#43 Serverless Starter Kits 🔩

This week, our expert is AWS Community Builder Matthew Gillard, our spotlight falls on AWS Community Builder Jeroen Reijn, we look at the latest service releases, news, articles, & more!

Jun 29, 2025

Welcome

In last week’s issue, our serverless expert was AWS Lambda Principal Engineer Rajesh Pandey, and our spotlight fell on AWS Principal Developer Advocate Ricardo Sueiras!
This week, our serverless expert is AWS Community Builder Matthew Gillard, our spotlight falls on AWS Community Builder Jeroen Reijn, 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 by Mohsin Sheikhani where they create an agent-based hotel booking system.

Ricardo Cino covers “DynamoDB Streams with more than 24 hour retention”.
Marcos Henrique discusses “Rebuilding Bloated cron jobs with Event Bridge Scheduler“.
Salam Shaik covers “Building a Real-World Context-Aware Movie Chatbot Using Amazon Bedrock - Nova Pro“.
Mohsin Sheikhani has an agent-focused article titled “Hands-On with Amazon Bedrock Agents: Hotel Booking Assistant with Action Groups and Knowledge Bases“.
Vadym Kazulkin covers “Quarkus 3 application on AWS Lambda- Part 6 Optimization strategies for the cold and warm starts“.
Axel Delhuvenne has a great article called “How to Build an Event-Driven Outbox Pattern with AWS, Terraform and LocalStack“.

🎓 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 Matthew Gillard:

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?

With serverless, the lines are blurred between your business logic code and the infrastructure required to run it. They both need to be co-located to an extent to avoid the dreaded context switch, which slows developers down.

The main mistake I see time and time again is organisations that have cloud platform teams with rigid module systems in place to deploy infrastructure (for example, Terraform) and expect their developers to think like infrastructure architects to deploy their code, rather than think like developers to deploy their code.

There are now tools like CDK, Pulumi, and Serverless Stack (SST) (and others) that allow you to treat your "code as infrastructure" by co-locating everything in the same repository, using one language (usually JavaScript, TypeScript, or Python), which increases developer efficiency and velocity.

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

I am incredibly excited about Serverless Stack (SST)!

It's amazing that more people aren't aware of the absolute joy of this tool. The high-level pitch is that you can build your application and infrastructure using high-level components in TypeScript, which uses Pulumi behind the scenes.

Using a handful of lines of code and the built-in sensible defaults, you can have your API endpoint deployed without thinking about all the building blocks you would have to deal with using Terraform or CloudFormation. It also allows great flexibility in modifying the defaults if required and has a feature called "Live" which has a built-in ability to debug your Lambda functions in dev mode while they are deployed to the cloud - the code actually executes on your local machine. This also allows for fast feedback loops and less time waiting for cloud deployments.

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

My tip is to utilise managed services where possible. Some examples:

Use EventBridge Pipes for glueing services together
Gain some familiarity with Step Functions and use them when you have clearly defined workflows, using direct service integrations where possible
When you have to write code (e.g., AWS Lambda functions), keep your handlers lightweight and decompose your business logic into reusable services, which makes your code more testable and easier to migrate to other managed code execution methods later (other cloud providers, containers, etc)
Don't overthink your architecture. Build fast and loosely coupled. This allows you to be agile and change as you're building and learning new ways of doing things
Use SST, which allows you to easily deploy separate environments using one codebase
Don't be afraid of containers - use them if you have a requirement using managed container platforms like ECS Fargate

✅ 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, the most interesting service release for me personally is Amazon CloudWatch Investigations going GA!

🔥 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-lambda-mcp-cookbook - version 2 of the framework has just been released.
amazon-q-vibes-memory-banking - A lightweight context preservation framework for AI-assisted rapid prototyping and vibe-coding sessions.
aws-cdk-starterkit - upgraded to include Biome v2.

✖️ Social of the Week

This week’s social is on LinkedIn by Ryan Cormack:

This is really cool as I was personally looking for the TypeScript version of the framework too and then realised it was only for Python users. I was going to just wait for the official support, but keen to have a play with this now that Ryan has ported it over!

🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts

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

⭐ My favourite video this week is by Kyler Middleton covering “Veradigm's security-first approach to amplifying potential with GenAI“.

Ryan Williams covers “Introduction to AWS EventBridge Using the CDK!“.
James Eastham discusses “Mastering Local Async Lambda Development with .NET Aspire“.
AWS Developer Podcast episode 171 - How I learned to stop worrying and love chaos engineering.
The AWS Bites podcast covers “We Tried Amazon DSQL So You Don’t Have To (But You Might Want To)“ in episode 145.
Lydia Dely covers “The Secret to Making Your Code 10x Safer with MCP Context 7“.
AWS re:Inforce 2025 - Veradigm's security-first approach to amplifying potential with GenAI.
Shefali Arora covers “Building an OTT Recommendation System on AWS Amazon Personalize + Kafka + DynamoDB“.
Logicata podcast Season 4 Episode 25: Certificates, MFA, and Australian Investments.

Weekly Case Study 🔍

This week’s case study comes from Martyn Kilbryde and Chemist4U, and their 2024 re:Invent talk about how they went from zero to production serverless in 8 weeks:

🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts

This week’s inspirational quote is by author and speaker, Michael Nygard.

“Every system eventually goes into production and stops behaving like it did in test.“
- Michael Nygard

Although this is a fairly obvious conclusion, it does highlight that developing software is not a one-and-done activity pre-release to production (your work often doesn’t stop there), and quite often, we come out of the first production release with more work to do! That may be due to unexpected user behaviour, different scale, or perhaps quirks with the production integrations with external services.

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 “Do you pay personally for an AI license to use in your software development?”.

Interestingly, 44% said “Yes, just one”, 11% said they pay for multiple, and 44% said no. Personally I have Copilot which work pays for, and I use a combination of free ChatGPT and Claude with it - so I don’t pay for one out of my own money. If I didn’t get Copilot for free at work I would probably just pay for Claude.

This week, we ask the question, “Do you e2e test your Serverless services?”. Do you test, for example, hitting your API and ensuring down stream in your architecture a message is published to a queue and a Lambda function processes the message? Do you feel this is overkill? What works well with e2e testing serverless infrastructure and what doesn’t?

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 Jeroen Reijn:

Jeroen is an AWS Community Builder, Cloud Solutions Architect, blogger and international speaker who has a key focus on Java, DevOps and Serverless on AWS. He is also an all round awesome guy, and it was great meeting him at re:Invent last year! Checkout this latest video with Jeroen and my friend Mark Sailes discussing all things Java and AWS.

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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