#33 Resilient Solutions 🏆

This week, our Serverless expert is AWS Community Builder David Behroozi, our spotlight falls on AWS Community Builder Ryan Cormack, we look at the latest AWS service releases, news, articles, & more!

Apr 18, 2025

Welcome

In last week’s issue, our serverless expert was Marko from ServerlessLife and the spotlight fell on AWS Community Builder Adit Modi!
This week, our serverless expert is AWS Community Builder David Behroozi, our spotlight falls on AWS Community Builder Ryan Cormack, 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 wrote a back to basics article on “Dedicated Outbound IP Address with AWS Lambda“.

I’m personally a little fatigued on the AI articles and videos right now, so I thought I would run a series of short articles highlighting some of the basic architecture and engineering premises that most AWS practitioners should understand.

AWS North Community Conference organisers from left to right: Steve Morland, CTO, Leighton, Dan Pudwell, Solutions Architect, Leighton, Lee Gilmore, AWS Practice Lead, Leighton, Claire Cundill, Chief Business Officer, Leighton and Holli Taylor, Head of Marketing, Leighton — The AWS North Community Conference organisers.

There was also a nice write up this week in the Northern Insights magazine about the AWS North Community Conference we are running in October, so go check it out!

📰 Articles that caught the eye

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

⭐ My favourite this week was the article by Marcos Henrique on validating AI outputs! Similar premise to the AI Test Framework I wrote here.

🎓 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 David Behroozi:

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?

Since serverless architectures are more distributed than traditional ones, operating these solutions requires you to rethink how you do logging, alarms and orchestration. Requests can span multiple services and multiple logs. This makes tracing a request from start to end more difficult and introduces more opportunities to fail. I use 4 techniques to handle this.

1. I pick a consistent id when I start processing a request and propagate it downstream. Often it's the request id of the service that receives the request. This consistent id allows me to trace where the request came from and its progress.

2. For every request that hits Lambda/ECS/Fargate I emit 1 canonical log entry. This gives me a succinct summary of what happened with searchable metadata so I don't need to roll up multiple log lines to get current status. You can read about how I log here: https://speedrun.nobackspacecrew.com/blog/2023/09/08/logging-for-scale.html

3. Any latency or fault alarms are placed as close to the end user as possible and are from services like API Gateway, CloudFront or ALB. This makes it so requests that are rejected due to message size or high end-user latencies (caused by coldstarts or timeouts triggering retries) aren't masked in my metrics.

4. If processing a message spans multiple systems and communication is through EventBridge, I use Step Functions to orchestrate the workflow. This ensures that software bugs don't orphan messages that must reach a completion state.

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

I'm a fan of CloudFront Functions. The functionality today is quite limited, but once a year new features trickle out that unlock new use cases. The ability to run little bits of code close to your end users that you normally would do as middleware is a very powerful construct. The possibility of doing authentication, granular throttling, feature flags and caching with very little overhead on the edge excites me.

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

During an operational event there are 5 things you can do fast.

1. Throttle
2. Scale Up
3. Rollback
4. Toggle a Feature Flag
5. Restart a process

Rule these options out first. Everything else will take more time and delay your recovery.

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

⭐ This week, my favourite update is the static IP support in CloudFront!

🔥 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.

Bring your diagrams to EventCatalog - EventCatalog now supports embedding Miro, Lucid, or Draw.io diagrams into your documentation.
aws_resource_validator - version 0.4.0 released.

💡 DynamoDB Tip of the Week

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

💡 Use hierarchical sort keys e.g. country-state-city

Structure your sort keys hierarchically, like country#state#city, to enable efficient querying and data filtering. This makes it easy to query at various levels of granularity depending on your application’s needs.

AWS Best Practice documentation.

✖️ Social of the Week

This week’s social is on X/Twitter by Marc Brooker:

This post and comments thread are gold for anybody working with modern system design. Go check it out!

🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts

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

⭐ My favourite video this week is from my friend Luca Mezzalira with his colleague Raj Saha - a must-watch in my opinion!

💡 Hints & Tips

Each week, I share any quick hints or tips based on things I notice in day-to-day engineering life. This week is all about cost optimisation.

⭐ [Tip 1] Logging Levels - make sure you have different logging levels per environment and stage, for example, in production have the log level set as INFO or ERROR, but in develop, perhaps set as DEBUG. This will save costs in your production environments, for sure.

⭐ [Tip 2] Log Retention - Make sure that in your different stages you set the log retention explicitly, for example, in production set this to 30 days, but perhaps in the develop stage you could set this to 1 day.

⭐ [Tip 3] Initialisation - make use of initialising frameworks, database connections, and dependencies outside of the Lambda handler to reuse these across invocations. This saves cost by reducing the function run time.

Weekly Case Study 🔍

This week’s case study comes from Booking.com

Booking.com replaced a costly third-party ad rendering solution with a fully serverless, in-house platform built on AWS to generate dynamic, customised ad creatives at scale. Using services like AWS Lambda, API Gateway, Amazon S3, CloudFront, and CloudWatch, the system processes over 1,000 image requests per second with sub-second latency and 99.9% availability, handling 200 feeds across 10 social media partners.

Booking.com image-rendering solution architecture diagram — https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/booking-serverless-case-study/

This scalable architecture supports multilingual, multi-currency content and reduces costs by 90% while giving Booking.com complete creative control and real-time performance visibility. The project showcases how serverless AWS solutions can power global-scale personalisation with high efficiency and agility.

🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts

This week’s inspirational quote comes from Doug Linder:

“A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.”
― Doug Linder

I love this quote and metaphor, but unfortunately, I couldn’t pin-point the exact Doug Linder regardless of the quote being well documented.

The reason I love this quote, is this is exactly how good engineers work, in my opinion; they try to test the boundaries of the solution for unexpected inputs and scenarios to make it more resilient and secure. To take this a step further, we can look at approaches like chaos engineering and threat modelling, which look at the overall architecture.

🗳️ Poll of the Week

In last week’s poll, we asked the question “What is your go-to for authentication in your Serverless solutions?“.

67% of people chose Amazon Cognito, with 33% stating “other”. My own go-to for most solutions is Amazon Cognito, unless there is a specific need to look at another service like Auth0. My next article will show just why I like to use Amazon Cognito since I have more control with it being part of the wider AWS ecosystem (especially when this means cost savings).

This week, we ask the question, “When streaming data from DynamoDB to a more flexible or analytics-friendly destination, which AWS service or pattern do you typically use?”.

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 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 Ryan Cormack!

Ryan is a former Just Eat and Moonpig engineer, now working as a Principal Engineer at Motorway, as well as an AWS Community Builder, speaker, entrepreneur, and blogger. A fantastic example of Ryan’s work is this great talk called “Shifting Gears: From Events to Event Driven“, which discusses Motorway’s journey on AWS and EDA. Thank you for all you do for our fantastic community Ryan!

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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