# 26 AWS North Conference! 🎤

This week, our expert is AWS Community Builder Danny Steenman, our spotlight falls on Head of Modern Compute Community Farrah Campbell, we look at the latest AWS service releases, blog posts, & more!

Mar 01, 2025

Welcome

In last week’s issue, our serverless expert was AWS Serverless Hero Ndimofor (Ro) Ateh Rosius, and our spotlight fell on AWS Principal Developer Advocate Gunnar Grosch!
This week, our serverless expert is AWS Community Builder Danny Steenman, our spotlight falls on AWS Head of Modern Compute Community Farrah Campbell, 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 been both on vacation and organising the first major AWS community conference in the North East of the UK, AWS North, which was unveiled this week! (The vacation means the newsletter is a little late this week, sorry!)

Do you have any insights, ideas, or an inspiring AWS story to tell? Take to the stage and join our industry leaders in shaping the conversation!

Apply now to be a speaker as the CFP is open for three separate tracks: Leader/Architect, Builder/Developer, and Lightning Talks.

🎟️ Be part of the action and register now to grab your tickets at: https://www.awsnorth.com

📰 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 Arpad Toth on using YubiKeys with 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 Danny Steenman:

1. What is one common mistake you see teams making when implementing serverless solutions, and how can they avoid it?
One common mistake is assuming that AWS takes care of everything automatically when you use a "serverless" resource. While AWS does handle a lot of the heavy lifting (especially server provisioning and maintenance) behind the scenes, it doesn't fully secure the resource for you.

In fact, IAM and resource-based policies become even more critical with serverless architectures because, unlike traditional resources that run within a VPC and have security groups as an additional layer of protection, serverless resources often rely solely on IAM for access control. For example, SNS topics can be exposed to the internet if they're not properly configured.

The key here is to invest time in mastering IAM and resource-based policies. Before you even deploy a component, think carefully about who needs access to it and then set up precise permissions. Don't leave it open or plan to come back to it later.

Treat this security step as non-negotiable if you want to maintain a secure environment, especially since IAM is often your primary (and sometimes only) line of defence for serverless resources.
2. Which serverless tool or service are you most excited about right now, and why?
I'm really excited about EventBridge, especially with the recent introduction of cross-account targets for Event Buses. I'm currently working on a custom landing zone solution built entirely with AWS CDK, and this new feature has simplified many of the workarounds I previously had to implement. In the past, I had to get creative with how I connected components across accounts, but now things can be more simple and straightforward.

In general, seeing more cross-account features emerging in serverless services is fantastic because it allows me to think outside the box—or in this case, the account (no pun intended). AWS has been pushing multi-account setups for quite a while now, so this makes my life as someone who manages multi-account environments much easier. I'm looking forward to even more innovations in this area that make cross-account architectures more flexible.
3. What is your favourite trick or tip when working with serverless that the readers may find interesting?
One of my favourite tricks when working with serverless is embracing branch-based deployments, especially when it's combined with AWS CDK. I've set this up in one of my clients projects where every feature branch triggers its own deployment, spinning up an ephemeral environment in their AWS account.

This means every developer in the team gets their own isolated replica of the application to work on, rather than competing over a shared test or staging environment. After they're done and their feature is merged into the main branch, the environment will be automatically destroyed. Disclaimer: This way of working works best if you have a serverless stack. When you build a lot of stateful resources such as EC2 and RDS it is doable but not as efficient.

If you're interested in trying this out, I've released a CDK starter kit on GitHub that sets up these ephemeral environments combined with GitHub integrations.

✅ 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 Claude 3.7 Sonnet release, which now has extended thinking, meaning it can work through difficult problems using careful, step-by-step reasoning!

🔥 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.

heic-to-jpg - A serverless way to massively convert HEIC images to JPG almost instantaneously using S3 and Lambda.
Event Catalog - A new fresh look and feel!
aws-client-monitor - AWS Client Monitor is a tool designed to analyze applications interacting with AWS services. It's particularly useful during local development, troubleshooting, or profiling third-party applications.
MCP2Lambda - Run any AWS Lambda function as a Large Language Model (LLM) tool without code changes using Anthropic's Model Control Protocol (MCP).
aws-health-events-insight - Single pane of glass for all your Health events across different accounts, regions and organizations.
vscode-iam-service-principal-snippets - This VS Code extension provides autocompletion of all AWS services that can be used as Service Principals in your IAM policies.
powertools-lambda-python - The OpenAPI utility now adds support for, for example, documentation, and you can use the Logger with custom handlers.

✖️ Social of the Week

This week’s social is on X/Twitter by Eric Johnson!

It is great to see that AWS SAM is going to get more love, as in recent months and years, it has all been the AWS CDK in my opinion.

🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts

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

⭐ My favourite this week was the video by Allen Helton and Andres Moreno. A great session, and it is fantastic to see Allen back on the live streams, too.

💡 Hints & Tips

Each week, I share quick hints or tips based on things I notice in day-to-day engineering life. This week, we discuss some quick and practical AI prompts that can really help with your day-to-day work:

⭐ [Tip 1] Does the model have enough info? - One of the small but effective enhancements you can add to your prompts is asking the question at the end:

“Let me know if any details are unclear or missing—feel free to ask any clarifying questions to ensure the most relevant response“.

This proactively prompts the model to ask you any additional questions for more information that would make the results more effective.

⭐ [Tip 2] Specify the format - If you work a lot with README files, one suggestion is to ask your model to generate data in specific formats like tables, which can then be inserted directly into README files for better documentation. An example could be:

”Please generate a markdown table for a README file that documents the Customer and Order entities shown below. Include columns for field names, data types, and descriptions of each field. Format the table nicely with proper markdown syntax: <add the Typescript typed objects here>”

This would result in the following with my own data as a quick example:

Other typical example formats can include (but are not limited to):

SVG graphics
ASCII/Unicode art
Mermaid diagrams (flowcharts, sequence diagrams, etc.)
PlantUML diagrams
LaTeX

Weekly Case Study 🔍

This week’s case study comes from the law firm Smokeball.

Smokeball AI, built on AWS, leverages Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, Lambda, and EKS to automate legal administrative tasks, significantly reducing manual effort in document processing, client intake, and time tracking. By integrating AI-driven tools like Archie, Intake, and AutoTime, the platform cuts processing times by up to 95% and helps lawyers capture 30% more billable hours. With scalable, secure AWS infrastructure, Smokeball rapidly deployed its AI suite in six months, driving adoption across global markets and positioning itself for continued legal tech innovation.

🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts

This week’s inspirational quote comes from renowned author, Gregor Hohpe:

"Good architects ride the elevator: they understand both business strategy and technical implementation."
- Gregor Hohpe

I love this quote as it shows the importance of great architects bridging the gap between executive vision and engineering execution and understanding where to make the right tradeoffs technically whilst also being able to communicate that vision and architecture in a simple and effective way.

The best architects I have worked with have taken the time to really understand the business, not just drawing lines on a diagram between AWS service icons.

🗳️ Poll of the Week

In last week’s poll, we asked the question, “Do you build your serverless architectures using evolutionary architecture?“ with 80% saying yes and 20% saying no. I feel like hexagonal architecture and clean code are becoming more favourable to architects and engineers now when we are using compute in our architecture (Lambda, ECS, EKS etc).

This week we ask the question, “How do you mainly consume your AWS content?“. I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below:

📅 Serverless Events

The following serverless events are upcoming, so mark your calendars:

AWS Community Day Slovakia - 26th March 2025
AWS Community Day Italy - 2nd April 2025
AWS Community Day Romania - 10th April 2025
AWS Community Day Turkey - 19th April 2025
ACD Bengaluru - 23rd May 2025
ACD Adria - 5th Sept 2025
AWS Community Day Baltic - 10th Sept 2025
ACD DACH - 7th Oct 2025
AWS North Community Conference - 16th Oct 2025

Do you have any upcoming events that you want to highlight? Message below!

⭐ Spotlight

This week’s spotlight falls on AWS Head of Modern Compute Community Farrah Campbell:

Farrah is a massively prominent figure in the technology community as a whole and is currently serving as the Head of Modern Compute Community at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Farrah is a former AWS Serverless Hero and Director at Stackery who went on to also manage the AWS Heroes programme at AWS, and is now a prolific active speaker at international conferences, sharing her experiences and insights on topics such as serverless computing and community building (and always done with a focus on kindness and empathy which I love personally).

Farrah has been hugely pivotal to the serverless community for many years now and continues to advocate for people and teams building modern systems using serverless - and our wonderful community would not be what it is without her! Thank you for everything you have done and continue to do for us!

👋🏼 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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