Off-by-none: Issue #330

June 17, 2025

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The Weakest Link 🔗

In our previous issue, Amazon Aurora DSQL became GA, AWS Serverless got a powerful MCP server, and Snowflake entered the Postgres game. This week, Amazon API Gateway adds routing rules, Databricks introduces a new approach to building AI agents, and Google Cloud Run gets GPUs. Plus, we have a ton of serverless and cloud content from the community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

It looks like the entire Internet broke last week, but other than that, lots of other things to talk about.

AWS continues to crank out all things AI. Amazon Q Developer now helps customers optimize AWS costs, Amazon Q Developer introduced Pro Tier upgrades for Builder IDs, and Powertools for AWS Lambda introduced Bedrock Agents Function utility. Amazon Q Developer also released agentic coding experience within JetBrains and Visual Studio and an Eclipse IDE plugin.

AWS announced open-source AWS API Models and Amazon API Gateway introduced routing rules for REST APIs, which let you do some pretty cool things.

We also welcome a new 2025 AWS Heroes cohort, the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region, and an AWS Invoice Summary API that could come in useful.

In other cloud news, Databricks Launched Agent Bricks: A New Approach to Building AI Agents and Google Cloud Run Now Offers Serverless GPUs for AI and Batch Processing.

PagerDuty just leveled up: every plan now includes end-to-end incident management—no extra tools, no added complexity. Customizable workflows can auto-spin Slack channels, assign roles, open Jira tickets, and loop in the right teams—seamlessly tied to your on-call schedules. It’s everything you need to respond fast and stay in control, now built right in. Check out all the recent updates! Sponsored

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Some of my favorite tutorials from the last two weeks:

• Introduction to Day 2 Serverless Operations — Part 1 by Eyal Estrin
• Introduction to Day 2 Serverless Operations — Part 2 by Eyal Estrin
• Building a production Lambda function that monitors IAM access keys and sends automated email alerts using boto3 and AWS SES by Akhilesh Mishra
• Aurora DSQL Best Practices: Avoid hot keys by Marc Bowes
• Quarkus 3 application on AWS Lambda- Part 4 Reducing Lambda cold starts with SnapStart and API Gateway request event priming by Vadym Kazulkin
• Quarkus 3 application on AWS Lambda- Part 5 Measuring Lambda cold and warm starts with GraalVM Native Image by Vadym Kazulkin
• Serverless Image Resizer on AWS by Fidelis Ikoroje
• Agentic AI Prompting: Best Practices for Smarter Vibe Coding by Ran Isenberg
• System Design: Serverless Chat Application by Joud W. Awad
• Testing AWS EventBridge for Cross-Region Event Replication by Carlos Biagolini, Jr.
• MCP Client: Building a Smart and Robust Integration to DynamoDB with DynamoDB-Toolbox by Thomas Aribart
• Redacting Sensitive Data On-the-Fly with S3 Object Lambda by Ummenthala Anish
• Scalable Serverless Slack Bot Design: Avoid Slack’s 3-Second Timeout with AWS Lambda & SQS FIFO Queues by Geetansh Garg
• 10 AWS Lambda Hacks to Skyrocket Your Serverless Game!
• End-to-end email testing with SES and SQS by Luc Van Donkersgoed

Serverless Reads 🤓

Aurora DSQL: How to spend a dollar
Marc Bowes explains how Aurora DSQL pricing actually works (because the pricing page isn't very clear).

AWS Lambda Silent Crash – A Platform Failure, Not an Application Bug
This is a bit of a troubling story by David Lyon and AWS's response to it. I haven't tried to replicate it, but I don't see what he's got to gain by misrepresenting the problem.

The Serverless Scam Strikes Again
Andrew Zuo is conflating cloud with serverless again, but there is an important point to consider here regarding his take on uptime and the lack of accountability that seems to go with it.

My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts
Great piece by Thomas Ptacek that points out an inconvenient truth to many anti-ai developers: even though it doesn't do all the things the hypster and huckster say it can, in the hands of the right person, it's dramatically augmenting and accelerating the entire SDLC.

Poison everywhere: No output from your MCP server is safe
What could possibly go wrong if you give a non-deterministic language engine full access to all of your systems and then start installing MCP servers like they're unverified Chrome extensions? Simcha Kosman points out a few of the problems.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

• Join the AWS Lambda Hackathon! - Kick-off | Serverless Office Hours
• Join the AWS Lambda Hackathon! - Week 2 | Serverless Office Hours
• A2A - the next MCP? with Allen Helton and Andres Moreno
• Serverless Guru Spring Hackathon Winners & Project Showcase
• Serverless Craic Ep64 Environment for Success with Mark McCann and Dave Anderson

New from AWS 🆕

Here are several more AWS announcements that are worth a look:

• Announcing open sourcing pgactive: active-active replication extension for PostgreSQL
• Amazon S3 extends additional context for HTTP 403 Access Denied error messages to AWS Organizations
• AWS CloudTrail enhances logging for Amazon S3 DeleteObjects API
• AWS AppSync Enhances Security with Default Encryption for GraphQL API Caching
• AWS WAF now supports automatic application layer distributed denial of service protection
• Announcing ASN match support for AWS WAF
• Amazon Verified Permissions reduces authorization request price by up to 97%
• Amazon DynamoDB Streams adds supports for Kinesis Client Library (KCL) 3.0
• Announcing price reductions for Amazon SageMaker AI GPU-accelerated instances
• Amazon S3 Tables now provide storage cost visibility for individual tables
• Amazon Athena announces managed query results to streamline analysis workflows
• AWS Compute Optimizer now identifies idle EC2 Auto Scaling groups with GPU instances
• Amazon Q Developer CLI now supports Claude Sonnet 4

Serverless Tools 🛠

A Simple Framework for AWS Lambda NodeJs by Jiju Thomas Mathew

From Social 🐦

#teamwork #companyretreat #research pic.twitter.com/fOZTSw2MWV

— Jeremy Daly @ FinOps X (@jeremy_daly) June 11, 2025

CloudZero had our annual company retreat last week at Ocean Edge Resort in Brewster, MA. I am a big fan of remote work, but there is something magical about bringing teams physically together, even if just for a few days. And, yes, there was a beach bar that aided in the camaraderie.

Upcoming Events 🗓

July 16, 2025 - AWS Summit New York City 2025

October 16, 2025 - AWS North Community Conference

Please send me your serverless events!

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

Which provider of PostgreSQL technology did Snowflake announce it will be acquiring?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• Neon
• Aiven
• Supabase
• Crunchy Data
• Render

Final Thoughts 🤔

I was away last week on a corporate retreat, but tried to stay plugged in as much as I could.I don’t know what’s more concerning: how fast the world is changing, or how slowly most people are realizing it.

Until 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.