#20 Powertools 🔥
This week, our expert is Serverless Worldwide Tech Leader Joshua Kahn, our spotlight falls on AWS Powertools SA Leandro Damascena, we look at the latest AWS service releases, blog posts, news & more!
Welcome
In last week’s issue, our serverless expert was AWS Serverless Hero Yan Cui, and our spotlight fell on AWS Community Builder Benoît Bouré!
This week, our serverless expert is AWS Serverless Worldwide Tech Leader Joshua Khan, our spotlight falls on AWS Lambda Powertools Specialist SA Leandro Damascena, we look at the latest AWS service releases, blog posts, hints and tips, news and more!
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Leighton.
A Glimpse into My Week 🎤
This week, I was mainly focusing on knowledge gaps for the AWS DevOps Pro certification renewal, which after an intense 3 hour exam I passed with almost 800/1000! That’s both professional certifications renewed in quick succession!
That’s now all 7 certifications renewed, and even though I promised myself no more until 2028, I have started on the AI/ML route! (Glutton for punishment!)
📰 Articles that caught the eye
Here are some of the stand-out articles I read through during the week.
⭐ My favourite this week was the article by Benoît on invoking Private API Gateways:
Zac Charles wrote an interesting article on Caching ‘AWS CDK Docker Builds’.
Vadym Kazulkin covered how he became an AWS Serverless Hero in this great article.
Benoît Bouré wrote a great article on ‘Invoking Private API Gateway Endpoints From Step Functions’.
Jake Bazin discusses ‘Lambda vs Fargate in Modern Architectures: Exploring the Trade-Offs’.
🎓 Ask the Expert
Each week, I ask a different serverless expert the same three questions to get their personal insights - this week, we have AWS Serverless Tech Leader Joshua Khan
1. What is one common mistake you see teams making when implementing serverless solutions, and how can they avoid it?
I'll echo Yan's response from an earlier issue of your newsletter: trying to do too much at once. I encourage teams I work with to narrow their scope. Allow time to internalize event-driven patterns.
Along the same lines, start with a runtime that your development team can be most productive with. I've worked with a number of customers who either got bogged down choosing a runtime or were slowed by ramping up their developers on a new programming language. Start with what you know and build up successes.
Customers new to or contemplating Serverless still often worry about cold starts. My advice: don't sweat them too early. There are plenty of optimization options to minimize cold start latency if it becomes a concern later on.2. Which serverless tool or service are you most excited about right now, and why?
When Step Functions released variables and JSONata just before re:Invent, I quickly reworked a few workflows in the sample code for one of my breakout sessions. The combination of the two simplified the workflows significantly, I was surprised how many states I was able to remove.
AWS AppSync has long been one of my favorite services, since it was an alpha service. The team continues to add great new features. AppSync fits well with event-driven architectures and the subscription feature (and now AppSync Events) enable great frontend experiences.3. What is your favourite trick or tip when working with serverless that the readers may find interesting?
AWS SAM tends to be pigeon-holed to "serverless" development, but it can be used with any CloudFormation resource.
I'm also a big fan of Powertools for AWS Lambda. It simplifies so much. Though the Powertools devs might be getting tired of my Slack messages.
✅ Bonus tip: join the hashtag#believeinsls discord! There is a community there to answer any questions you may have without getting overzealous on serverless or without judgment! Check it out!
🚀 New Releases
Here are the latest releases this week in the AWS World:
⭐ The most interesting for me of course is the AWS Console multi sign-in feature which we have all waited years for!
AWS CodePipeline introduces new debugging experience in AWS Management Console.
The AWS Management Console now supports simultaneous sign-in for multiple AWS accounts.
Start collaborating on multi-partner opportunities with Partner Connections.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk adds additional Spot allocation strategies.
Amazon MSK announces support for additional Graviton-3 (m7g) instance sizes for Express Brokers.
AWS CodeBuild now supports batch builds with reserved capacity and Lambda compute.
🔥 Tip: Check out https://aws-news.com/ for the very latest up-to-date serverless releases as they happen, created by the talented AWS Serverless Hero Luc van Donkersgoed.
👷🏻 Tools & Frameworks
Check out the latest open-source frameworks, news, and tool updates from the past week.
David Boyne is working on a dashboard for Event Catalog which I am excited to see.
The Express.JS team talk about the future of the framework for 2025 and beyond!
💡 Hints & Tips
Each week I share quick hints or tips based on things I notice in day-to-day engineering life. This week I am shaking it up a bit with having renewed the DevOps Pro certification this week, so thought I would share what works for me when taking AWS certifications:
⭐ [Tip 1] Learning Content - Having taken 7 AWS certifications so far, and passed all of them first time with flying colours, I would say the best learning content out there is the content on Udemy by Stephane Maarek (hands down!). If you couple his courses with real hands-on work you should pass any certification in my opinion.
⭐ [Tip 2] Exam Approach - When taking any of the AWS professional exams, the first thing you will notice is your time being swallowed up! 3 hours is a long time, but you also need to contend with 75 very long questions with equally as long answers!
My approach that seems to work well:
Scan the question for key pieces of information and ignore the ‘fluff’. Look for words like ‘most scalable’ or most ‘cost-effective’.
There are typically four options to choose from, where you can typically discount two straight away. Do this, and focus your time between the two remaining answers.
Go with your gut after doing the above. Don’t sit on one question for 4-5 minutes. What I do is select the answer you think is correct and flag it to come back to at the end. You won’t be penalised for wrong answers, and you don’t want to run out of time having not even attempted it.
✖️ Social of the Week
This week I’m going to go with this banger of a Dad joke with a twist of engineering!
I rarely use one of my posts, and it’s even more rare I say something remotely funny! 🤣
🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts
Here are some of my favourite videos and podcasts this week.
⭐ My favourite this week is the session ran at GOTO by Henrik Kniberg, check it out!
James Eastham covers ‘The Simplest Way To Deploy Your Containerized .NET Applications on Azure’.
Henrik Kniberg discusses AI-Powered Software Development From the Trenches through GOTO.
Dave Farley covers ‘Acceptance Testing Is the FUTURE of Programming’.
AWS Developers channel discusses ‘What Do We Want From LLMs?: Agents and Tool Use’.
Weekly Case Study 🔍
This week’s case study covers Amanote, and how they optimised their note-taking app for learners, handling millions of queries on AWS.
Amanote, a Belgium-based EdTech company, built a scalable note-taking app for students on AWS, using serverless solutions like AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and API Gateway to support over 500,000 users in 50 countries. The app handles 1–3 million monthly queries per customer and automatically scales to accommodate 20,000 new users monthly. This case study is worth a read!
🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts
This week’s inspirational quote comes from author Rebecca Parsons:
“Evolutionary architecture became a necessity, not because anybody wanted it to be, but because you didn't have a choice.
You have to be able to change your systems to keep up with changing business and consumer expectations, let alone regulatory frameworks.”
- Rebecca Parsons (Coauthor of "Building Evolutionary Architectures")
The reason this quote resonates with me is the fact I spend so much time evangelising evolutionary architecture. The key take here is “you don’t have a choice”, meaning the only constant is change, and the only way to succeed is to adapt to the change.
🗳️ Poll of the Week
In last week’s poll, we asked the question “Is Infrastructure from Code (IfC) a step too far as an abstraction?“. The results showed that 55% said yes, 36% said no, and 9% said maybe.
I am very much in the yes camp, as it has always felt like an abstraction too far for me - similar to how I feel with non-IfC services like Amplify and App Composer.
This week, we ask the question “Is it imperative that a serverless engineer’s skills include architecture, DevOps, QA, backend, and Ops?“.
Let me know if you have any thoughts in the comments:
📅 Serverless Events
The following serverless events are upcoming, so mark your calendars:
ServerlessDays Manchester 2025 - 20th Feb 2025
AWS Community Day Italy - 2nd April 2025
AWS Community Day Romania - 10th April 2025
AWS Community Day Turkey - 19th April 2025
⭐ Spotlight
This week’s spotlight falls on AWS Lambda Powertools Specialist SA Leandro Damascena!
Leandro is a blogger, open-source specialist, and Principal Solutions Architect on the AWS Lambda Powertools team!
Leandro is one of the driving forces behind the AWS Lambda Powertools package that almost all of us use in our serverless solutions daily! If it wasn’t for the amazing work of Leandro and the team we would need to manually install and configure tracing, logging, idempotency, metrics, and more!
👋🏼 Wrapping Up
Thank you for reading the latest Serverless Advocate Newsletter!
If you want to find out a little more about me, please have a look at:
https://www.serverlessadvocate.com/
See you next time,
Lee
