Off-by-none: Issue #342

October 28, 2025

Not Again 🤦‍♂️

In our previous issue, AWS broke the internet, Bedrock finally automated access to its foundation models, and Caylent and Trek10 took their relationship to the next level. This week, AWS is having another terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, Lambda and Kinesis payload limits get bumped, and Cloudflare promises observability that just works. Plus, we've got some amazing serverless and cloud content from the community!

News & Announcements

As of this writing, AWS seems to be having another bad day. But as soon as it's back up and running, there's some great news for those of you that suffer from event payload verbosity. AWS Lambda quadrupled its maximum payload size for asynchronous invocations from 256 KB to 1 MB, giving you more room for context, events, and occasionally questionable JSON. Not to be outdone, Kinesis Data Streams now supports records up to 10× larger than before, which should make large-message streaming and log aggregation a lot less painful, and likely more expensive.

In AI land, AWS unveiled Amazon Nova Multimodal Embeddings (blog post here), the first unified embedding model built for agentic RAG and semantic search. It supports text, documents, images, video, and audio through a single model. Looking forward to trying this.

Meanwhile, ECS Managed Instances are now available in all commercial AWS regions, giving teams more flexibility to deploy container workloads without managing infrastructure. Speaking of bad days, AWS published a post-mortem on the recent DynamoDB outage in us-east-1. You need an eye chart to read it, but if you're interested in peeking behind the curtain to see how complex (and interconnected) AWS services are, and more importantly, why you don't want to host something like this yourself, check it out.

And over at Cloudflare, Workers automatic tracing just entered open beta. It gives you distributed traces across every function call on their platform with no setup, no SDKs, just instant visibility. Observability out of the box that just works? Color me skeptical, but intrigued.

Tutorials

• Inside Claude Code Skills: Structure, prompts, invocation by Mikhail Shilkov
• Automating Transit Gateway Attachment Tagging Using EventBridge and Lambda by Santanu Das
• Micronaut 4 application on AWS Lambda- Part 6 REST API application by Vadym Kazulkin
• From Seconds to Milliseconds: Fixing Python Cold Starts with SnapStart by Anne Stein
• Running a Strands Agent on Lambda to Tag Product Reviews by Martyn Kilbryde

Reads

• Becoming an AWS (Serverless) Hero - 1 year later by Vadym Kazulkin
• How Cloudflare’s client-side security made the npm supply chain attack a non-event by Bashyam Anant

Podcasts, Videos, and more

• Embracing Complexity in Serverless • GOTO 2025 with Sheen Brisals
• Agent Design Principles - Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself with Andres Moreno and Allen Helton
• What’s new with Observability | Serverless Office Hours with Joe Alioto, Siva Guruvareddiar, and Gunnar Grosch

New from AWS

• Aurora DSQL now supports resource-based policies
• AWS Resource Explorer supports 47 additional resource types
• Amazon Nova now supports the customization of content moderation settings
• Amazon Bedrock Data Automation supports additional formats for video and faster processing for images
• Amazon Cognito now supports resource indicators to simplify enhancing protection of OAuth 2.0 resources
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) announces upgraded query planner that can run queries up to 10x faster
• Amazon CloudWatch introduces interactive incident reporting
• Amazon SageMaker adds additional search context for search results
• Amazon S3 now generates AWS CloudTrail events for S3 Tables maintenance operations

Upcoming Events 🗓

November 19, 2025 - DynamoDB Day

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

Please send me your serverless events!

Final Thoughts 🤔

HugOps to AWS. It's no fun dealing with one outage, let alone back to back ones. Hopefully this email will actually get to you all. Pretty much everything runs through AWS, so… 🤷‍♂️

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.