reInvent brings in some Lambda updates 🚀☁️ #92
DevOps Agent, AWS Transform, and the list goes on...
In the previous issue, It’s almost reInvent with a good pre:Invent week 🚀☁️ #91 close look at tenant isolation and more updates.
AWS Lambda Durable Functions are capable of building reliable, long-running, multi-step applications and AI workflows without needing to manage complex external orchestration or state.
Reliable Multi-Step Workflows: Enables you to define complex processes (like order processing, user onboarding, or multi-step AI tasks) directly within the Lambda function code.
Automatic Checkpointing & Recovery: The function’s progress is automatically saved (checkpointed). If the function fails or is interrupted, it can automatically resume from the last known checkpoint, strengthening application resilience.
Long-Running Execution: Functions can suspend execution and wait for up to one year for long-running tasks or external events (like human approval or an API callback).
No Compute Charges for Waiting: When the function is paused (
waits), you do not incur compute charges, making long-running workflows highly cost-efficient.Simplified Development: You use familiar programming language constructs and new operations like
“steps”and“waits”via an open-source SDK, eliminating the need to write custom state management or integrate with additional infrastructure.Built-in Error Handling: It provides automatic retries and recovery from failures.
⭐ Pick of the month
This month’s Pick is “Lambda Tips & Tricks“.
Lee Gilmore shares webhooks on AWS Lambda - Tips and Tricks with the patterns of EDA and how Lambda PowerTools plays for an advantage for idempotency.
Jones Zachariah Noel N (author) explains different factors which can account for maintaining Lambda function performance during peak traffic and how ALBs and API Gateway play a role in this architecture choice.
🚀 AWSome content to learn from
Steef-Jan Wiggers writes about how Durable Functions: Stateful logic directly on Lambda Code shifts the way you build stateful flows with human or external event approvals in Lambda functions.
Chris Dobson, in a 2-part series on Durable Functions explains workflow orchestration with aspects of how you can test and retest the workflow be it with parallel failures and retries.
Hector Zelaya’s blog When Does a Serverless MVP Approach Work Best? talks about the MVP with Serverless that digs into the hidden costs and also gives you some must-know trade-offs.
Denise Ignatova debunks DynamoDB Primary-Composite keys when you find yourself in a situation requiring you to modify a composite sort key explaining the complications of composite sort keys.
Tim Anderson reflects on AWS shows Rust love at re:Invent: 10 times faster than Kotlin, one tenth the latency of Go with Lambda Functions now supporting Rust with Amazon Linux 2023 OS runtime.
Chodavarapu Naga Viswanadha Avinash shares how New Relic’s Lambda Extension moved from Go to Rust for better performance, reliablity and cost efficiency.
Ran Isenberg’s AWS re:Invent 2025: My Serverless & Agentic AI Takeaways reflects on the pre:Invent and re:Invent announcements that went from the traditional SQS payload increase to agentic AI.
Yan Cui reflects on the biggest re:Invent 2025 serverless announcements from Lambda to S3 and even CloudFront services, and how Lambda has been reinventing!!
⚒️ What's happening with Serverless tools, samples, and projects
Marcin Sodkiewicz’s AWS Cost Estimator now supports Lambda Managed Instances.
Sedai Support for AWS Lambda Managed Instances.
Testing Locally with Lambda Managed Instances using LocalStack.
🎙️ Podcasts, videos and live-streams
On AWS Bytes, Eoin Shanaghy and Luciano Mammino take on ECS Managed Instances Mode.
Sandro Volpicella on Centralized Alerting with CloudWatch, EventBridge, Lambda, and CDK
On Cloud Dialogues, Matt Gillard and Georgia Smith join Michael Walmsley - AWS ReInvent 2025 Wrapped.
Some of the reInvent sessions -
DynamoDB: Resilience & lessons from the Oct 2025 service disruption by Craig Howard.
What’s new with AWS Lambda by Janak Agarwal.
Deep dive on AWS Lambda durable functions with Michael Gasch and Eric Johnson
🗓️ Mark your calendars
Believe in Serverless’ AWS Anti-Patterns That Will Cost You Later with Danielle Heberling.
AWS Community Days are happening -
ACD Kochi on December 20th, 2025.
ACD Israel on January 15th, 2026.
📢 What's new in Serverless
AWS Lambda announces durable functions for multi-step applications and AI workflows.
AWS launches AWS Transform custom to accelerate organization-wide application modernization.
Announcing AWS Lambda Managed Instances, a capability to run functions on your Amazon EC2 instances.
Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL now supports integration with Kiro powers.
Announcing Database Savings Plans with up to 35% savings.
Amazon S3 increases the maximum object size to 50 TB.
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore now includes Policy (preview), Evaluations (preview) and more.
Amazon S3 Tables now support automatic replication of Apache Iceberg tables.
Amazon S3 Vectors is now generally available with 40 times the scale of preview.
AWS Security Agent (Preview): AI agent for proactive app security.
Introducing AWS DevOps Agent (preview), frontier agent for operational excellence.
Amazon API Gateway adds MCP proxy support.
Amazon S3 Tables now offer the Intelligent-Tiering storage class.
Introducing Amazon Route 53 Global Resolver for secure anycast DNS resolution (preview).
Announcing TypeScript support in Strands Agents (preview) and more.
👨💻 Word from the author
Thanks for the support and let’s share more about Serverless!!!
If you are attending AWS re:Invent 2025, look forward to meeting you in-person!! I’ll be there, shoot me a message on LinkedIn.
I’m open to feedback, so feel free to DM me on LinkedIn for any queries about AWS or Serverless.
If you are looking for any guidance or assistance with learning Serverless, my LinkedIn DMs are open for a chat!
Stay tuned and share with Serverless enthusiasts. Follow The Serverless Terminal on X (formerly Twitter) and Blog.
Until next time, happy building on Serverless!
This roundup is packed with gems! The Durable Functions "no compute charges for waiting" feature is a game-changer—we've been paying for idle Step Functions in approval workflows and this basically makes that entire cost categroy disappear. The ability to suspend for up to a year shifts how we think about asynchornous processes entirely. I'm curious how checkpoint recovery handles partial failures in parallel branches, but this is definitely the most impactful Lambda update this year!