#40 Welcome New AWS Heroes! 💜

This week, our expert is AWS Principal SOLA Anton Aleksandrov, our spotlight falls on AWS Senior Product Manager Praneeta Prakash, we look at the latest service releases, news, articles, & more!

Jun 07, 2025

Welcome

In last week’s issue, our serverless expert was AWS Serverless Hero Ant Stanley, and our spotlight fell on Cloud Dialogues Co-Host Georgia Smith!
This week, our serverless expert is AWS Principal Solutions Architect Anton Aleksandrov, our spotlight falls on AWS Senior Product Manager Praneeta Prakash, 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 to the new AWS Heroes!

Welcome to the new AWS Heroes: Christian Bonzelet, who is now a DevTools Hero, David Victoria, who is a Community Hero, and Nora Schöner, who is also now a DevTool Hero! Congratulations!

You can view the news article here for more information https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-our-newest-2025-aws-heroes-cohort/

📰 Articles that caught the eye

Here are some stand-out articles I read during the week in the World of Serverless, AI, Engineering and Architecture!

⭐ My favourite this week was the article by Luc van Donkersgoed, as I do love a bit of async testing patterns!

Luc van Donkersgoed covers “End-to-end email testing with SES and SQS“.
Damien Gallagher discusses “Modernizing Legacy Struts2 Applications with Claude Code: A Developer's Journey“.
Cyberark have a great article titled “Poison everywhere: No output from your MCP server is safe“.
Thomas Aribart covers “MCP Client: Building a Smart and Robust Integration to DynamoDB with DynamoDB-Toolbox“.
Vadym Kazulkin does part 4 in his series “Quarkus 3 application on AWS Lambda- Part 4 Reducing Lambda cold starts with SnapStart and API Gateway request event priming“.
A great article by Josh Thorne titled “Creating a Serverless Book Recommendation System with Bedrock“. (I missed this last week)

🎓 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 Principal Solutions Architect Anton Aleksandrov:

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?

Getting too excited about technology. Don't get me wrong, we're all techies, and serverless IS exciting, but you have to keep in mind - at the foremost - serverless is a tool! Technology for the sake of technology doesn't mean much, instead be pragmatic and always think what business problem you can solve with it. Don't switch programming languages or IaC tools just because you saw someone on the internet saying it worked for them. Instead, use languages/tools that make YOUR team most productive. Don't try to immediately apply every single optimisation technique prior to actually knowing how your system behaves in production, where the bottlenecks are, and what ACTUALLY needs to be optimised. Instead, monitor, analyse, and prioritise the most impactful optimisations.

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

Oh man, this is a hard one! So many amazing launches recently... But if I have to pick what I'm most excited about RIGHT NOW, it has to be building Agentic workflows with Serverless. You hear these buzzwords like AI Agents, MCP Servers, Agentic workflows everywhere today. At their core, though, these are just cloud applications with familiar needs - security, governance, observability, CI/CD and so on. What really excites me is that all the serverless best practices and lessons we’ve learned over the years can now be applied to accelerate this new Agentic and GenAI-driven world. It’s like the perfect intersection of cutting-edge AI and battle-tested cloud architecture.

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

Embrace modular IaC from the get go. With Serverless, application developers want more flexibility to control their functions and queues, so you will commonly see them using IaC. Modularising your most common architectural patterns into architectural blueprints will be a game-changer for organisations with multiple development teams. Create a collection of CDK Constructs or Terraform modules that are relevant to YOUR organisation and enable all other teams with packaged best practices and organisational policies.

✅ 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 release is API Gateway now supporting proxy-based architecture patterns through routing rules!

🔥 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.

EventCatalog GitHub Action - This action is a powerful tool that helps you catch issues early in your pull requests, ensuring your event-driven architecture stays healthy, aligned and governed.
iam-lens - Get visibility into the IAM permissions in your AWS organizations and accounts. Use your actual AWS IAM policies (downloaded via iam-collect) and evaluate the effective permissions.

💡 DynamoDB Tip of the Week

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

💡 “Use dynamodbs tools like marshall and unmarshall for easier writes”

Use marshall and unmarshall from the AWS SDK to handle data conversion between JavaScript objects and DynamoDB formats. This simplifies read/write logic and reduces chances of format-related errors.

Further reading: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSJavaScriptSDK/v3/latest/Package/-aws-sdk-util-dynamodb/

✖️ Social of the Week

This week’s social is on LinkedIn by Allen-Michael (AM) Grobelny:

I love this post and its sentiment, as I do worry about how we prepare the next generation of engineers to possess a breadth and depth of knowledge in the face of AI. The sad reality, though, is that many companies will naturally push for greater output with the time saving, of course.

🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts

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

⭐ My favourite video this week is by James Eastham called “Serverless or Containers? Who Cares Pick Both!“. Check it out below

David Boyne covers “Detect breaking schemas with EventCatalog“.
The Believe In Serverless podcast covers “Serverless Guru Spring Hackathon Winners & Project Showcase“.
Derek Comartin chats to David Fowler on Design, APIs, and Avoiding Dogma.
The AWS Developers channel discusses “3 MCP servers which you should start using today“.
The fantastic Eric and Julian kick off the AWS Lambda Hackathon!
Dave Farley covers 14 Step Continuous Delivery Checklist.

Weekly Case Study 🔍

This week’s case study comes from CarGurus where they transformed car shopping with AI-powered price intelligence on AWS

🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts

This week’s inspirational quote comes from U.S. Air Force colonel and military strategist, John Boyd

“Speed of iteration beats quality of iteration.”
- John Boyd

This quote/law wasn’t originally from the software engineering space, but has been widely adopted in agile and lean product thinking.

It means the ability to rapidly and accurately gather information and act on it, which becomes increasingly important, a concept captured by the OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

It essentially translates to the ability to quickly release, test, and adapt software which is more valuable than aiming for perfection in a single release!

What are your thoughts and experiences with this? How do you work? Feel free to leave a comment below.

🗳️ Poll of the Week

In last week’s poll, we asked the question “Do you work multi-cloud in your day to day role?”.

Interestingly, 75% said just one cloud, 13% said two max, and finally 13% said they don’t use the cloud yet. I’m not really surprised by the 75% given my own experiences in multiple companies.

This week, we ask the question, “What do you use for your CICD pipelines?”. 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 lightning talks throughout the day. Go check it out!

Other fantastic events happening soon:

ACD Australia - 15th August 2025
ACD Adria - 5th Sept 2025
AWS Community Day Baltic - 10th Sept 2025
ACD Aotearoa - 18th Sept 2025
ACD Poland - 18th Sept 2025
ACD Portugal - 27th 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 Senior Product Manager Praneeta Prakash!

Praneeta is a truly fantastic Product Manager for the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), who alongside the team, listen to the community closely to really drive forward new and innovative open-source developer experience features that we (including myself) use daily in our work supporting our own customers! Examples from the last couple of weeks alone are the AWS CDK Toolkit Library going GA and the cdk drift feature!

Thank you for all you do for our wonderful community!

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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