#21 Productivity 🧠

This week, our expert is AWS Community Builder Zied Ben Tahar, our spotlight falls on AWS Chief Evangelist (EMEA) Danilo Poccia, we look at the latest AWS service releases, blog posts, news & more!

Jan 24, 2025

Welcome

In last week’s issue, our serverless expert was AWS Serverless Worldwide Tech Leader Joshua Khan, and our spotlight fell on AWS Lambda Powertools Specialist SA Leandro Damascena!
This week, our serverless expert is AWS Community Builder Zied Ben Tahar, our spotlight falls on AWS Chief Evangelist (EMEA) Danilo Poccia, 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 had fun creating a quick and basic MVP app called Cloud Cards which allows me to share micro-learning topics quickly across areas such as Patterns, CI/CD, Engineering and Domain-Driven Design (DDD).

I’m hoping it may help individuals bridge the gaps in their knowledge about fundamental key areas I feel all engineers, architects and builders should know.

What might I add next? ♠️

Embedded Video.
Diagrams and images.
Bookmark interesting cards.
More categories (AWS, AI and EDA)
Embedded code snippets.
Call to actions per card i.e. next steps in learning

Let me know if you find it fun and useful! Also, what is missing feature-wise? Reach out and let me know!

📰 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 Marko building a chat solution with AppSync Events!

🎓 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 Community Builder Zied Ben Tahar:

1. What is one common mistake you see teams making when implementing serverless solutions, and how can they avoid it?
Building applications using serverless architectures has an incredible superpower: It enables teams to iterate faster, adds flexibility, and helps architecture evolve quickly. However, it’s easy to make some common mistakes, especially for those new to the serverless paradigm. I actually want to discuss about two mistakes I’ve seen some teams make:
Keeping IaC Separate from application code
I’m a strong advocate for developers having full ownership of the IaC for their applications, with DevOps engineers playing a supporting role to help teams grow. I’ve seen teams split responsibilities, with DevOps engineers managing application IaC while developers focus solely on the application code (e.g., the code running inside Lambda functions). While this may work in traditional setups, it can hinder collaboration in serverless solutions. Sometimes, services are built with direct integrations — like API Gateway to DynamoDB, service-to-service integration with EventBridge Pipes, or even Step Functions — making IaC an integral part of the service definition. Rigidly splitting roles can create bottlenecks.
Overlooking the distributed systems challenges
Building event-driven architectures with services like Lambda functions, SQS, and EventBridge, among others, is common, but aspects such as eventual consistency, message ordering, idempotency, and defining system technical boundaries can be overlooked. Observability is another concern: without proper logging, tracing, and metrics, understanding system behavior becomes challenging. Finally, unit testing the application code alone isn’t sufficient. I generally recommend shifting toward integration testing that include all service components.
My Takeaway
All of these come with their own share of cognitive load, so I recommend taking a balanced and iterative approach to keep things manageable. That's why I also recommend identifying and standardizing patterns into reusable modules (e.g. high-level CDK or Terraform constructs) that can be leveraged when relevant, helping reduce complexity. Start simple. Focus on addressing your immediate business requirements, but don’t overlook critical aspects like extensibility, observability, IaC, and cost monitoring. Serverless has the potential to accelerate development workflows, but don’t let the "simplicity" lure you into accidental complexity!
2. Which serverless tool or service are you most excited about right now, and why?
Aurora DSQL was mentioned in previous issues by Vadym Kazulkin and Rehan van der Merwe, and I’m also excited about the Aurora DSQL Database. It’s a very welcome addition to the AWS database ecosystem. DynamoDB remains an awesome database but solutions can sometimes become complicated, particularly when dealing with single-table design or when advanced access patterns are necessary. Aurora DSQL simplifies application design while staying fully serverless, offering more straightforward solutions for developers. I’m eager to follow further updates on Aurora DSQL.
I am also excited about Cargo Lambda. I started using Rust with Lambda last year, and I was impressed by how good the developer experience was. This has made my Rust journey with Lambda smooth sailing.
3. What is your favourite trick or tip when working with serverless that the readers may find interesting?
I recently needed to run some ad-hoc analytics queries on data stored in a DynamoDB table. I used a new service announced at re:Invent 2024, Glue Zero ETL, which helps replicate DynamoDB tables to Iceberg tables and makes the data available for querying in Athena. The setup was quite easy. I also wrote a blog post about it, which you can find here.

✅ 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 this week is the cross-account Amazon EventBridge release where you no longer need to go bus to bus! I would however suggest people still follow the bus-to-bus pattern to keep a level of governance and standards in place across their organisations.

A cross-team collaboration sending events from source account to target account targets. — https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/introducing-cross-account-targets-for-amazon-eventbridge-event-buses/

🔥 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.

💡 Hints & Tips

Each week I share quick hints or tips based on things I notice in day-to-day engineering life. This week, we focus on productivity hacks.

⭐ [Tip 1] The Second Brain 🧠 - this is a fantastic approach from Luca Mezzalira to organising the digital deluge, notes, tasks, and sheer amount of juggling of meetings and content producing that we all try to manage daily.

I had been managing everything purely through three Google Keep lists previously which was not the most effective way of managing my time, thoughts, and writing. Time to buy myself an iPad too I think!

⭐ [Tip 2] IAM Permissions - how often are you working with AWS and need to start searching through the AWS documentation for a particular IAM permission for a given service so you can get the name and syntax correct?

This is where I have permissions.cloud bookmarked to quickly search for a given service, description or method to work with the AWS CLI, SDKs, IaC, or API. Check it out as it typically makes me more productive!

✖️ Social of the Week

This week’s social is on LinkedIn via the Tech Lead Journal podcast:

André Neubauer hits an important nuisance of where we are currently: AI is a tool to support us where we direct it using our own expertise, and we should not be taking the output verbatim into production apps.

I do worry that early practitioners are going to bypass the fundamentals of engineering and architecture now, and therefore will not have the expertise and knowledge to validate if generative AI output is correct, or the right quality for their solution requirements. It’s a topic I am keen to see play out over the coming years as AI enhancements and adoption increase.

💡 It was also highlighted in this great article this week by Justin Jackson where he states:
”When building a product, the overall experience you craft matters. You can't just duct tape together AI-generated code and build a solid UX. We've seen this with no-code builders and starter kits. To build something great, you need someone with expertise.”

🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts

Here are some of my favourite videos and podcasts this week.

⭐ My favourite this week was the session with Yan and David on EventCatalog and Wing which was a great watch!

EventCatalog revolutionises governance in Event-Driven Architecture with David Boyne and Yan Cui.

Weekly Case Study 🔍

This week’s case study comes from Gen, and how they achieved over 90% Accuracy for Norton Genie Scam Detection Using AWS Serverless and AI Services.

I love this case study as it highlights the power of serverless architecture in addressing real-world challenges with speed, scalability, and security, and the article shares the AWS architecture diagrams to see how they did it.

“We haven’t hit any scale limits since the application launched, we’ve been humming along with unbelievable stability, which has been fantastic”
- Michael Shavell, senior technical director.

Gen developed Norton Genie—a generative AI product to detect scams on AWS using services like Lambda, Step Functions, and DynamoDB. By designing a serverless, event-driven architecture, they rapidly prototyped in six weeks, scaled to handle over 500,000 submissions with sub-second response times, and achieved 90% scam detection accuracy.

🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts

This week’s inspirational quote comes from Engineer and Developer Advocate, Kelsey Hightower:

“You haven’t mastered a tool until you understand when it should not be used.”
- Kelsey Hightower

I love this quote, as the key AWS service that springs to mind when I hear this is DynamoDB! It is an amazing database technology (and a staple go-to), but I have found working at past companies AWS engineers see it as the only database technology to use for every use case. It’s only when they have truly hit the hard edges of it that they realise it should not be used for every use case.

🗳️ Poll of the Week

In last week’s poll, we asked the question “Is it imperative that a serverless engineer’s skills include architecture, DevOps, QA, backend, and Ops?“ which had 100% of respondents stating yes.

I have seen a few viral posts recently on LinkedIn where people are suggesting having those skills is like recruiting a full team, not an individual. I think they have maybe missed the boat on this one, as most engineers I have worked with over the past five years or so had all of those skills to varying levels.

This week, we ask the question, “What is your go-to service for building a central event platform on AWS?“. Please feel free to add comments below:

📅 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 Chief Evangelist (EMEA) Danilo Poccia:

Danilo is an author, international speaker, blogger, builder, writer, and Chief Evangelist at AWS, with a key focus on Serverless, IoT, and AI/ML. I have subscribed to Danilo’s posts on LinkedIn for some time now as they are an amazing source of information on everything from the latest AWS news, to open-source updates, to new service releases! I also loved his recent open-source contributions around AI testing with LLM Test Mate. Thank you for all you do, and have done for many years now for our wonderful community!

👋🏼 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

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