#32 Simplicity in Serverless 🌱

This week, our Serverless expert is Marko from ServerlessLife, our spotlight falls on AWS Community Builder Adit Modi, we look at the latest AWS service releases, news, blog posts, & more!

Apr 11, 2025

Welcome

In last week’s issue, our serverless expert was AWS Serverless Hero Jeevan Dongre and the spotlight fell on AWS Community Builder Jannik Wempe!
This week, our serverless expert is Marko from ServerlessLife, our spotlight falls on AWS Community Builder Adit Modi, 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 working on a number of articles and code repo examples.

I released one this week titled “API Gateway Restricting Resource Path with IP Allow Listing with WAF“, which covers an example of having one resource endpoint on the API tied down to specific IP addresses.

It was also nice to see the fantastic organisers of Serverless Days Manchester publish my recent talk "Microservices & EDA on AWS: Tackling Common Challenges for Engineering Teams".

📰 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 Yan Cui on event versioning in EDA.

🎓 Ask the Expert

Each week, I ask a different serverless expert the same three questions to get their personal insights - this week, we have Marko from ServerlessLife:

Opinions are the author’s and do not express the views of their employer.

1. What is one common mistake you see teams making when implementing serverless solutions, and how can they avoid it?

A big mistake is trying to build serverless systems the same way you’d build traditional apps. Old habits don’t always translate well—and in many cases, they get in the way.

For example, developers used to running everything locally now need to get comfortable working in the cloud, even during development. Local mocks only go so far.

Serverless also leans heavily on async and event-driven design. Instead of calling services directly, you’re wiring together queues, streams, and events. That’s a big shift from the old synchronous mindset.

Data modeling is another change. You move from normalized, strongly consistent SQL databases to denormalized, eventually consistent NoSQL systems.

One thing that often gets missed is idempotency. Serverless functions can retry automatically, so they need to handle duplicate events without causing side effects—like charging a customer twice.

Testing changes too. Unit tests are still useful, but integration tests are where the real value is, since you’re depending on so many cloud services.

Observability can be tricky—everything’s broken up into tiny pieces, so you really need good logging, metrics, and tracing to understand what’s going on.

And finally, in serverless, developers don’t just write code—they also write infrastructure. You’re defining everything with Infrastructure as Code, and that becomes part of your workflow.

The key is to embrace the differences and not fight them. Serverless works great when you design for it, not around it.

2. Which serverless tool or service are you most excited about right now, and why?

When SST introduced remote debugging a few years ago, it was a game-changer for my productivity. But other frameworks didn’t offer anything similar. That’s what inspired me to create Lambda Live Debugger, which brings this capability to all frameworks.

Lambda Live Debugger is a free and open-source project. It connects to your deployed Lambda, routes requests to your computer, and sends responses back to the deployed Lambda. This allows you to debug locally, but the system behaves as if the code is running in the cloud with the same permissions. In case of code changes, you do not have to redeploy. The code is reloaded automatically without deploying or even restarting the debugger.

For writing integration tests, I created ServerlessSpy. It is a CDK-based library that, apart from writing integration tests, offers a web console to monitor events in real time. I am not the only author on the project anymore, since Hugo Lewenhaupt, contributed most of the code in recent times.

3. What is your favourite trick or tip when working with serverless that the readers may find interesting?

Serverless isn’t just tricky during development—debugging in production can be even harder. That’s why I built a couple of simple tools that make life a lot easier.

When you're fixing a production issue, the first thing you usually want is more logs. But if detailed logging wasn’t added during development, you're stuck. That’s where the Lambda Logger Extension comes in. It lets you inject additional logging into already deployed Lambda functions—without changing the original code. It’s been a game-changer for debugging live systems.

Lambda Error SNS Sender is a CDK construct that automatically emails you error details when a Lambda throws an error. No need to dig through the AWS Console or rely on third-party tools just to see what went wrong.

These are small tools, but they solve very real pain points when you’re working with serverless in production.

✅ 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 an most interesting releases this week in the AWS World:

⭐ This week was very heavy AI releases as you will see from the list below, however my favourite is the Amazon Nova Reel 1.1 release! Seriously cool!

🔥 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.

AWS MCP Servers - A suite of specialised MCP servers that bring AWS best practices directly to your development workflow.
Powertools for AWS Lambda 3.10.0 - new AppSync resolver Pydantic models for the parser utility.
VS Code Agent mode - Now available to all users and supports MCP.

💡 DynamoDB Tip of the Week

Each week we have a quick DynamoDB tip from our resident DynamoDB expert, Uriel Bitton.

💡 Using TTLs on temp data to save storage costs

Set a Time To Live (TTL) on temporary data to make DynamoDB automatically delete it after a certain period. This reduces your storage usage and helps lower your DynamoDB bill over time.

✖️ Social of the Week

This week’s social is on LinkedIn by AWS Solutions Architect, Lefteris Karageorgiou:

Not much to be said here other than Lefteris hits the nail on the head - Serverless has many benefits for organisations both big and small, but specifically for startups it is a no brainer. What is more interesting is the comments about K8s… really? It would need to be a very niche use case for me to consider it for a start-up. (everything is a trade off)

🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts

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

⭐ My favourite video this week is by Allen and Andres - go check out the link below! (also loving the background music)

💡 Hints & Tips

Each week, I share any quick hints or tips based on things I notice in day-to-day engineering life. This week we look at two fairly unknown AWS CDK commands.

⭐ [Tip 1] AWS CDK Docs - did you know the AWS CDK has a ‘docs’ command that automatically opens up the current documentation in your browser? Simply type in npx cdk docs in your terminal.

⭐ [Tip 2] AWS CDK Watch - when building your AWS CDK apps, you may have used the hotswap command to deploy your changes quickly (under the hood it uses the AWS SDK rather than CloudFormation), but the watch command takes this one step further by automatically deploying changed files using the hotswap command. Simply type in npx cdk watch in your terminal.

Weekly Case Study 🔍

This week’s case study comes from Wildix.

Wildix, a unified communications provider serving 2 million users globally, built its x-hoppers retail headset solution on AWS to help brick-and-mortar retailers respond to modern challenges like reduced foot traffic and lean staffing.

Leveraging services such as Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Polly, Amazon Redshift, and AWS Lambda, Wildix enabled real-time, multilingual voice communication and analytics, achieving 80% faster innovation and a 70% reduction in costs.

The AWS-powered solution supports in-store efficiency, boosts sales by up to 35%, cuts training time by 50%, and continues to evolve based on direct customer feedback.

🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts

This week’s inspirational quote comes from Kent Beck:

“Write tests until fear is transformed into boredom”
― Kent Beck

This is a fantastic quote from Kent Beck, and one that I live out on every project I do personally. For example, recently I worked on a project with a complex integration with another system that required everything from usage plans, IP allow listing, authentication, schema validation, and more… the confidence I had in the integration stemmed from the amount of tests I wrote, from unit tests of the payload schemas (including under and over posting etc), to the e2e tests that generated access tokens and hit the endpoint resources with both success and failure scenarios. Testing is not an after thought!

You may find the following article complementary to above.

🗳️ Poll of the Week

In last week’s poll, we asked the question “Do you use feature flags in your serverless solutions?“, with 42% saying “Yes, very effective!“, 25% saying “Not my bag“, and 33% saying “Sometimes!”.

My own thoughts, I think they are effective if managed correctly, i.e. not allowing them to live in your code base indefinitely, and used for the correct scenario (perhaps to allow a subset of users to try a new feature).

This week, we ask the question, “What is your go to for authentication in your Serverless solutions?“.

Feel free to leave a comment below on why you chose your answer and your experiences!

📅 Serverless Events

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

🎟️ To note, CFP is currently open for the AWS North Community 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 Turkey - 19th April 2025
AWS Community Day CZ - 29th April 2025
ServerlessDays Belfast 2025 - 15th May 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 me below!

⭐ Spotlight

This week’s spotlight falls on AWS Community Builder Adit Modi!

Adit is 12x AWS Certified, an AWS Community Builder, AWS Ambassador, HashiCorp Ambassador, regular blogger, AWS Gold Jacket recipient, seasoned international speaker, and more! Go checkout his LinkedIn profile and blog link above. Thank you for all you do for our wonderful community Adit!

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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