#44 Serverless Developer Experience! 🥑
This week, our serverless expert is AWS Community Builder Antonio Lagrotteria, our spotlight falls on AWS expert Linda Haviv, we look at the latest service releases, news, articles, & more!
Welcome
In last week’s issue, our serverless expert was AWS Community Builder Matthew Gillard, and our spotlight fell on AWS Community Builder Jeroen Reijn!
This week, our serverless expert is AWS Community Builder Antonio Lagrotteria, our spotlight falls on AWS expert Linda Haviv, 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 (although I missed it from the tail end of last week) was by Kate Gawron comparing DSQL to Aurora Serverless V2.
Seth Orell has another article in his series titled ‘How to Crater Your Database, Part Five - Summary’.
Davide De Sio covers ‘Add guardrails to your Strands Agent in zero time with Amazon Bedrock Guardrails‘.
Harsha Mathan wrote a cool article on ‘Tokenisation & Data Masking using Lambda - The $700 Million Question‘. I would love to know the Bedrock costs, though.
Ogbeide Godstime Osemenkhian wrote an article on ‘Building Event-Driven Microservices: My LocalStack Journey‘. I’m seeing a lot of Localstack content at the moment, a bit of a resurgence, it seems.
Kate Gawron has a super interesting article called ‘Comparing Aurora DSQL vs. Aurora Serverless v2: A Practical Cost Analysis‘.
🎓 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 Antonio Lagrotteria:
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?
A common mistake I’ve seen is teams underestimating the importance of investing in the developer experience for Serverless. It's crucial to establish a development workflow that makes developers feel confident, comfortable, and effective when building and deploying Serverless solutions, especially in an enterprise domain.
I experienced this firsthand when helping teams transition from mature on-prem pipelines, local environment setup, to Serverless production workloads. Gaining developer buy-in requires offering feature parity—local testing, fast feedback loops, and reliable CI/CD, also for Serverless workloads.
Approaches to your testing framework of choice or SAM can help Serverless developers reach the point where they can say, “It works on my machine,” which is key to building trust in the enterprise and accelerating adoption.
2. Which serverless tool or service are you most excited about right now, and why?
Recently, I had the chance to deploy Step Function workloads in production, and I am very impressed with 2 features: Express workflows for their reliability, scalability and cost opportunities and Map State in workflows. It can’t be easier to parallelise work, control its execution, and massively scale your workloads, and still be in the pay-as you-go model.
3. What is your favourite trick or tip when working with serverless that the readers may find interesting?
Probably a boring one, but in an enterprise context, I found deploying lambdas with Docker to be much better than other approaches, though it may be perceived as slower.
For me, it brings a number of advantages, such as the ability to run a custom runtime or golden image if rules dictate so, and you do not have to rewrite your CI/CD pipeline, as it probably already supports Docker images.
Overall, it gives a consistent development environment that allows teams to focus on bringing value to company goals, not fiddling with platform issues or technicalities that eventually lead to wasted time.
✅ 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 was Nova Canvas virtual try-on (article on this incoming!)
AWS Fargate now supports SOCI Index Manifest v2 for greater deployment consistency.
Amazon Aurora DSQL is now available in additional AWS Regions.
Amazon S3 Express One Zone now supports tags for cost allocation and attribute-based access control.
Amazon Nova Canvas adds virtual try-on and style options for image generation.
Amazon Q in Connect now supports 7 languages for proactive recommendations.
Citations API and PDF support for Claude models now in Amazon Bedrock.
Amazon DynamoDB global tables with multi-Region strong consistency is now generally available.
🔥 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 CDK Serverless Nag Pack - Brings us the new Serverless CDK NAG rules pack.
CDK CLI anonymous telemetry data - The CDK team will begin to collect telemetry data on CLI usage on or after August 8, 2025, but do not collect customer content and they will anonymise the data they do collect.
EventCatalog - Introducing the EventCatalog Linter.
✖️ Social of the Week
This week’s social is on LinkedIn by Robert Hanuschke!
As a huge fan of the AWS CDK, this is something I have not added to any production serverless solutions yet, but I am keen to add it over the next week or so, and feed back on my thoughts! Sometimes these Nag Packs can add noise and false positives, in my opinion, but on the whole, they are very useful!
🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts
Here are some of my favourite videos and podcasts this week.
⭐ My favourite video this week is by James Eastham on ‘Three Smarter Ways To Use Claude Code’! Check it out below:
Mike Chambers covers Integrating Model Context Protocol (MCP) Tools with Strands Agents (How-to).
James Ward has a great video on Structured Concurrency: Hierarchical Cancellation & Error Handling.
Luca Mezzalira has a great video on What I had to unlearn to grow in tech (in the AI era).
Johannes and Rafael continue on Automating CICD Observability with GitHub Receiver and OpenTelemetry.
Andrej Karpathy discusses Software Is Changing (Again), but with The Primeagen talking through/over Andrej’s talk.
Dave Anderson, Mark McCann, and Michael O’Reilly discuss the Workgrid Case Study in Episode 67 of the Serverless Craic podcast.
Dave Farley has a great video with Kent Beck titled “Can Software Ever Be BUG-FREE?”.
Another great video from James on ‘Should You Emulate The Cloud Locally On Your Machine?’.
Mark Sailes and Max Andersen discuss A career in open-source on the Java In The Cloud Podcast.
Weekly Case Study 🔍
This week’s case study comes from Canva! To help customers move from a blank page to digital design faster, Canva built gen AI tools with Amazon Bedrock, empowering users to generate text with Magic Write, generate images, get help from a chat assistant, and search through a gen AI recommendation system. In this fireside chat, Canva's Greg Roodt discusses how they use AI services on AWS.
🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts
This week’s inspirational quote is by AWS Community Builder and Datadog Ambassador, Benjamen Pyle:
“If AI wrote my code, and I'm just the reviewer, then why am I getting called because my name is on the Git blame line?
That's because at this point, end of the day you own the code. AI is just a tool to help you write code faster, more efficiently, and be more productive. You own that code and you will be accountable for what it does.
Make sure you understand what it creates and ultimately what is running on your customer's device..“- Benjamen Pyle
Benjamen is on the money as usual with this quote, and this is something I have thought a lot about recently. I think the other consideration is the added pressure on PR reviewers now in ensuring that pull requests from people that have used AI tools to move quicker don’t have ineffective code, security issues, old frameworks (like V2 of the AWS SDK, for example).
If inexperienced developers are taking AI code verbatim and pushing PRs at a higher frequency that can cause a headache upstream! When raising that pull request make sure you can explain the code and approach like the reviewer is a 12 year old!
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 e2e test your Serverless services”.
Interestingly, only 57% said “Yes”, with the remaining 43% saying “No”. I am really surprised by that, as a lot of systems I have had the pleasure of building have had integrations that were not always testable through an API, and we have needed to e2e test the serverless solutions through other means. Here is an article I wrote about this some time ago.
This week, we ask the question, “Do you actively build side projects or do consultancy outside of your full-time role?”.
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 expert Linda Haviv:
Linda is an all-round AWS expert, international speaker, professional content producer (go checkout Instagram & TikTok!), and former Developer Advocate at AWS, passionate about empowering and teaching builders through creative content (including bespoke songs!), ‘Techtorials’, live demos, talks, and storytelling!
Her energy, warmth, and dedication to supporting others make her a standout voice in our tech space! I’m excited to see what she does next after leaving AWS!
Thank you for everything you do for our amazing community, your work continues to inspire and uplift those around you!
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
