Off-by-none: Issue #343

November 4, 2025

CAPTCHAs Are Dead (Probably) 🚦💀

In our previous issue, AWS had another terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, Lambda and Kinesis payload limits got increased, and Cloudflare promised observability that just works. This week, AWS expands its MCP tools, Nova learns to browse the web, and Bedrock AgentCore makes CAPTCHAs officially obsolete (sorry, crosswalk photography industry). Plus, we've got plenty of awesome content from the serverless and cloud community!

News & Announcements

AWS continues to invest in the Model Context Protocol. The Serverless MCP Server just added support for tools that let you manage Lambda event source mappings (ESM) directly through MCP, making it easier to blame AI for misconfigurations rather than your CDK skills. Read the official blog post for the details (it's actually kinda cool). And the MCP Proxy for AWS is now generally available. It's a client-side proxy that enables MCP clients to connect to remote, AWS-hosted MCP servers using AWS SigV4 authentication.

In more AI news, AWS introduced Amazon Nova Web Grounding (blog post here), which lets Nova models ground responses with real-time, web-retrieved context. Meanwhile, Stability AI’s Image Services added four new editing tools to Bedrock, and the Bedrock AgentCore Browser preview now includes Web Bot Auth, which reduces CAPTCHAs when your AI goes browsing the web. The machines can finally click all the crosswalks and stoplights for us. What could possibly go wrong? 🤷‍♂️

A few smaller but solid quality-of-life updates: Amazon S3 added conditional writes for copy operations, and Amazon Cognito removed the Machine-to-Machine app client price dimension. This should make your backend apps a little cheaper.

Also, Valkey 9.0 dropped recently, ushering in “the next generation of caching.” It’s fast, open, and looks like the future for anyone still mourning the Redis license change.

Tutorials

• Organization-wide EventBridge broadcasting by Marcin Sodkiewicz
• How I Made an MCP Server That Saves Me an Hour Per Week by Kaslin Fields
• You Don’t Need Ordered Events, You Need Smart Events by Jason Conway-Williams
• Do You Really Need a Staging Environment? by Marco Troisi
• Preventing Breaking Changes in Event-Driven Systems with Contracts and Validation by Rashwan Lazkani
• Micronaut 4 application on AWS Lambda- Part 7 Measuring Lambda cold and warm starts with GraalVM Native Image and REST API by Vadym Kazulkin
• How To: Better Serverless Chat on AWS over WebSockets by Marko Djakovic
• You Don’t Need a NAT: A $30 to $0 AWS story by Nikesh Kazi

Reads

• Building a better testing experience for Workflows, our durable execution engine for multi-step applications by Olga Silva and Mia Malden
• Why We Switched from Amazon DynamoDB to Postgres on Aurora Serverless v2 by Antoine Berger
• Rust on AWS Lambda, an honest return of experience by Loïc Labeye

Podcasts, Videos, and more

Getting your AI spec right! | Serverless Office Hours
Learn how to get the best out of your AI coding with specs. Erik Hanchett and Eric Johnson show how to bring structure to AI coding with spec-driven development.

New from AWS

• Amazon ECS now supports built-in Linear and Canary deployments
• TwelveLabs’ Pegasus 1.2 model now available in three additional AWS regions
• Split Cost Allocation Data for Amazon EKS supports Kubernetes labels
• AWS Config now supports 52 new resource types
• Amazon Kinesis Data Streams launches On-demand Advantage mode
• AWS Step Functions announces a new metrics dashboard
• Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator now supports AWS PrivateLink
• TwelveLabs’ Marengo Embed 3.0 for advanced video understanding now in Amazon Bedrock
• AWS Config launches 42 new managed rules

Developer Tools

CDK Booster
Speed up AWS CDK's bundling of TypeScript/JavaScript Lambda handlers

AWS Lambda Stubs for unit testing by Ricardo Cino
Providing stubs for all AWS Lambda invocation types for easy unit testing

Upcoming Events 🗓

November 19, 2025 - DynamoDB Day

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

Please send me your serverless events!

Final Thoughts 🤔

Is it just me, or were the pre:Invent announcements a bit underwhelming so far this year? Hope you're all getting ready for re:Invent, because there are some serverless announcements that should knock your conference swag socks off.

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.