Off-by-none: Issue #332

July 8, 2025

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Agent Failure Rates 🤖

In our previous issue, AWS Lambda SnapStart spread across the globe, AWS re:Inforce dropped some major security updates, and Cloudflare Containers were released in public beta. This week, Amazon Keyspaces gets CDC, Nova Canvas lets you try on clothes, and NuxtLabs joins Vercel. Plus, we've got lots of amazing content from the serverless and cloud community!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

AWS had a couple of interesting announcements including Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) now supporting Change Data Capture (CDC) Streams. If DynamoDB hadn't offered this, I never would have used it, which is partially why I never used Keyspaces (that, and the nightmares I still have from managing my own Cassandra ring back in the day).

Also, Amazon Nova Canvas added virtual try-on and style options for image generation, which is pretty cool. Lots of interesting use cases including ecommerce applications and more advanced personalization of stock imagery.

And ICYMI, the Serverless ICYMI recap for Q2 2025 is now available.

In other serverless related news, EventCatalog introduced the EventCatalog Linter and Entity Maps, Cloudflare introduced pay per crawl: enabling content owners to charge AI crawlers for access, DBOS now Integrates with SpoonOS to Simplify AI Agent Development and Deployment, and Serverless, Inc. announced the ability to Self-Host AI Agents on AWS with the Serverless Container Framework v2.

Finally, NuxtLabs, the creators and stewards of Nitro and Nuxt, are joining Vercel! 🤯

PagerDuty brings the incident room to Slack—automatically. Now included in every plan, you get instant Slack channels named to match Jira tickets, predefined roles assigned on the spot, and GenAI that answers questions about the incident and its business impact in real time. It's end-to-end incident management, without ever leaving your team’s daily workflow. Check out all the recent updates! Sponsored

Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here are some of my favorite tutorials from last week:

• Modernizing a To-Do App with Serverless AWS Architecture by Rayane Kadi
• Build a Serverless Text-To-Speech Application with Amazon Polly — 20 Minutes Hands On Lab  by Kamalpreet Kaur
• Extending My Blog with Proofreading by Amazon Nova by Jimmy Dahlqvist
• Three Ways to Build Multi-Agent Systems on AWS by Matias Kreder
• AppSync: how to implement unauthenticated operations by Yan Cui
• Add guardrails to your Strands Agent in zero time with Amazon Bedrock Guardrails by Davide De Sio
• AWS DMS validation: A custom serverless architecture by Anil Malakar, Mahesh Kansara, and Prabodh Pawar
• MCP as Serverless architecture by Brad Webb
• AWS Fault Injection Service for AWS Lambda - Part 2 FIS Lambda Action invocation-add-delay by Vadym Kazulkin
• AWS Fault Injection Service for AWS Lambda - Part 3 FIS Lambda Action invocation-http-integration-response by Vadym Kazulkin

Serverless Reads 🤓

DSQL sucks at TPC-B
Marc Bowes does an excellent job addressing Kate Gowron's recent article: Comparing Aurora DSQL vs. Aurora Serverless v2: A Practical Cost Analysis and the performance metrics she measured.

Cloudflare container platform in public preview with scale to zero pricing, some initial limitations
Tim Anderson digs into the new Cloudflare container platform and gives you some insights into cold starts, initial scaling limits, and why this is an important addition to Cloudflare's growing product suite.

AWS Confirmed the Crash. Then Denied It. Then Billed Us.
I'm fascinated by this David Lyon's debacle with AWS. Again, I have no dog in this fight, and I'd love to give AWS the benefit of the doubt, but his evidence is rather compelling.

Going Serverless for Real — Decisions, Tradeoffs, and the Unexpected and Serverless in production: Expect the unexpected (and the occasional fire)
Velan J. tells the story of his serverless journey along with plenty of practical advice along the way.

The Trouble With Treating AIs as Humans
Marco Troisi just said what all of us are (or should be) thinking. The human memory is fallible, and sometimes beautifully so. We can create novel ideas from connections between disparate ideas, fragments of long ago read texts, and our real world (physical) experiences. Smells can trigger memories, as well as something as simple as the warmth of the sun on your face. There is a uniqueness to being human that these machines will never duplicate. AI still has a purpose, and its impact will fundamentally alter our society. But pretending that it's thinking like a human won't serve anyone, except the shareholders of its creators.

The Percentage of Tasks AI Agents Are Currently Failing At May Spell Trouble for the Industry
Speaking of AI, Carnegie Mellon University released a paper showing that Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro AI agent "failed to complete real-world office tasks 70 percent of the time." Others, like OpenAI's GPT-4o (91.4% failure rate), Meta's Llama-3.1-405b (92.6% failure rate), and Amazon's Nova-Pro-v1 (98.3% failure rate) were even worse! Everyone is building agents, but apparently no one is doing it well.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

• AWS Lambda, Kafka schemas & Avro | Serverless Office Hours
• What I had to unlearn to grow in tech (in the AI era) by Luca Mezzalira
• Should You Emulate The Cloud Locally On Your Machine? by James Eastham
• Serverless Craic Ep67 Workgrid Case Study from The Serverless Edge

New from AWS 🆕

• Amazon S3 Express One Zone now supports tags for cost allocation and attribute-based access control
• Amazon CloudFront announces support for HTTPS DNS records
• Amazon Aurora MySQL and Amazon RDS for MySQL integration with Amazon SageMaker
• Amazon Rekognition Face Liveness launches accuracy improvements and new challenge setting for improved UX
• Amazon Aurora DSQL is now available in additional AWS Regions - AWS
• Amazon SNS now supports delivery to Amazon Data Firehose in three additional AWS Regions
• Amazon CloudWatch PutMetricData API now supports AWS CloudTrail data event logging
• Amazon Aurora now supports PostgreSQL 17.5, 16.9, 15.13, 14.18, and 13.21
• AWS Fargate now supports SOCI Index Manifest v2 for greater deployment consistency

Upcoming Events 🗓

July 16, 2025 - AWS Summit New York City 2025

October 16, 2025 - AWS North Community Conference

Please send me your serverless events!

Final Thoughts 🤔

That's a wrap for this week. I've been spending a lot of time with AI and agents over the past 9 months, and I can tell you that the failure rates published by Carnegie Melon pass the sniff test. My first reaction after reading it was, "Oh good, it's not just me!" I'm still bullish on AI, especially as an assistive technology with humans in the loop. But the hype and overpromises are starting to cause real problems for organizations trying to capitalize on it. I'd like to think that us humans will be safe for a while, so long as we can keep our failure rates below 70%. Unfortunately, greed doesn't work that way.

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.