#23 Building Solutions with AI 🤖

This week, our expert is AWS Community Builder Andres Moreno, our spotlight falls on AWS Senior Developer Advocate Matheus Guimaraes, we look at the latest AWS service releases, blog posts, & more!

Feb 07, 2025

Welcome

In last week’s issue, our serverless expert was AWS Community Builder Pubudu Jayawardana, and our spotlight fell on AWS Principal Developer Advocate Eric Johnson!
This week, our serverless expert is AWS Community Builder Andres Moreno, our spotlight falls on AWS Senior Developer Advocate Matheus Guimaraes, 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 the fun of taking the AWS Certified AI Practitioner exam!

This one was an interesting one to prepare for since I have been doing a lot of work with Amazon Bedrock and embedding generative AI and agents into products - next step is the AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer - Associate!

I have also been adding more content and features to Cloud Cards (check it out!)

📰 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 Matt Martz on rendering a client app in Lambda and securing it using Amazon Cognito!

🎓 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 Andres Moreno!

1. What is one common mistake you see teams making when implementing serverless solutions, and how can they avoid it?
One thing that I see people doing time and time again when starting with serverless is trying to get the same dev experience locally as what they had before.
The fact is, when working with serverless, it is a whole new world. I’ve always liked this quote by Ben Kehoem where he says, “Move your development environment towards the cloud, do not try to move the cloud down to your dev environment”.
By using Infrastructure as Code (IaC), you simplify how you get your resources in the cloud to troubleshoot and debug against a deployed resource. Pushback with this is the thought that iterations are slow, but deployments are only getting faster, and live reload of your resource from changes on your IDE is getting way better. I recommend starting with IaC and ephemeral sandboxes for your developers as soon as possible so they can tinker and troubleshoot with the real resources.
2. Which serverless tool or service are you most excited about right now, and why?
The service that always gets me excited is AWS Step Functions; this is my favourite service overall. It provides so many capabilities out of the box. Once your workflows are created, troubleshooting and fixing issues is very easy since you have a visual representation of the workflow execution, and you can get a lot of information about what happened.

I’m also very interested in seeing how the database landscape changes this year. Many of us started using DynamoDB for its ease of management and scale. The release of DSQL and having other tools in the market, like Neon DB, is making the database space more competitive, which usually means we’ll be getting sweet new features as a consumer.
3. What is your favourite trick or tip when working with serverless that the readers may find interesting?
The combination of SAM for IaC, the `sam sync` CLI command, and Infrastructure Composer + Workflow Studio in VSCode is a very powerful combination.
What this means is that as a developer, I can modify my Step Function Workflows using Workflow Studio locally and it will automatically update it in the cloud once I save it. This allows you to test and verify functionality faster by having a deployed version of your changes almost immediately. Reducing the time from code change to deployed resources is key in enabling the use of ephemeral sandboxes.

✅ 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 CloudFormation stack refactoring capabilities, although this was just released hours ago, so I have not tried it out yet!

🔥 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, I am sharing tips on passing the AWS Certified AI Practitioner exam!

1. Topics - If you have previously passed the developer or solutions architect associate certifications at a minimum, then I’d say you are already covered on the general questions on AWS services (covering Polly, Transcribe, Macie, S3 etc). I wouldn’t spend any learning time here personally if you are already familiar.

2. AI/ML Knowledge - Get a good understanding of underfitting and overfitting, prompt engineering (zero-shot, one-shot, few-shot etc), NLP, RAG, Agents, Knowledge Bases, embedding, inference, tuning models etc - general AI and ML concepts. A key focus on Bedrock.🤖

3. SageMaker - There is a big focus on SageMaker, so be sure to read the documentation on it, read the developer FAQs and docs, and watch some of the latest re:Invent videos. If you are getting hands-on please watch your spend! 💸

4. Governance & Bias - As you would imagine, there is a key focus on using AI, ML, and generative AI technologies responsibly (bias, governance etc). Read the AWS docs on this. ✅

5. Udemy Course - I would recommend the training material on Udemy from Stéphane Maarek which fills in the blanks! 🎙️

6. Free Retake - If you register with code ‘AWSRetake2025’ before the 15th Feb I believe you get a free retake if you fail 👍

✖️ Social of the Week

This week’s social is on Twitter/X by Matt Coulter and Kristi Perreault!

It’s not every day we have two AWS Serverless Heroes get engaged! Congratulations both! 💜

🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts

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

⭐ My favourite this week was the session by Tiffany Souterre and Viktoria Semaan on turning an architecture diagram into a deployed solution using Amazon Bedrock!

Weekly Case Study 🔍

This week’s case study comes from Immutable.

The key takeaways from this case study are that Immutable transitioned from a monolithic architecture on AWS to an event-driven microservices model using Amazon EventBridge and AWS Lambda, enabling it to scale efficiently while supporting a sixfold increase in employees.

This shift allowed Immutable to process 1,500% more customer transactions, improve system reliability by isolating issues to specific services, and accelerate innovation by reducing operational overhead. By leveraging AWS serverless technology, Immutable now supports 9,000 transactions per second with low latency, powering seamless collaborations in the Web3 gaming industry.

🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts

This week’s inspirational quote comes from ex-Principal Engineer at AWS, Adrian Hornsby:

“The best time to test your runbook is before the incident, not during it.”
- Adrian Hornsby

Adrian shared this on LinkedIn recently, and it really resonated with me. A lot of people create runbooks as a tick box exercise following doing an AWS Well-Architected Review; however, there is no point in having them if they are outdated, useless, or simply a paper exercise. Adrian goes on to say:

“There's nothing worse than being on call, getting paged at 3 AM, and realizing your runbook is out of date.

Your heart's racing, the alerts are firing, and that supposedly reliable troubleshooting guide is telling you to check services or run commands that no longer exist or work.

Meanwhile, the incident timer keeps going.“

What Adrian suggests is regularly testing your runbooks as a team to keep them up to date, time-boxed to 2 hours. I really like this approach personally.

🗳️ Poll of the Week

In last week’s poll, we asked the question “Do you regularly run AWS Well-Architected Reviews on your workloads?“, with 44% saying No, 22% saying Yes, and the remaining 33% saying just once at the start of a project. For me personally, I always do one at the start of a project, and then perform a WAR every 6 months, or when there are some significant changes to the solution (very similar to what I do with Threat Modelling too)

This week we ask the question “What approach do you take to validating events with schemas?“

Do you validate before publishing your events, only when consuming, or both? Or do you not validate your event payloads at all? As always, feel free to comment 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 Senior Developer Advocate Matheus Guimaraes!

Matheus is a former CTO turned Developer Advocate at AWS, who is also an international speaker, YouTube video creator, writer, owner of codingmatheus.com, content creator, podcast and live stream speaker and more! (Not sure how he creates so much great content - does he sleep?! 😅)

Thank you for all you do for our fantastic community Matheus!

👋🏼 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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