Off-by-none: Issue #331

July 1, 2025

Only have a few minutes? Check out this week's MOST POPULAR links as chosen by our email subscribers.

Cloudflare Containers 📦

In our previous issue, Amazon API Gateway added routing rules, Databricks introduced a new approach to building AI agents, and Google Cloud Run got GPUs. This week, AWS Lambda SnapStart spreads across the globe, AWS re:Inforce drops some major security updates, and Cloudflare Containers are finally here. Plus, we have two weeks worth of awesome serverless and cloud content from the community!

PERSONAL NOTE: 💔 Last week my mother-in-law passed away unexpectedly from post-surgical complications. My family, especially my wife and father-in-law, are devastated and heartbroken. Diane was a shining light of compassion, love, and kindness, always putting the wellbeing of others before her own. The unwavering support she provided to me and my family helped guide us through good times and bad. Her boundless generosity helped instill these same values in my two daughters. We are better humans for having known her, and every day we shared with her was a gift. Rest in peace, Diane. 🙏

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

AWS was busy these last two weeks. On the serverless front, AWS Lambda now supports SnapStart for Python and .NET functions in 23 additional regions, AWS Lambda announced native support for Avro and Protobuf formatted Kafka events, and Amazon Redshift Serverless now supports a 4 RPU Minimum Capacity Option.

Amazon Cognito introduced AWS WAF support for Managed Login, an awesome feature to help protect your Managed Logins from malicious attacks. Amazon S3 Express One Zone now supports atomic renaming of objects with a single API call, giving you millisecond response times versus hours. And Amazon CloudFront streamlined CDN setup with smart defaults and automation, and apparently it only takes 30 seconds!

ICYMI, AWS re:Inforce happened two weeks ago. Here are some of the top announcements. The one that caught my attention was that Express.js developers can now add authorization in minutes with Amazon Verified Permissions. They released verified-permissions-express-toolkit, an open-source package that allows developers to quickly implement authorization for Express web application APIs.

In other cloud news, Containers on Cloudflare are available in public beta for simple, global, and programmable compute. Also, the Cloudflare Log Explorer is now GA, providing native observability and forensics. And they continue to push their AI capabilities with the ability to connect any React application to an MCP server in three lines of code.

Incident management should happen where your team already works—and now with PagerDuty, it does. Every plan now includes an end-to-end Slack-first experience: auto-created incident channels tied to Jira tickets, roles assigned instantly, and GenAI on hand to answer questions about impact and next steps. It’s like having an ops center in your Slack—fast, focused, and fully integrated. Check out all the recent updates! Sponsored

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here are a few of my favorite tutorials from the last two weeks:

• Building serverless event streaming applications with Amazon MSK and AWS Lambda by Tarun Rai Madan
• DynamoDB Streams with more than 24 hour retention by Ricardo Cino
• How to Install FFmpeg on AWS Lambda (and Make It Work) by Inam Saleh
• Building a Stream Deck plugin to invoke a Lambda function by Maurice Borgmeier
• How to Crater Your Database, Part Five - Summary by Seth Orell
• Serverless MCP: Hosting Model Context Protocol on AWS Lambda by Arun Kumar Singh
• Build a serverless agent with persistent context using Strands Agents SDK by Davide De Sio
• How to automatically set up a website on AWS behind a real domain with AWS CloudFront and cross account roles
• Flatten Array of Arrays using JSONata for AWS Step Functions by Chris Cook
• Quarkus 3 application on AWS Lambda- Part 6 Optimization strategies for the cold and warm starts by Vadym Kazulkin

Serverless Reads 🤓

Contra Ptacek's Terrible Article On AI
Nikhil Suresh shares his (rather harsh) take on Thomas Ptacek's "My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts" post. Reading this, I tend to agree with many of his arguments, especially the morality aspect of the whole thing. But I still think Thomas shares an inconvenient truth to those who refuse to see the train coming.

Retries are still a best practice for serverless architectures
Tamas Sallai is rightfully excited about Marc Brooker’s talk from re:Invent 2024, "The tools and techniques behind resilient systems (ARC403)". Serverless strips away many of these failure modes and handles the throttling, retries, and DLQing for you. Of course you need to account for the scalability of other systems, but serverless has plenty of solutions for that as well.

Migrate from DynamoDB Streams to EventBridge
I really like the flexibility of this architecture outlined by Ronny Roeller. The introduction of EventBridge and SQS will negate the ordering guarantee, but for the right type of system, this could be very useful.

Should I learn AWS Lambda as a startup founder?
I came across this excellent introduction to Lambda functions by Alice Wanjohi on the AWS Startup site. Sure it's a bit of marketing-speak, but it still makes for a handy resource worth sharing with newbies.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

Lots of great videos, especially the AWS Bites episode on DSQL:

• AWS Bites #145. We Tried Amazon DSQL So You Don’t Have To (But You Might Want To) with Eoin and Luciano
• End-to-end with A2A - let's see it work! with Allen and Andres
• Master Local Async Lambda Development with .NET Aspire with James Eastham
• Three Smarter Ways To Use Claude Code with James Eastham
• Serverless Craic Ep66 Map your Org Capability by Serverless Craic
• Serverless Craic Ep65 SocialTechnical System for Change by Serverless Craic
• Coder vs Developer vs Software Engineer, What’s the Difference? by Modern Software Engineering
• Join the AWS Lambda Hackathon! - Week 4 | Serverless Office Hours
• AWS Lambda and .NET Aspire | Serverless Office Hours

New from AWS 🆕

Here are several more AWS announcements that might interest you:

• Amazon Simple Email Service is now available in three new AWS Regions
• Amazon DynamoDB global tables with multi-Region strong consistency is now generally available
• Now in GA: Accelerate troubleshooting with Amazon CloudWatch investigations
• Amazon Bedrock Guardrails announces tiers for content filters and denied topics
• Amazon S3 now supports sort and z-order compaction for Apache Iceberg table
• Amazon EventBridge now supports AWS CodeBuild batch builds as a target
• AWS Security Incident Response adds integration with Amazon EventBridge
• Amazon Q Developer Java upgrade transformation CLI is now generally available
• AWS AppSync is now available in 3 additional regions
• Valkey introduces GLIDE 2.0 with support for Go, OpenTelemetry, and pipeline batching
• AWS WAF announces general availability of Resource-level DDoS protection for Application Load Balancers (ALB)
• Amazon Bedrock Flows announces preview of persistent long-running execution and inline-code support
• Amazon Textract announces accuracy and feature updates to DetectDocumentText and AnalyzeDocument APIs
• Citations API and PDF support for Claude models now in Amazon Bedrock

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 🧑‍🏫

What was the root cause of the widespread internet outage on June 12, 2025?
Click an answer below to start the quiz.

• A hardware failure
• A cyber attack
• An invalid automated quota update
• A power outage
• A storage system software bug

Final Thoughts 🤔

Be sure to give your loved ones an extra hug this week. ❤️

Take care,
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.