Off-by-none: Issue #334

September 2, 2025

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It's been a minute 👋

In our previous issue, AWS introduced a new agentic IDE, Bedrock let you create API keys, and OpenAI's acquisition deal with Windsurf collapsed. This week, we're catching up after a summer break, Aurora turns 10, and AWS combats AI hallucinations. Plus, we have several weeks worth of awesome serverless and cloud content from the community!

News & Announcements 📣

We're back after a slightly extended summer break. There was a lot that happened in serverless and cloud over the last month, so let's get to it.

AWS was as prolific as ever with lots of really interesting announcements.

On the AI side, they announced that Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.1 is now in Amazon Bedrock, OpenAI open weight models are now available on AWS, Count Tokens API support for Anthropic’s Claude models is now in Amazon Bedrock, and they added Simplified Cache Management for Anthropic’s Claude models. They also enabled Automated Reasoning checks in Amazon Bedrock Guardrails. There's a great post by Danilo Poccia that explains how Automated Reasoning checks minimizes AI hallucinations and delivers up to 99% verification accuracy. It's a bit pricey, but for results that can't be wrong, it's worth looking at.

AWS was also busy with some excellent serverless announcements. AWS Lambda response streaming now supports 200 MB response payloads, AWS Lambda now supports GitHub Actions to simplify function deployment, and Amazon SQS increased maximum message payload size to 1 MiB. Also, Amazon DynamoDB added support for Console-to-Code and Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 now offers up to a 30% performance improvement.

AWS also opened their new AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region, AWS App Runner expanded support for IPv6 compatibility (I seriously thought this service was on life support), and the AWS Management Console now supports assigning a color to an AWS account for easier identification. That's a nice quality of life improvement if you spend a lot of time in the console.

For you database fans, AWS is celebrating 10 years of Amazon Aurora. Now I feel really old. 👴

Also, we got a new batch of AWS Heroes. I was able to see a few of them last week at the AWS Heroes Summit in Seattle. It was great meeting Raphael Manke, Kristiné Armiyants, and Rowan Udell in person. Amazing additions to the program.

In other cloud news, it was recently AI Week 2025 at Cloudflare. They're always doing something really cool over there like AI Crawl Control and AI Gateway now giving you access to your favorite AI models, dynamic routing and more through just one endpoint.

And lastly, Tecton is Joining Databricks to Power Real-Time Data for Personalized AI Agents. I'm not sure if it's better to be a big data company, or to position yourself to be bought by one. 🤷‍♂️

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Tutorials 👷‍♀️

There were so many great tutorials I read from the last few weeks, but here are some of my favorites:

• Simplify AWS Lambda Deployments Using GitHub Actions by Kasun de Silva
• How to build an API Gateway with a custom domain with AWS CDK by Pete McAree
• How To Connect AWS AppRunner Service To RDS And EC2 by Dickson Victor
• Testing in a serverless environment by Ricardo Cino
• Building a Production-Grade AWS Elastic IP Monitoring Solution: A Serverless Journey by Abhishek Gupta
• Amazon SES + AWS Lambda Email Sending Tutorial by Carlos Biagolini Jr
• Serverless Semantic Search: A Hands-On Guide to AWS S3 Vector Buckets with Rust
• Effectively building AI agents on AWS Serverless by Anton Aleksandrov and Dhiraj Mahapatro
• Hosting Remote MCP Server on AWS Lambda for Free by Xinzhi Sherry Zhu
• Why I Ditched Redis for Cloudflare Durable Objects in My Rate Limiter?
• RAG on AWS: Building an AI-powered Knowledge Base, with Amazon Bedrock and S3 Vectors by Davide De Sio
• Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway - Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 by Vadym Kazulkin
• Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime - Part 1 and Part 2 by Vadym Kazulkin
• Cognito-based MCP Servers by Marcin Sodkiewicz
• AWS CDK Blueprints vs Custom Constructs vs Aspects by Lee Gilmore

Reads 🤓

• How We Cut Our Client's AWS Bill by 90% by Going Serverless by Mehul budasana
• Building My First AI-Powered App: From Whisper to Vercel Limits by Sidharth Sangelia
• The $12,000 AWS Bill That Almost Killed Our Startup by Aaron Rose
• The Equality Delete Problem in Apache Iceberg by Yingjun Wu

Podcasts, Videos, and more 🎧

• Integrating Model Context Protocol (MCP) Tools with Strands Agents (How-to) with Mike Chambers and Suman Debnath
• AWS Bites #147. Spec coding with Kiro with Eoin and Luciano
• Building Serverless Agentic Apps | Serverless Office Hours with Julian Wood
• Translating Infrastructure as Code using GenAI | Serverless Office Hours with Darko Mesaros
• Serverless Craic Ep71 AI, DevOps & Serverless: Building Frictionless Developer Experience
• Cloud Run & Agents: Fast Starts | Google Cloud: Passport to Containers
• Serverless Craic Ep70 Frictionless Developer Experience in the Age of AI
• Serverless Craic Ep69 Serverless myths debunked for modern cloud teams
• Enough Vibing, We’re Spec Coding Again with Allen Helton and Andres Moreno

New from AWS 🆕

There were a lot of exciting announcements from AWS over the last month. Here are some more that you might find useful:

• AWS Budgets now supports Billing View for cross-account cost monitoring
• Amazon Bedrock now supports Batch inference for Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4 and OpenAI GPT-OSS models
• Amazon OpenSearch Serverless introduces automatic semantic enrichment
• Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 in Amazon Bedrock Expanded Context Window
• Amazon OpenSearch Serverless now supports Attribute Based Access Control
• Amazon Polly launches more synthetic generative voices
• Amazon OpenSearch Serverless now supports backup and restore
• Amazon OpenSearch Serverless adds support for Hybrid Search, AI connectors, and automations
• Amazon DynamoDB now supports a CloudWatch Contributor Insights mode exclusively for throttled keys
• Aurora DSQL now supports resilience testing with AWS Fault Injection Service
• Amazon Bedrock now available in the Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region
• Amazon DynamoDB now supports more frequent throughput mode updates from provisioned to on-demand capacity
• Amazon Neptune now supports BYOKG - RAG (GA) with open-source GraphRAG toolkit
• Amazon S3 introduces a new way to verify the content of stored datasets
• Amazon Q Developer now supports MCP admin control
• AWS Billing and Cost Management now provides customizable Dashboards
• Announcing the AWS Billing and Cost Management MCP server
• Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports AI-powered forecasting
• Amazon Athena now supports CREATE TABLE AS SELECT with Amazon S3 Tables
• Amazon Neptune Now Integrated with Zep to Power Long-Term Memory for GenAI Applications
• Amazon CloudWatch expands region support for natural language query result summarization and query generation
• Amazon DynamoDB now supports more granular throttle error exceptions
• Amazon Bedrock now available in the Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region
• Announcing a new open source project for scenario-focused AWS CLI scripts
• Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics adds multi-browser support for application testing
• RDS Data API now supports IPv6

Upcoming Events 🗓

October 16, 2025 - AWS North Community Conference

December 1-5, 2025 - AWS re:Invent 2025

Please send me your serverless events!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Hey all! Good to see you again. I was planning on doing my normal every-two-week cadence over the summer, but life got busy, I had a lot of travel planned, and honestly, I really needed a break. Now that summer is winding down here and the kids are back to school, I'm looking forward to returning to our regularly scheduled program. 😉

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.