Off-by-none: Issue #333

July 15, 2025

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

Meet Kiro 👋

In our previous issue, Amazon Keyspaces added Change Data Capture (CDC), Nova Canvas let you try on clothes, and NuxtLabs joined Vercel. This week, AWS introduces a new agentic IDE, Bedrock lets you create API keys, and OpenAI's acquisition deal with Windsurf collapses. Plus, we have some awesome content from the serverless and cloud communities!

Serverless News & Announcements 📣

It's AWS Summit New York week, so get ready for a few major announcements coming soon. However, there was no shortage of news out of AWS this past week.

The biggest is perhaps the introduction of Kiro, a new agentic IDE from AWS that claims to work "alongside you from prototype to production." It looks pretty interesting, especially with its unique approach that focuses on planning and documentation before trying to write code. Guille Ojeda from Caylent shared his first impressions that gives a great breakdown of how this new service works.

AWS also released a new "Free Tier" structure that now provides an "always free" plan, as in free forever up to certain limits. This has been a huge issue for many people trying out AWS, so perhaps this will unlock some new (less surprised) users for them. Check out the Explore AWS services with AWS Free Tier page for more info.

In AWS AI news, they released Amazon CloudWatch and Application Signals MCP servers for AI-assisted troubleshooting, enabled Amazon Q chat in the AWS Management Console so it can now query AWS service data, and announced a Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server for AWS Price List.

Another announcement that'll have a big impact is Amazon Bedrock's introduction of API keys for streamlined development. This lets you authenticate API calls to Amazon Bedrock models without setting up IAM policies, making it much easier to integrate them into non-AWS workloads.

AWS also introduced AWS Builder Center, a new home for the AWS builder community and they announced that Oracle Database@AWS is now generally available. You know, for companies still operating like it's 1999.

In other tech news, OpenAI’s $3 billion deal with AI coding startup Windsurf collapsed, Jack Dorsey launched Bitchat, a secure messaging app that doesn’t use the internet, and Replit partnered with Microsoft.

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Serverless Tutorials 👷‍♀️

Here are some tutorials that caught my attention this past week:

• Mastering AWS SAM for Python Lambda: The Ultimate Hands-On Guide by Tarek Cheikh
• 14 AWS Lambda Security Best Practices to Secure Your Serverless Applications by Ran Isenberg
• Power your MCP servers with Google Cloud Run by George Mao
• Modernizing SOAP applications using Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda by Daniel Abib
• The Security Checklist I Use for Every Website I Build by Arbythecoder
• Retries and Serverless: Essential AWS SDK Practices (2025 Edition) by Maik Wiesmüller
• Part 1: Building a Simple News Summarizer with AWS Lambda and API Gateway by Girish Bhatia
• Micronaut 4 application on AWS Lambda- Part 1 Introduction to the sample application and first Lambda performance measurements by Vadym Kazulkin
• Using Amazon Nova Canvas Virtual Try-On in Ecommerce Solutions by Lee Gilmore
• Deploying FastAPI to AWS: Part 3 - Going Serverless with Lambda by Nauman Tanwir
• How to Manipulate, Extract and Recombine S3 Key Prefixes in AWS Step Functions by Hannah Lochhead
• Quarkus 3 application on AWS Lambda- Part 7 Introducing extended API Gateway request event Lambda SnapStart priming by Vadym Kazulkin

Serverless Reads 🤓

Writing Code Was Never The Bottleneck
Pedro Tavares explains what many execs and AI hypesters are missing: writing code is the easiest part of software development. It's certainly possible to generate a PRD with AI, and you probably should as it can help you think through your requirements. However, without knowledgeable humans in the loop, you're bound to end up with a bunch of unmaintainable slop.

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

• Maximise your VIBE with Amazon Q with Danielle Heberling and Michael Walmsley
• AWS Bites #146. The AWS Product Lifecycle page with Eoin and Luciano
• Serverless Craic Ep68 The Serverless First Edge by The Serverless Edge
• Agentic AIOps | Serverless Office Hours with Eric Johnson and Biswanath Mukherjee
• The Smarter Way To Develop Azure Functions Locally with James Eastham

New from AWS 🆕

Here are few more announcements from AWS that might interest you:

• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) introduces support for up to 10 secondary Region clusters
• Amazon QuickSight introduces granular access customization for exports and reports
• Enhanced AWS Specialization badges now display categories
• AWS Price List API now supports four new Query Filters
• The Amazon S3 console now displays an external access summary for all your buckets
• Amazon SageMaker Studio now supports remote connections from Visual Studio
• Amazon SageMaker HyperPod announces new observability capability
• Amazon SageMaker HyperPod accelerates open-weights model deployment
• Amazon Neptune Analytics now integrates with Mem0 for graph-native memory in GenAI applications
• Amazon SageMaker HyperPod introduces CLI and SDK for AI Workflows

Thoughts from Social 🐦

After 5 years, I just finished my last week at Vercel 🥲

What a ride. I'm grateful for this community and proud to have helped people learn to code with React/Next. Many tweets sent and friends made.

I guess I don't have to wear all black now!? Gotta switch up my wardrobe...

— Lee Robinson (@leerob) July 10, 2025

I’ve always appreciated the energy and expertise Lee Robinson brings—and his impact on Vercel’s success is a true testament to that. He hasn’t announced what’s next, but this post does a great job summing up his time there: 5 things I learned from 5 years at Vercel.

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 🤔

What a crazy week leading up to the AWS Summit. I know of some exciting announcements for all you AI fanatics out there, so hold onto your hat. I really wish I could be there, but I'm off to watch my daughter compete in the NFL Flag Football Championships instead. That's too good to miss. 🏈

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.