#35 Cheaper Serverless! 💰

This week, our Serverless expert is Elena van Engelen-Maslova, our spotlight falls on Alessandro Volpicella, we look at the latest AWS service releases, news, articles, & more!

May 02, 2025

Welcome

In last week’s issue, our serverless expert was AWS Sr. Specialist Solutions Architect Lee Hannigan, and the spotlight fell on AWS Community Builder Marco Troisi!
This week, our serverless expert is AWS Community Builder Elena van Engelen-Maslova, our spotlight falls on AWS Community Builder Alessandro Volpicella, we look at the latest AWS service releases, blog posts, hints and tips, news and more!
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Leighton.

📰 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 Yan Cui on ephemeral environments in serverless with Neon!

🎓 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 Elena van Engelen-Maslova:

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?

Because serverless functions are small and focused, developers often think they don’t require the architectural structure like containerised or monolithic applications do.

But just because your function does one thing doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be maintainable, testable, and portable.

The result? Business logic becomes tightly coupled to cloud-specific services, making it harder to maintain, test and are not portable.

My advice:

Keep your business logic separate from infrastructure concerns. Use a clean architecture approach, or a similar architecture like hexagonal or onion architecture, to give your software a longer life.
Use fewer layers if needed, but still separate concerns: business logic, application orchestration, and cloud-specific integrations can all live in different modules within a single-function setup.
Treat functions like real software, not just glue code.

I shared this message in my Voxxed Days Amsterdam talk on Clean Architecture for Serverless, where I showed how to run the same business logic on both AWS Lambda and Azure Functions using simplified Clean Architecture and dependency injection.

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

Right now, I am loving AWS AppSync - especially how seamlessly it turns DynamoDB into a real-time GraphQL API with almost zero boiler-plate backend code. It is great for read-heavy or mobile-first apps, delivering real-time updates, offline support, and a managed API layer in minutes.

In Chapter 13 of my “Kotlin Crash Course” book, I use this combo to walk readers through how to create a production-ready API without writing boilerplate code or managing servers. It’s a game-changer for rapid development!

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

Use Lambda SnapStart to crush cold starts in JVM languages (Kotlin/Java) or even Python/.NET!

SnapStart pre-initialises your function’s execution environment, cutting cold start latency by circa 10x and drastically reducing how often they happen. But here’s the pro tip: pair it with ‘priming’ (e.g., invoking critical paths during deployment) to warm up dependencies.

I have used this in a Kotlin Lambda with CRaC (Coordinated Restore at Checkpoint) and saw 15x faster cold starts and 80% less accordances thereof. If you are curious, I wrote a deep dive about it here: https://medium.com/aws-in-plain-english/snapstart-your-kotlin-aws-lambda-with-crac-e253c8a376cb .

✅ 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 reduction of CloudWatch Logs cost! Wow.. didn’t see that coming!

🔥 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.

cdk-project-rules - A collection of versioned project rules to enhance CDK application development with Amazon Q Developer.
sfn-profiler - A package of utilities for profiling AWS Step Function executions.

💡 DynamoDB Tip of the Week

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

💡 “Store all your entities on one table to query at lower latency and lower costs (single table design)”

A single-table design stores all your related entities in one table using strategic keys. This reduces the number of queries and results in better performance and cost savings.

Further reading: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/creating-a-single-table-design-with-amazon-dynamodb/

✖️ Social of the Week

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

This is a really interesting tweet thread on his perspective, and sadly, it is something I have also been thinking about recently. He goes on to say:

To clarify here, there are 3 types of vibe coders:
1. Understand the code, sometimes accept code without reading through all of it, but still be sus and know when to intervene and refactor things
2. Vibe codes, doesn't understand a lot of code, but actively tries to learn more about programming and the stack they're using
3. Vibe codes, dgaf about anything except the result, INEVITABLY hits a wall when the codebase becomes a mess my tweet is about #3

I have already seen it first hand when an engineer has done a PR which they clearly didn’t generate themselves (example 3), and also clearly didn’t understand how the code worked. This is why I put a large emphasis on pair/mob programming or talking through PR code where it is sensible to do so. Just think of all the messy code bases we will have to fix up in years to come!

🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts

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

⭐ My favourite video this week is by James Eastham on idempotency in EDA! Go check it out, check it out, check it out (see what I did there?).

Weekly Case Study 🔍

This week’s case study comes from The Weather Company.

Learn how The Weather Company uses Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock for foundation model training and inference to help deliver accurate forecasts to 2 billion people in 178 countries and 83 languages.

🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts

This week’s inspirational quote comes from American computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter

“It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.”
- Douglas Hofstadter

This quote resonates so much when working on projects in software development where estimates and deadline dates are involved, especially the self-referential nature of the quote! i.e. it takes time even to take into consideration Hofstadter's Law!

Unfortunately, even agile projects will get labelled with delivery dates for stakeholders or clients (even when delivering smaller increments), and that can be very tricky to manage with changing requirements, blockers, and giving estimates which are rarely accurate! This is why many companies simply double estimates and still add contingency on when talking about fixed dates with fixed teams and a fixed deadline.

🗳️ Poll of the Week

In last week’s poll, we asked the question “Do you use internal private Amazon API Gateways in your solutions?”.

Interestingly, 67% said No, and 33% said yes. I get it, it does add a lot of additional complexities to your serverless architecture, but sometimes, it is worth it. I have a couple of articles on using them over at https://serverlessadvocate.com if you are interested in learning more!

This week, we ask the question, “Are you actively embedding AI into your Serverless applications?”.

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!