#46 Amazon S3 Vectors, Lambda debugging features, and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore! 🤯

This week, our serverless expert is AWS Community Builder Seth Orell, our spotlight falls on AWS Senior Solutions Architect Urmila Raju, we look at the latest service releases, news, articles, & more!

Jul 20, 2025

Welcome

In last week’s issue, our serverless expert was AWS Community Builder Davide De Sio, and our spotlight fell on AWS Community Builder Daniele Frasca!
This week, our serverless expert is AWS Community Builder Seth Orell, our spotlight falls on AWS Senior Solutions Architect Urmila Raju, 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 Jimmy Dahlqvist covering a cool use case for Amazon Nova.

Benjamen Pyle covers ‘Establishing Datadog on Kubernetes with EKS’.
Ran Isenberg has a great article on ‘Serverless MCP on AWS: Lambda vs. Fargate for Agentic AI Workloads’.
Jimmy Dahlqvist covers ‘Extending My Blog with Translations by Amazon Nova‘.
Nick Gilbert has a great security article titled ‘Kiro Just Went Live: Here’s Why I’m All In on GenAI for Security‘.
Matheus das Mercês has a super interesting article on ‘You Don’t Need a Construct for That: Best Practices for Serverless Infrastructure with AWS CDK Blueprints‘.
Vadym Kazulkin covers ‘Micronaut 4 application on AWS Lambda- Part 1 Introduction to the sample application and first Lambda performance measurements‘.

🎓 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 Seth Orell:

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?

An all-too-common mistake I've observed is when teams adopt serverless technology without first addressing the fundamentals: continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. For your team's success, serverless is not a primary; CI/CD is.

Serverless helps teams run ("You build it, you run it" - Werner Vogels) software, but running software is the last mile in the journey. What happens in the "you build it" phase is crucially more critical than your "you run it" phase. If you haven't nailed down your fundamentals, serverless solves very little.

If you are new to CI/CD, check out Dave Farley's YouTube channel, "Modern Software Engineering," for bite-sized lessons. Read through the treasure trove that is Martin Fowler's blog, including his seminal article on continuous integration (updated in 2024). Hear Jez Humble address claims of "Continuous Delivery: Sounds Great But It Won't Work Here" in devastating fashion.

Now, place serverless on top of all this. You will be unstoppable.

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

I may be late to the game, but I have been prototyping an integration with Momento, and (wow!) am I impressed. This is how serverless caching should look. Khawaja and his team have done an excellent job. I am also interested in their "Topics" offering, but I don't yet have hands-on experience. But that is coming soon.

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

Go build something. Serverless makes it easy to experiment on the cheap. Instead of merely composing stuffy architectural diagrams, you could have functioning example applications that deploy and run. Get out of the ivory tower and get your hands dirty. It's fun!

✅ 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 has been mega for releases, with my favourites being Amazon S3 Vectors, Lambda debugging features, and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore! 🤯

🔥 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 v2.50.3 - quality-of-life improvements including customisable node graphs, an "Edit page" button for easier editing, and rendering of Mermaid and PlantUML diagrams in accordions.
Powertools for AWS Lambda (Python) v3.17.0 - This release enhances the Parser experience with new schemas for Amazon Cognito User Pool triggers.
CDK Insights - CDK Insights is built to use AI and static analysis to audit your AWS CDK stacks, surface hidden issues, and suggest best practices.
OpenTelemetry Integration for Powertools for AWS Lambda RFC - RFC now open for discussion, so please get involved.
Amazon DynamoDB Local - version 3.0.0 is out now.
API Gateway VTL Editor - The API Gateway VTL Editor provides a browser-based environment for testing Apache Velocity Template Language (VTL) transformations used in AWS API Gateway.

✖️ Social of the Week

This week’s social is by Serverless Hero, Yan Cui:

This is 100% the one thing people forget when learning DDD! It's not just about understanding boundaries and documenting ubiquitous language; the primary reason we're building the software in the first place is to create value for our customers and gain a deeper understanding of their problem statement through close collaboration with them! The projects that I have seen fail in the past have typically had a handoff between engineering teams and customers, typically through BAs and delivery (this just doesn’t work!).

What is your experience with this? Feel free to leave a comment below.

🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts

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

⭐ My favourite video this week is by Marc and Darko discussing the future of AI assisted development.

Mark Sailes has another great episode on Java in the Cloud titled ‘Deep Dive: Live EKS thread-dumps & AI analysis‘.
James Eastham has a great video on ‘Your AWS Lambda Developer Experience Has Just Got 3x Better’.
Dave Farley asks the question: ‘Can We FIX Agile for Software Engineers?’.
Clare Liguori joins the Whats new in Data podcast covering ‘Retrieval as a Tool, Not a Destination’.
Ryan Williams has a great video titled ‘A Beginner's Guide to Serverless System Design on AWS‘.
Derek Comartin covers ‘You don’t need an Aggregate in DDD. Model Rules, Not Relationships’.
Marc Brooker and Darko Mesaros cover ‘Beyond Prompts: The Future of AI-Assisted Development‘.
Maik and Johannes cover ‘Implementing Evolutionary Architecture and CI/CD Adaptations’.

Weekly Case Study 🔍

This week’s case study comes from AstraZeneca:

As clinical trials grow more complex, identifying the right patients and optimising trial sites is more critical than ever. AstraZeneca is transforming this process with Amazon Bedrock, using text-to-SQL and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to merge structured and unstructured data.

🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts

This week’s inspirational quote or thought comes from NYT Bestselling Author, Robert Greene.

“Understand: we tend to overestimate other people’s abilities—after all, they’re trying hard to make it look as if they knew what they were doing—and we tend to underestimate our own.“
Robert Greene

This quote hit the spot for me, especially as somebody who at times has felt imposter syndrome, and at other times felt like I am flying high in my career. There have been times I have worked closely to people on the outside that seem to know everything as top experts in the industry, and you seen realise it is all bravado and confidence and their skills are lacking. And at other times I have worked with quiet geniuses that don’t do themselves justice.

Ultimately we are all in the same boat on an ever-lasting learning journey; just be kind to other people, and just as important, yourself.

What are your own thoughts and experiences of this quote? Feel free to leave a comment below.

🗳️ Poll of the Week

In last week’s poll, we asked the question “What is the ideal size for an autonomous serverless team in your opinion?”.

Interestingly, 43% said 2-3 people, with 29% saying both 4-5 and 6-8. I have to agree with the 43% personally as I prefer small autonomous teams that have little to no handoffs, and communication is optimised at this size I feel (especially with continuous deployments and trunk-based development). I have worked in teams from 4-8 in the past that felt clunky with too many touch points and dependencies.

This week, we ask the question, “Does your organisation have reusable base components, frameworks and patterns to use on projects?”.

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 Singapore - 2ns August 2025
GOTO Serverless Bengaluru - 8th August 2025
ACD Australia - 15th August 2025
ACD Adria - 5th Sept 2025
AWS Community Day Baltic - 10th Sept 2025
ACD Bay Area - 17th Sept 2025.
ACD Aotearoa - 18th Sept 2025
ACD Poland - 18th Sept 2025
ACD Portugal - 27th Sept 2025
ACD DACH - 7th Oct 2025
ACD Nordics - 10th Oct 2025
AWS North Community Conference - 16th Oct 2025
ServerlessDays Milano - 21st Oct 2025
ServerlessDays Cardiff - 23rd Oct 2025
Serverless Architecture Conference - 20th-22nd Oct 2025
ServerlessDays Sao Paulo - 5th Nov 2025

Do you have any upcoming events that you want to highlight? Message me below!

⭐ Spotlight

This week’s spotlight falls on AWS Senior Solutions Architect Urmila Raju:

Urmila is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS, and fantastic local and international speaker covering serverless and AI technologies and solutions. The amount of conferences and talks she has done is impressive! I have personally attended some great sessions by her in the past, including this great example below: