#27 New Heroes & Builders! 🙌🏼

This week, our expert is AWS Community Builder Sebastian Bille, our spotlight falls on AWS Principal Developer Advocate Marcia Villalba, we look at the latest AWS service releases, blog posts, & more!

Mar 07, 2025

Welcome

In last week’s issue, our serverless expert was AWS Community Builder Danny Steenman, and our spotlight fell on AWS Head of Modern Compute Community Farrah Campbell!
This week, our serverless expert is AWS Community Builder Sebastian Bille, our spotlight falls on AWS Principal Developer Advocate Marcia Villalba, we look at the latest AWS service releases, blog posts, hints and tips, news and more!
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Leighton.

Welcome new AWS Heroes & Community Builders! 🙌

This week, we welcomed five new AWS Heroes to our fantastic global collective across containers and community groups!

Congratulations to Ahmed Bebars, Badri Kesavan, Marcelo Paiva, Raphael Justin Jambalos, and Stav Ochakovski!

You can check them out here with the official unveiling post.

It’s also been great in the same week to see the new cohort of AWS Community Builders, especially when I see so many fantastic people that I know personally join the community! 🙌

A Glimpse into My Week 🎤

This week, I have been working on a number of articles and code repo examples.

At the start of the week, I released one on ‘Amazon CloudWatch Composite Alarms’, and I am currently finishing off one on ‘Amazon Cognito M2M Token Caching‘. Stay tuned!

I’m also building an OMS currently that integrates with many 3rd party systems for order routing, which is full EDA and serverless (as you would imagine), so this will no doubt spawn new ideas and articles.

📰 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 Marcos Henrique on his architecture with MCP, StepFunctions and Amazon Bedrock!

🎓 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 Sebastian Bille!

1. What is one common mistake you see teams making when implementing serverless solutions, and how can they avoid it?
One of the biggest struggles I see teams facing with serverless is the developer experience. The key mindset shift is, in my opinion, recognising that the cloud isn’t just a deployment target - it should be an extension of your local development environment.

Once you start deploying and testing in the cloud early and often as part of your development workflow, things begin to click. Instead of spending time trying to replicate cloud services locally or maintaining complex mocks, you validate your code in the actual environment it will run in. This makes it easier to catch issues early and build confidence that your application will behave as expected in production (or wherever you're deploying next).
2. Which serverless tool or service are you most excited about right now, and why?
Right now, I’m really excited about Lambda Live Debugger.

One of the biggest challenges with serverless in terms of developer experience has always been debugging. Logs and traces get you halfway there, but oftentimes it's just quicker and more intuitive to be able to step through the code one step at a time.

Lambda Live Debugger allows you to attach a debugger to a Lambda Function that's executed in your AWS account, making it possible to inspect and debug functions as they run in their native environment.

What I love about Lambda Live Debugger is how well it aligns with the idea that the cloud should be an extension of your local development environment. This kind of tooling makes serverless development more intuitive and can really streamline the feedback loop!
3. What is your favourite trick or tip when working with serverless that the readers may find interesting?
One trick that has really become second nature to me is the storage-first pattern. In distributed architectures, even simple state management - like ensuring that X happens before Y - can be trickier than it seems. Recovering from partial failures, handling retries, and ensuring nothing get’s lost or duplicated often benefit from a more reliable approach than writing complex state management logic into your functions.

The idea is simple: instead of building custom logic to track execution state and handle retries, you persist it first - whether that’s writing to DynamoDB, storing an object in S3, or publishing an event to EventBridge. Then, downstream processes react to those storage events to continue execution. If something fails mid-execution, the stored state serves as a reliable checkpoint, making it easy to retry without duplication or data loss. This makes failure recovery much simpler and also improves debugging - you can even replay events if needed.

This shifts your system from being tightly coupled and sequential to being more event-driven, resilient, and predictable.

✅ 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 introduction of Amazon Bedrock Data Automation.

🔥 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.

✖️ Social of the Week

This week’s social is on X/Twitter by AWS Hero Ran Isenberg, highlighting a great video about how Samsung does cross-region recovery on AWS. I watched the video off the back of this tweet and can highly recommend it (below).

🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts

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

⭐ My favourite this week was the video by Rebecca Parsons on Evolutionary Architecture and Domain-driven Design.

💡 Hints & Tips

Each week, I share quick hints or tips based on things I notice in day-to-day engineering life. This week, we have a varying range of tips, some that have come from the community too.

⭐ [Tip 1] Package.json Config - Do you ever find that you have non-secret static values that need to be set in many npm scripts, and you duplicate them on every line typically? One way of getting around this is the solution below using a config object:

This approach allows you to set the config in one place, and then use it throughout your scripts; meaning if you ever need to change a value you can do it in one place. It also makes for better readability!

⭐ [Tip 2] How to get the best out of your workspace? - This is a great video by Luca Mezzalira who walks through his home office setup, including areas for work and content creation, ideation space, the furniture, tech and gadgets he uses, and much much more. Go check this out as there are some great hints and tips in here for sure!

[Tip 3] AWS CLI auto-prompt - when enabled you can use auto prompt features in the AWS CLI which is a great productivity hack as there are so many options that we can’t always remember. You can enable this using the following commands.

aws --cli-auto-prompt

The example below shows auto-complete for using S3:

Weekly Case Study 🔍

This week’s case study comes from Prezzee.

Prezzee, a global digital gifting platform, modernised its AWS infrastructure by adopting serverless technologies such as AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, and Amazon Aurora to support rapid growth and high availability. This shift enabled 40x scalability, improved availability to 99.99%, reduced technical incidents by over 90%, and accelerated time to market by 67%. Following the changes, Prezzee now operates with a fault-tolerant, cost-efficient, and innovation-driven architecture, allowing its engineering teams to focus on building new features and enhancing customer experiences. Go check out the case study using the links above.

🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts

This week’s inspirational quote comes from Grady Booch:

"The goal of software architecture is to minimize the human resources required to build and maintain the required system."
– Grady Booch

I love this quote as it captures the essence of architecting with serverless services, reducing operational and building overhead so teams can focus on innovation and resolving real-world business problems instead of infrastructure management. This is especially true when using direct integrations and plugging your services together like building blocks.

Any serverless system should be designed to minimise human effort in scaling, maintenance, and deployments in my opinion.

🗳️ Poll of the Week

In last week’s poll, we asked the question, “How do you mainly consume your AWS content?“, with 67% saying blogs, and 33% saying newsletters. I’m super surprised more people don’t vote for YouTube!

This week, we ask the question (for fun), “What is your typical drink whilst coding your solutions?“. I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below:

📅 Serverless Events

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

🎟️ To note, CFP is currently open for the AWS North conference which I am helping organise, and we also have opportunities for lightening talks throughout the day. Go check it out!

Other fantastic events happening soon:

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 Principal Developer Advocate Marcia Villalba!

As a Principal Developer Advocate at AWS, Marcia has been a driving force for many years now in helping serverless developers and architects build scalable, reliable, and secure cloud-native applications on AWS. With over 20 years of experience, Marcia generously shares her expertise and knowledge through conference talks, code examples, AWS News articles, meetups, blog, podcasts, and her fantastic FooBar YouTube channel!

Beyond her technical knowledge, Marcia’s passion for mentoring and empowering aspiring cloud professionals makes a lasting impact (her content has always been inspiring for me for years now!)

We’re grateful for everything you do to educate, inspire, and strengthen our amazing global serverless community! Thank you!

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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