Title: Issue #175: Is serverless enough? Publication: Ready, Set, Cloud! Series: Ready, Set, Cloud Picks of the Week Author: Allen Helton Published: August 04, 2025 URL: https://www.readysetcloud.io/newsletter/175/ Lots of questions last week making us wonder if 100% serverless systems are really a goal we should be shooting for. ### 🦸 Serverless Superhero Our serverless superhero this week is [Jason Butz](https://rdyset.click/AyVEC8), senior architect at Republic Airways and AWS Community Builder. Jason is a great writer, sharing high-quality content through his blog posts. He's also active in the tech community - helping others figure out their problems and sharing his experience. Thank you for enabling others and for teaching us your hard-earned lessons, Jason! ### 💯 Spotlight I've read quite a few existential serverless blog posts over the past few years, but I think [Seth Orell](https://rdyset.click/sVhi5H)'s [Serverless is not a primary](https://rdyset.click/GYu2SY) post from last week might be my favorite. Existential might be a bit strong of a word here, but it's a wonderful article describing that simply "going serverless" is not the answer to all your problems. Quite the opposite, in fact. It reminds me of a series that [Sheen Brisals](https://rdyset.click/h78U5M) did a while back tamping the magic bullet mentality buzz would have you believe. Great stuff, please read this one! ### 🔥 My Favorite Content For whatever reason, I really like seeing engineers post their GitHub activity grid at the end of the year. Heatmaps are fun and they give you a quick view at data you'd otherwise spend minutes reading and likely not comprehending. Last week, [Gabriel Koo](https://rdyset.click/bw0HBn) shared a blog post of a project he made with Kiro that [shows dev.to blog engagement in GitHub grid style](https://rdyset.click/pfRkOz). While I don't particularly like the heavy AI influence in the authoring of the article, I thought the project was pretty cool. Looking at this end-to-end, it's interesting to see how fast we can move with AI. From analyzing the problem, to coding the solution, to even writing the recap. This is a type of enablement like we've never seen before, and I view this article as a perfect case study into the types of things we can do these days. AWs recently released S3 Vector Store, but I didn't see much hype around it besides a few "this is cool" remarks. But [Brian Tarbox](https://rdyset.click/uzW7sd) picked up on its importance and published an article last week discussing at length the [lessons from the vector store and nuance of using it at scale](https://rdyset.click/ypYPYv). This is an incredibly thoughtful article, covering S3 Vector Store from every angle you need as a software architect. He compares it to other stores like OpenSearch and Pinecone, and tells you what it's good for and more importantly - what it's not good for. Fantastic write-up! Good ol' [James Eastham](https://rdyset.click/zsXOmK) decided last week would be a good time to stir the serverless vs containers pot. But as polarizing as "[Serverless vs Containers... You Decide](https://rdyset.click/xtGZhE)" sounds, he does a pretty good job at staying objective and explaining the situation we find ourselves in at this point in time. He makes a couple of pretty bold claims toward the end of the video, which I love, but I won't spoil them because this is worth the watch. ### 💡 Tip of the Week I had several "a ha!" moments last week reading this post on AI agent building shared by [Carlota Soto](https://rdyset.click/0LoMTx). Following the points she shared is the difference between hacking away on a POC and building robust, production-ready systems. ### 🐣 New Releases AWS released [DocumentDB Serverless](https://rdyset.click/lJzrNc), a new configuration for DocumentDB. I won't go into the same arguments we've had for Aurora and other "serverless" flavors of services. I'll just be happy with the dynamically scalable option that now exists 🙃 Amazon SES just introduced [tenant isolation](https://rdyset.click/ll0tqi) allowing you to segment email sends to virtual tenants. This means you could build multi-tenant systems on SES and not have one bad actor ruin your entire reputation. S3 Access Points now support [tags for ABAC](https://rdyset.click/Ua9NH1). Now you can use tags for access control to simplify how you grow your application. ### Last Words Last week I attended Momento's [(Buffer-Free Video)^AI Conference](https://rdyset.click/nkwPrT) in Seattle. It was a truly engaging experience and eye-opening to see all the real production scenarios massive video companies are solving with AI. From audio-track isolation to repainting a scene in an uploaded video, there's so much that goes into making whimsical experiences for users I just had no idea about. Videos will be up in a couple of weeks for the talks, I'll be sure to share them! That's my take on the week, but what's yours? What did I miss? What made you nod along (or 🙄)? Hit reply if you're reading the email. Prefer socials? Ping me on [Twitter](https://rdyset.click/SEZTFx), [LinkedIn](https://rdyset.click/LRlpbr), or [email](mailto:allenheltondev@gmail.com). Happy coding! Allen