Off-by-none: Issue #350

January 6, 2026

Happy Serverless New Year! 🥂

In our previous issue, Lambda durable functions went global, more cloud databases showed up where developers actually wanted them, and we finally said goodbye to 2025. This week, we ring in the new year, speculate on the future of AI and serverless, and share some posts from folks who stayed productive over the holiday.

News & Announcements

The last two weeks were predictably quiet, at least from an AWS serverless perspective. There were other big stories, like xAI raising $20B in a Series E round and humanoid robots that can do your laundry, but the most interesting announcement out of AWS was that the NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B model is now available on Amazon Bedrock. Not sure how great it is yet, but it's got a huge context window and is really inexpensive.

That's basically it, but I'm sure things will pick up again next week.

Tutorials

• Serverless applications with Java and Aurora DSQL - Part 3 Integrated query editor by Vadym Kazulkin
• Composite SLOs for Serverless Event-Driven Systems by Nabin Debnath
• Stop Building Chatbots: The Case for Infrastructure-Driven AI Agents by Ayman Aly Mahmoud
• Using Amazon Transcribe to Generate Accessible Captions for Video Content by Anisat Ahmed
• Voice Agents with Amazon Nova Sonic by N Chandra Prakash Reddy
• Building a Secure, Serverless Multi-Tenant RAG Chatbot with Amazon Bedrock and Lambda by Vimal Paliwal
• AWS Lambda Managed Instances (Part 2 - Cost) by Brian McNamara
• Understanding AWS Lambda Durable Functions by Manoj Fernando
• The Myth of ‘Just Connect Lambda to RDS’ by Steven Leung
• 9 Serverless Anti-Patterns That Will Tank Your Production Apps (And How I Learned to Avoid Them) by Ahmad Jawad
• Monitoring Third-Party Webhook Delays with AWS Durable Functions by Javier Mendoza
• Serverless ML on AWS: How I Cut Inference Costs by 99% with Lambda & ONNX by Cristopher Coronado
• Storing Sensitive Information in DynamoDB with KMS by Sebastian

Reads

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail
Eyal Estrin shares a great reminder that cloud, Kubernetes, serverless, and even GenAI only work when they’re applied in service of real constraints and business goals, not trends.

Serverless Cloud Architecture Is Failing Modern AI Agents
Abigail Wall claims serverless is failing for AI agents, but it overstates limits that many real-world systems already work around and misses that smart patterns (not ripping out serverless) are what actually solve these edge cases.

2025: The Year Agentic AI Got Real (What Comes Next)
I agree that 2025 feels like the year agentic AI got practical, and while MCP is clearly maturing, it's far from being the ultimate solution.

On Friday Deploys: Sometimes that Puppy Needs Murdering
Charity Majors seemingly softens her long-held stance on Friday deploys here, but still lands the key point: deploy freezes aren’t a virtue, they’re a workaround for systems and processes that aren’t as safe or predictable as they should be.

API Platform Unkey Ditches Serverless After Performance Struggles
This feels less like a general indictment of serverless and more like one workload hitting real limits that many teams already work around in practice. It can't be treated like a silver bullet.

Podcasts, Videos, and more

• Amazon API Gateway response streaming | Serverless Office Hours
• DEV Track Spotlight: Breakout Sessions & Code Talks from AWS re:Invent 2025
• DEV Track Spotlight: Building Scalable, Self-Orchestrating AI Workflows with A2A and MCP (DEV415)
• DEV Track Spotlight: Serverless Full-Stack in Action: AI-Driven Developer Experience (DEV309)

New from AWS

• Amazon ECS now supports tmpfs mounts on AWS Fargate and ECS Managed Instances
• AWS Config now supports 21 new resource types
• Amazon MQ now supports HTTP based authentication for RabbitMQ brokers
• AWS Secrets Manager announces improved secret sorting capabilities
• Amazon Redshift supports four new materialized view (MV) features on data shares

Developer Tools

Open Source Serverless Product Analytics on AWS by Sebastian

Security

How I Autoban Hackers Who Touch My Secret URLs by Ben Subendran

Final Thoughts 🤔

Welcome to 2026, and here's to hoping this one will be better than the last! 🙂

I spent the last two weeks diving into some hands-on experiments to boost my productivity with AI. I created a Stream Deck plugin that connects to Claude Code’s hook system for real-time alerts with a single button tap to take me directly to the correct VS Code instance. And I built a little Swift app that pushes those same alerts straight into my Mac’s Notification Center. I’ve also been working on local model fine-tuning and head training to tailor AI behaviors to exactly what I need. This was all part of some experiments around intent parsing and voice controls. It was surprisingly therapeutic. Every small win made me feel like I was freeing up more time in the future.

I read a post that was shared with me about The Future of Coding Agents, and while it's a little all over the place, his Figure 2, "Evolution of the Programmer, 2024–2026" seems spot on. If you haven't embraced this future yet, now's the time.

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.