Off-by-none: Issue #345

November 25, 2025

Now that's the pre:Invent I was waiting for! 🚀

In our previous issue, Bedrock AgentCore went full YOLO, Lambda boosted SQS throughput, and Redshift embraced Iceberg tables. This week, Anthropic drops Opus 4.5, AWS unloads a tsunami of pre:Invent announcements, and CloudFront quietly rolls out one of the most disruptive pricing changes in years. Plus, we've got plenty of awesome content from the serverless and cloud community!

News & Announcements

Before we get to the pre:Invent announcements, we should first mention that Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5 this past week. It's a third the price of its 4.1 predecessor, it's faster, and it's measurably more capable at a number of different tasks. I'm glad I'm a Max 20x plan user.

And speaking of Opus 4.5, Claude Opus 4.5 is now available in Amazon Bedrock.

Pre:Invent came a little late this year, but good things come to those who wait. AWS Lambda announced a new tenant isolation mode to simplify building tenant-aware applications (read the official blog here). This is incredibly useful for serverless SaaS companies. Also, Amazon API Gateway now supports response streaming for REST APIs, letting you ditch the Lambda fURLs in favor of a more functional (albeit more expensive) approach. And Amazon API Gateway REST APIs now support private integration with Application Load Balancer so you no longer have to stick an NLB between them.

One that hasn't gotten much attention, but seems huge to me, is flat-rate pricing plans for website delivery and security launched under the CloudFront service brand. For $0/mth you get a lot, including plenty of bandwidth, storage, DDoS protection, and serverless-edge function executions to support a commercial site or even a small SaaS. Compute fees still apply.

Beyond tenant isolation, Lambda had several other announcements worth looking at. They added Kafka event source mapping integration in the Amazon MSK Console, enhanced error handling capabilities for Kafka event processing, and added a new feature for ESM Provisioned mode that can optimize costs up to 90%. And AWS Lambda added support for Python 3.14, which is less than two months after it was released. Is that a new record? 😉

In database land, DynamoDB now supports multi-attribute composite keys in global secondary indexes. I outlined some of the goodness that this feature brings in a LinkedIn post, but the TL;DR is that this is an incredibly useful feature. Aurora DSQL got some nice quality-of-life improvements. Statement-level cost estimates in query plans lets you avoid all those costly queries (but I know you're still gonna run them), there's now an integrated query editor in the AWS Management Console, and they launched new Python, Node.js, and JDBC Connectors that simplify IAM authorization.

In other big pre:Invent news, you can now build production-ready applications without infrastructure complexity using Amazon ECS Express Mode. But unlike App Runner, you need to pay for the load balancer. AWS Step Functions enhanced Local Testing with a new TestState API, Amazon S3 now supports attribute-based access control, and AWS CloudFormation StackSets now supports deployment ordering.

And the CloudFormation team didn't stop there! They are accelerating the dev-test cycle with early validation and simplified troubleshooting on change set creation, plus they launched the AWS CloudFormation Language Server that lets you add intelligent authoring in IDEs. But my favorite new CloudFormation feature is the ability to safely handle configuration drift with drift-aware change sets! Total game changer.

Sick of jumping between payer accounts to manage your AWS bills? Now you can use the new Billing Transfer feature for multi-organization billing and cost management. Also, AWS Organizations introduced direct account transfers between organizations, making it so much easier to move accounts between orgs without removing them first.

And it wouldn't be re:Invent without the launch of new Well-Architected Lenses including an updated Machine Learning Lens and an updated Generative AI Lens.

Yan Cui (aka theburningmonk) shared the biggest pre:invent serverless announcements you may have missed, Cloudflare explains their November 18, 2025 outage, and Serverless, Inc. announced improved Python support, merging plugins into core, and more.

In a world where AI can generate ten hypotheses before you finish one dashboard query, speed becomes your only advantage. Honeycomb gives both humans and AI agents the clarity and immediacy required to diagnose issues before users ever notice, perfectly aligning with the growing view that the old observability model simply can’t keep up with AI-driven systems. Sponsored

Tutorials

Reads

Podcasts, Videos, and more

New from AWS

There were way too many announcements to list them all, but here are some of the ones that piqued my interest (and maybe yours). I've categorized them to make them a bit more digestible.

AI & ML

Databases, Storage, and Data Management

Security

Networking & App Integration

Cost Management

Upcoming Events 🗓

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

Please send me your serverless events!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I hope you're all doing well and are excited to finish the year out strong. I wrote a post for the CloudZero blog this past week titled: IA for AI: Rethinking How We Store, Surface, And Share Data In A Conversational World. It's forward looking, but somehow after only a few days removed from writing it, it seems even closer now. Crazy how fast things are moving, and I don't think it'll slow down any time soon.

On that note, as I was reviewing the AWS announcements from this past week, the pace of releases seemed higher than normal. Maybe it's because they weren't spread over October and November like they usually are, or perhaps it's something more. I know I've already said this, but I've been more productive in the last several months than I've ever been. I rarely get enough time to enter a flow state, but when I do, I come out the other end feeling like I moved a mountain. If all I did was "write code", I can't even imagine how much progress I'd make. Maybe the AWS developers are figuring this out too?

Even when I only get a few minutes, I no longer spend half of that time trying to get back on task. If I forget where I was or what I was doing, I simply ask the agent what I was working on and we pick up right where we left off. Don't get me wrong, I definitely think we're in an AI bubble, but I also think it's not going to burst the same way others have in the past. There will be a correction, but there is something incredibly real here that will change everything.

Hope to see you at re:Invent,
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.

Previous Issue

Issue #344 • November 18, 2025

Sign up for the Newsletter

Stay up to date on using serverless to build modern applications in the cloud. Get insights from experts, product releases, industry happenings, tutorials and much more, every week!

 

This Week's Sponsor

Check out all of our amazing sponsors and find out how you can help spread the #serverless word by sponsoring an issue.

 

About the Author

Jeremy is the Director of Research at CloudZero, founder of Ampt, and an AWS Serverless Hero that has a soft spot for helping people solve problems using the cloud. You can find him ranting about serverless and cloud on Bluesky, LinkedIn, X, the Serverless Chats podcast, and at conferences around the world.

 

Nominate a Serverless Star

Off-by-none is committed to celebrating the diversity of the serverless community and recognizing the people who make it awesome. If you know of someone doing amazing things with serverless, please nominate them to be a Serverless Star ⭐️!