I was wondering if it was possible to deploy without automatic instrumentation. Maybe in cases where we would like to minimize overhead, or where a client wants to use its own libs. Or if it could be an issue getting the organization to allow serverless.com access to its information.
Is it possible?
You absolutely can. Remove the org and app settings from your serverless.yml and then make sure you have the AWS access key and secret available in whatever environment you are deploying from. This page should help you decide how you want to manage those credentials: https://serverless.com/framework/docs/providers/aws/guide/credentials/
I prefer the use of serverless config credentials command myself because I usually work on multiple AWS accounts. Then when it comes to deploying from my local machine, I can choose which account to deploy too using --aws-profile option.