#41 The internet is down! ❤️🩹
This week, our expert is AWS Community Builder Uriel Bitton, our spotlight falls on AWS Community Builder Matthew Gillard, we look at the latest service releases, news, articles, & more!
Welcome
In last week’s issue, our serverless expert was AWS Principal Solutions Architect Anton Aleksandrov, and our spotlight fell on AWS Senior Product Manager Praneeta Prakash!
This week, our serverless expert is AWS Community Builder Uriel Bitton, our spotlight falls on AWS Community Builder Matthew Gillard, 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, AI, Engineering and Architecture!
⭐ My favourite this week was the short MCP article by Denise Ignatova! Simple yet very cool!
Rehan van der Merwe covers “Migrate from CDK Pipelines to CDK Express Pipeline“.
Alex Raileanu covers part 1 of “Working with AWS DSQL and Lambda: First Part - Setup of the project“.
Marc Bowes has a great article called “Aurora DSQL Best Practices: Avoid hot keys”.
Kenta Goto discusses “The necessity of “cdk.context.json” in AWS CDK“.
Ricardo Cino talks through “Private AppSync with custom dns“.
Denise Ignatova covers “MCP Custom Server Tools + Amazon-Q. How to ...?“.
🎓 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 Uriel Bitton:
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?
It’s most often about costs. Just because you can do it doesn’t necessarily mean you should. Most engineers can design a scalable and performant architecture with AWS’s services, but most don’t know how to optimize costs in their architecture.
This can be done with things like throttling your APIs, avoiding long-running processes in your Lambdas and delegating these to SQS for example.
With DynamoDB, setting maximum read/write request units for throughput protects you from DoS attacks and abusive behaviour which can cost you a lot.
One common mistake I see with regards to serverless functions is developers will set a large amount of Lambda concurrency but not match that concurrency with the API Gateway endpoints and DynamoDB throughput. If concurrencies don’t fit together across your entire pipeline, you can have service A bottlenecking service B even though service B has a generous amount of concurrency or throughput.
2. Which serverless tool or service are you most excited about right now, and why?
I’ve gotta say DynamoDB’s Import to S3 tool. I’ve discovered something really cool about it. If you have large database migrations, it can get pricy to migrate data to DynamoDB. But if you can upload your data in JSON format to S3 (which is free unlimited) then from there you can use DynamoDB’s Import to S3 tool to import your data into DynamoDB, costing you dramatically less.
3. What is your favourite trick or tip when working with serverless that the readers may find interesting?
When I create a new Lambda function, the first thing I do is head to the configuration settings and crank up the memory setting to 1024MB by default. More memory sometimes means less cost per call, it’s counter-intuitive but the calculations check out for many workloads. Then before using the functions in production, I’ll use AWS Compute Optimizer to get recommendation for the best memory setting to use on each function (or if I need an even better tuning experience Lambda Power Tuning)
✅ 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 the price change for Amazon Verified Permissions, which means this is actually usable now!
Amazon EKS Pod Identity simplifies the experience for cross-account access.
Amazon Bedrock Custom Model Import now supports Qwen models.
Amazon DynamoDB Streams adds supports for Kinesis Client Library (KCL) 3.0.
Express Brokers in Amazon MSK now support Apache Kafka version 3.8.
Announcing open sourcing pgactive: active-active replication extension for PostgreSQL.
AWS HealthLake is now available in the AWS Europe (Ireland) Region.
AWS Console Mobile Application adds support for CloudWatch Log Insights.
Amazon ECS adds support for updating capacity provider configuration for ECS services.
Amazon Verified Permissions reduces authorization request price by up to 97%.
AWS WAF now supports automatic application layer distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection.
AWS AppSync Enhances Security with Default Encryption for GraphQL API Caching.
Powertools for AWS Lambda introduces Bedrock Agents Function utility.
🔥 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 Fundamentals - more great resources in one place from the team at AWS Fundamentals, including the AWS Toolbox, AWS FinOps Dashboard, and more!
Powertools for AWS Lambda - now offers a new Amazon Bedrock Agents Function utility that simplifies building serverless applications integrated with Amazon Bedrock Agents.
AWS API models - new publicly available source of API models for Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS Lambda MCP Cookbook (Python) - This project provides a working, open-source, pure AWS Lambda-based Python MCP server implementation.
Node.js 24.2.0 - the latest version of Node.js has been released.
cli53 - cli53 provides import and export from BIND format and simple command line management of Route 53 domains.
DynamoDB Extended - DynamoDB Extended adds essential productivity tools to the AWS DynamoDB Console.
✖️ Social of the Week
This week’s social is on LinkedIn by Eduardo Ordax:
I love this post as it speaks of the dangers of vibe coding when you don’t have the experience or knowledge to validate what has been built by the LLM (and why). The visuals are fantastic!
🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts
Here are some of my favourite videos and podcasts this week.
⭐ My favourite videos this week are by Mark Sailes as he starts his new channel “Java In The Cloud“, check it out!
Allen and Andres cover A2A - the next MCP? on the Believe In Serverless channel.
Derek Comartin covers “The Future of AI Integration: MCP with James Montemagno & Den Delimarsky“.
Tudor Girba has a great talk titled “Moldable Development: Programming Through Custom Tools“.
The Primeagen covers “99% of AI start ups will be Dead by 2026“.
Mark Sailes has a great video titled “Secure passwords for Lambda applications“.
Another great video from Mark titled “Processing S3 files with Java“.
Weekly Case Study 🔍
This week’s case study comes from Lennar, who transformed homebuilding with Data & AI and Amazon SageMaker:
🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts
This week’s inspirational quote/law is Brooks Law by Fred Brooks:
“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”
- Fred Brooks (The Mythical Man-Month)
This quote is so, so true, and I have experienced it first hand at a previous company where 13 new teams and 13 new work-streams were added to a major project to try and get it over the line (not my decision of course!), and it was a disaster! 13 small teams working on the same project with a lack of communication and coordination just made it more complicated and therefore later.
What are your thoughts and experiences with this? Feel free to leave a comment below.
🗳️ Poll of the Week
In last week’s poll, we asked the question “What do you use for your CICD pipelines?”.
Interestingly, 62% said GitHub Actions, 31% Jenkins, and only 8% AWS Code Pipeline. My own “go to” is GitHub Actions on all projects now so I totally appreciate the percentages.
This week, we ask the question, “Which aspect of AWS Step Functions do you find most challenging or confusing?”. Do you find it difficult to debug and trace executions, or perhaps integrating with external services?
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 Community Builder Matthew Gillard!
Matthew is a Principal Cloud Architect at V2 AI, an AWS Community Builder, co-founder of ServerlessDays Melbourne and the Cloud Dialogues podcast, blogger, international speaker, and much more besides! Go follow him on LinkedIn for great content!
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
