of your workloads.

And if you haven't heard, Databricks is buying open-source database startup Neon for $1B. 🤯

Plus, on the subject of vibe coding, OpenAI introduced Codex.

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Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

There were way too many tutorials from the past 3 weeks to include all my favorites, but here's a sample:

• Quarkus 3 application on AWS Lambda- Part 1 Introduction to the sample application and first Lambda performance measurements by Vadym Kazulkin
• Quarkus 3 application on AWS Lambda- Part 2 Reducing Lambda cold starts with Lambda SnapStart by Vadym Kazulkin
• Quarkus 3 application on AWS Lambda- Part 3 Reducing Lambda cold starts with SnapStart and DynamoDB request priming by Vadym Kazulkin
• Building a multi-region Serverless API with the AWS CDK, Lambda, and DynamoDB by Thomas Aribart
• Understanding push vs poll in event-driven architectures by Yan Cui
• Amazon Bedrock AI Model Cross-Region Inference by Lee Gilmore
• Deploying a MCP server on AWS by Daniel Alejandro Figueroa Arias
• Optimizing cold start performance of AWS Lambda using advanced priming strategies with SnapStart by Shan Kandaswamy and Gustavo Martim
• How to use Neon and ephemeral environments to simplify serverless development by Yan Cui
• How Smartsheet boosts developer productivity with Amazon Bedrock and Roo Code by Rony Blum and JB Brown
• I Tried Running an MCP Server on AWS Lambda… Here’s What Happened by Ran Isenberg
• Turning Text into Art: Using AWS Nova to augment Blog post with illustrations by Roman Tsypuk
• Serverless RAG Chat with AppSync Events and Bedrock Knowledge Bases by Zied Ben Tahar
• Triggering multiple workflows with DynamoDB Streams by Arpad Toth
• Amazon Cognito M2M Token Caching for Cost Optimisation & Performance by Lee Gilmore
• Implementing WebSockets on AWS by Joud W. Awad

Serverless Reads 🤓

And here are a few articles that piqued my interest:

• Valkey Turns One: How the Community Fork Left Redis in the Dust by Khawaja Shams
• The Hidden Cost of Convenience: Why Controlling Serverless Spend in Data Platforms Is So Hard by Suteja Kanuri
• The Way to Great Software Is Slow and Steady by Marco Troisi
• Are We Prepared for AWS Lambda’s INIT Phase Billing by Hari Om

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

• Simplifying serverless networking | Serverless Office Hours
• Why Your Lambda Functions Need a Structural Makeover with James Eastham
• 1 billion PHP on AWS Lambda invokes | Serverless Office Hours
• AWS Bites #143: Is App Runner better than Fargate?
• Building an agent-ready API from scratch. No humans allowed
• Public Speaking Mentor AI Assistant | Serverless Office Hours
• EDA for the Real World: Architecture & Implementation with TypeScript & EventBridge
• Money-saving tips for the frugal serverless developer | Yan Cui | SREday London 2025 Q1

New from AWS 🆕

Here are several more AWS announcements from the last few weeks that you probably don't want to miss:

• SES Mail Manager adds Debug Logging for traffic policies
• Announcing Amazon Bedrock Agents Metrics in CloudWatch
• Amazon Bedrock Data Automation now supports generating custom insights from videos
• Announcing Code Editor (based on VS Code – Open Source) in Amazon SageMaker
• Amazon CloudWatch Network Monitoring adds multi-account support for flow monitors
• AI search flow builder is now available on the Amazon OpenSearch Service
• Amazon Bedrock Guardrails now supports cross-region inference
• Amazon Bedrock Data Automation now supports extraction of custom insights from audio
• Amazon Bedrock Model Distillation is now generally available
• Amazon Cognito now supports OIDC prompt parameter
• DynamoDB local is now accessible on AWS CloudShell
• AWS CodePipeline now supports deploying to AWS Lambda with traffic shifting
• Amazon Cognito adds enhanced context support for machine-to-machine (M2M) authorization flows
• AWS Amplify introduces data seeding

Upcoming Events 🗓

May 22, 2025 - AWS Cloud Infrastructure Day

October 16, 2025 - AWS North Community Conference

Please send me your serverless events!

Take the latest Off-by-none Cloud Quiz 🧑‍🏫

What database startup did Databricks announce plans to acquire for $1B?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• MongoDB
• Neon
• Supabase
• Planetscale
• Fauna

Final Thoughts 🤔

Apologies again for missing last week. Let's hope for smoother days ahead. 🤞

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.