#22 DeepSeek Everywhere 🐋

This week, our expert is AWS Community Builder Pubudu Jayawardana, our spotlight falls on AWS Principal Developer Advocate Eric Johnson, we look at the latest AWS service releases, blog posts, & more!

Jan 31, 2025

Welcome

In last week’s issue, our serverless expert was AWS Community Builder Zied Ben Tahar, and our spotlight fell on AWS Chief Evangelist (EMEA) Danilo Poccia!
This week, our serverless expert is AWS Community Builder Pubudu Jayawardana, our spotlight falls on AWS Principal Developer Advocate Eric Johnson, 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 have mainly been preparing for my next AWS exam which is the AI Practitioner certification! ML and AI is something I am eager to understand further than just using Amazon Bedrock from a generative AI and agent perspective.

Great content from Stephane Maarek on Udemy

Also, I can’t be the only one who needs a timeline cleanse from the sheer amount of DeepSeek news, surely?

📰 Articles that caught the eye

Here are some of the stand-out articles I read during the week in the World of Serverless.

⭐ My favourite this week was the article by Ran Isenberg on how he had a real-life phishing scare (although not strictly serverless, Ran is one of the big contributors in our community and this one was interesting)

Ran Isenberg discusses ‘How Social Engineering Phishing Works: My Real-Life Encounter’.
Daniele Frasca wrote a piece on ‘Cheating Lambda scalability‘.
Vadym Kazulkin covers ‘Data API for Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 with AWS SDK for Java - Part 12 Data API quotas, limitations and pricing‘.
Jimmy Dahlqvist created a great tutorial on building a ‘PEP and PDP with Cognito User Pools‘.
Jones Zachariah Noel N covers ‘Amazon S3 is more than storage and brings in a lot for the analytics ecosystem’.

🎓 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 Pubudu Jayawardana:

1. What is one common mistake you see teams making when implementing serverless solutions, and how can they avoid it?
One of the common mistakes I see with teams starting with serverless is that they consider serverless only as a technology. So, they jump directly into implementation, which later leads to inefficient, unscalable and eventually expensive solutions.

Serverless is an approach or philosophy for building and running applications where the focus is on delivering business value without managing infrastructure. So the team must think in the serverless mindset and the solutions must be designed accordingly.

In serverless, teams must be ready to operate in a cross-functional, cloud oriented way rather than dedicated infra and developer roles. Also, they should focus on application logic and mostly utilising native integrations provided by the cloud provider. Also, testing a serverless application can be quite different from the traditional software development process as well.

Therefore, when introducing serverless to a team that is used to traditional software development, it is important to start with a fresh mindset. Proper guidance is essential to help them understand the serverless principles before diving into the implementation. This will help them to adopt serverless technologies better and to be successful.
2. Which serverless tool or service are you most excited about right now, and why?
I have been working quite a lot with EventBridge, and it is always exciting to see how it continues to evolve and improve.

Initially, it started as EventBridge Bus/Rules, and now it has grown into a suite of services, including EventBridge Pipes, EventBridge Scheduler, EventBridge Connections, and more. Last year, we also saw significant performance improvements in EventBridge, and a few weeks ago, there was a great feature released to enable cross-account targets - which proves the EventBridge team is actively working on making it suitable for more and more use cases.

I believe EventBridge services have already become key components in the modern EDA landscape. That’s why I’m really excited about EventBridge and its promising future.
3. What is your favourite trick or tip when working with serverless that the readers may find interesting?
Use AWS Powertools!

Powertools provides support for many essential functionalities and best practices commonly needed in your serverless application. The great thing about powertools is that it is easy to adopt and the modular design helps to choose only what you need. I can guarantee it will definitely improve your productivity.

✅ 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 (a fairly quiet week):

⭐ The most interesting for me this week is the AWS Amplify Data client release:

🔥 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.

dynamodb-parallel-scan. Scan DynamoDB tables concurrently (up to 1,000,000 segments), recursively read all items from every segment
cedar-access-control-for-k8s. This project allows users to enforce access control on Kubernetes API requests using Cedar policies.
amazon-bedrock-serverless-prompt-chaining. This repository provides examples of how to build complex, serverless, and highly scalable generative AI applications with prompt chaining and Amazon Bedrock.
React Admin v5.5.2. Build Admin Panels, Internal Tools, Dashboards, ERPs, and B2B Apps, Fast.
Run DeepSeek R1 on AWS. This was shared on Twitter/X by Werner Vogels here (the image above).
Powertools for AWS Lambda v3.5. A new version has just been released for Python.
stripe-recommendations. Theo Browne created a repo showing how to take the pain out of using Stripe.

💡 Hints & Tips

Each week, I share quick hints or tips based on things I notice in day-to-day engineering life. This week we go with a ‘JSON’ slant!

⭐ [Tip 1] Visualising JSON - do you ever have large amounts of JSON that you would love to visualise outside of just a bland VS Code file? If so, check out JSON Crack, which allows you to paste in JSON and view it as an interactive diagram! (There is also a VS Code plugin too)

⭐ [Tip 2] Updating Dependencies - ‘Package JSON Upgrade’ is a VS Code extension which shows you available updates in your package.json visually, and offers quick actions to guide you in your updating of them! Very neat!

✖️ Social of the Week

This week’s social is on LinkedIn by Yan Cui discussing his key takeaways from building an AI-powered code reviewer using Amazon Bedrock:

Having built something similar recently (although not code review related), it’s great to see I am not the only one who has suffered from the Bedrock limits, which is why I like the approach to falling back to Anthropic directly as a fallback mechanism. It’s a shame we need to do this (even on top of cross-region inference). Great article attached to the post too, so check it out!

🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts

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

⭐ My favourite this week was the panel session on “Where is software development going?”.

Weekly Case Study 🔍

This week’s case study comes from Hokkaido Cultural Broadcasting.

Hokkaido Cultural Broadcasting leveraged AWS services like Amazon Bedrock, DynamoDB, and Polly to automate news script generation, improve searchability of press releases, and streamline video production, cutting article creation time to two minutes and reducing video production costs.

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/uhb/?did=cr_card&trk=cr_card

By using AI-powered automation, the station increased its content output by 100–120 pieces per month without significant cost increases, enhancing distribution across multiple channels. Their success earned industry recognition, inspiring other broadcasters to explore AWS-driven efficiencies.

🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts

This week’s inspirational quote comes from American entrepreneur and investor, Naval Ravikant:

“Go do something great and your network will instantly emerge.”
- Naval Ravikant

This quote is very special to me, as some of my closest friends I have made through my community work in AWS over the years; friends that are international with different backgrounds and experiences, and friends that emerged through our shared love of Serverless and AWS.

🗳️ Poll of the Week

In last week’s poll, we asked the question “What is your go-to service for building a central event platform on AWS?“, with 80% saying Amazon EventBridge and 20% saying Amazon SNS. These numbers sound about right to me, and EventBridge is always my go-to unless I need more control on guaranteed ordering and at-most-once delivery.

This week we ask the question, “Do you regularly run AWS Well-Architected Reviews on your workloads?“. Do you run them on your projects? Do you run them regularly, or just once at the start of the project? Or do you simply not see any value or don’t get a chance to?

Let me know your thoughts in the 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 Principal Developer Advocate Eric Johnson!

Eric is one of my favourite international public speakers, bloggers, developer advocates, live streamers on Serverless Office Hours, video producers, and more in the Serverless space!

Eric always distills complex patterns and techniques into easily digestible chunks; whilst always doing it with a level of fun and humour! What an incredibly huge impact he has had on the serverless community! Thank you for everything you have done (and continue to do) over many, many years!

👋🏼 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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