Off-by-none: Issue #349

December 23, 2025

Wrapping up 2025 🎁

In our previous issue, Aurora DSQL finally provisioned at serverless speed, ElastiCache Serverless unlocked safer distributed transactions, and the serverless AI ecosystem kept growing well beyond the bounds of AWS. This week, Lambda durable functions go global, cloud databases continue showing up everywhere developers actually want them, and we finally say goodbye to 2025. Plus, we have lots of serverless and cloud content from the community!

News & Announcements

AWS shipped a handful of useful updates this week, including a nice quality-of-life improvement for anyone working with container-based serverless workloads. Amazon ECR now supports creating repositories on push, removing one more manual setup step from the deployment flow.

On the Lambda side, durable functions are now available in 14 additional regions, finally making them GA beyond a single region. And for anyone sending email at scale, Amazon SES introduced built-in email validation, helping catch bad addresses earlier and pushing me one step closer to finally closing my SendGrid accounts.

AWS databases are now available on the Vercel Marketplace, making it easier for frontend-focused teams to pair modern web apps with managed data backends. At the same time, Cloudflare continues to push data closer to the edge with aggregation support in R2 SQL, expanding the kinds of workloads developers can realistically run there. And at the other end of the spectrum, Databricks raised $4B at a $134B valuation, underscoring just how central data platforms remain as AI adoption accelerates. More options, more integration points, and more choice still seems to be at the top of every developer's Christmas wish list.

Tutorials

• AWS Lambda on EC2 - Hands on report by Maik Wiesmüller
• Building an open warehouse architecture: Supabase’s integration with Amazon S3 Tables | Amazon Web Services by Riccardo Busetti, Andrew (Qingjie) Ren, Ameen Khan, Fabien Gaud, and Pritesh Patel
• Migrating your FastAPI app step by step to serverless by Steve Yonkeu
• The Death of Glue Code: Real-World Lessons from AWS Zero-ETL by Nabin Debnath
• AWS Kinesis 10MB Records vs Lambda: The Throughput Reality No One Tells You by Marcin Sodkiewicz
• Step Functions without ASL? Welcome Lambda Durable Functions by Andres Moreno
• Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway - Part 5 Adding API Gateway REST API as a target for Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway by Vadym Kazulkin
• Automatically Backing Up AWS Cognito User Pools by Furkan Gungor
• Debugging AWS API Gateway HTTP with OIDC-JWT authorizers by Luciano Mammino
• AWS Durable Functions vs Step Functions: Is Code-First Orchestration the New Standard? by Benjamin Ajewole
• Hands-On with AWS Lambda Durable Functions & Callback by Awedis Keofteian
• Tutorial: Getting Started with Spec-driven Development Using Kiro by Faye Ellis

Reads

Where Architects Sit in the Era of AI
AI isn’t replacing architects, but it is changing what good architecture looks like. This piece by Dave Holliday, João Carlos Gonçalves, and Manoj Kumar Yadav, reframes the role as less about drawing boxes and more about shaping constraints, feedback loops, and decision-making in an AI-augmented world.

Road to re:Invent Hackathon: How Not to Build a Serverless App
A painfully honest walkthrough of the mistakes we keep making with serverless, usually in the name of “moving fast.” If you’ve ever shipped something that technically worked but felt wrong, Allen Helton's story should hit close to home.

On the success of 'natural language programming'
Natural language isn’t replacing code, but it is becoming a powerful interface to it. Marc Brooker's essay does a great job separating what’s genuinely working from the hype we tend to project onto AI-driven development.

2025 was for AI what 2010 was for cloud
A sharp analogy from Charity Majors that puts the current AI moment into historical perspective. We’re still early, still clumsy, still arguing about primitives, and yes, "of COURSE there’s a f**king bubble." But the direction feels very familiar, and you'd be wise not to ignore it.

Kiro's Agentic IDE: Hype, Hope and Hard Truths
An honest take from Peter McAree on agentic IDEs that cuts through the hand-wavy demo fluff. There’s real potential here, but also real constraints that tools, and developers, can’t simply wish away.

Cold-Start Anti-Patterns and Refactorings in Serverless Systems: An Empirical Study
A long but valuable empirical study that turns cold starts from anecdotes into data. If you care about performance and design tradeoffs, this gives you real patterns to rethink, not just knobs to tweak.

We’re Already Living in a Post-Serverless World
A personal reflection on how serverless quietly faded into the background, exactly as it was supposed to. The more we stop arguing about what “counts” as serverless, the closer we get to the future it promised.

Podcasts, Videos, and more

• DEV Track Spotlight: The Builder's Job Is Not to Build: A Mindset for Better Outcomes (DEV347) with Ben Kehoe
• DEV Track Spotlight: Build modern applications with Amazon Aurora DSQL (DEV308) with Oleksii Ivanchenko and Vadym Kazulkin

New from AWS

• Amazon RDS enhances observability for snapshot exports to Amazon S3
• AWS IoT now offers event-based logging to help optimize observability costs
• Amazon CloudWatch extends automatic telemetry configuration to six critical AWS services
• Amazon SageMaker Studio now supports SOCI indexing for faster container startup times
• Announcing Cost Allocation Tags support for Account Tags
• Amazon ECS now enables you to define weekly event windows for scheduling task retirements on AWS Fargate
• Amazon Bedrock Data Automation launches instruction optimization for your document blueprints
• Amazon Route 53 launches detailed metrics for Resolver endpoints
• Amazon Aurora now supports PostgreSQL 17.7, 16.11, 15.15, 14.20 and 13.23
• Amazon Redshift Serverless announces the general availability of dual-stack mode supporting IPV6
• Amazon ECS Managed Instances now supports Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

Final Thoughts 🤔

Hey all! This will be the last issue of 2025, but we'll be back with more serverless and cloud goodness on January 6, 2026. For those of you who've been following along, I've had a hell of a year, so I'm looking forward to putting this one behind me and starting fresh in 2026.

Wishing you all a happy holiday season and a safe, healthy New Year. 🥂

See you next year,
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.