#50 Serverless Blueprints 🧩

This week, our expert is AWS DevTools Hero Matthew Bonig, our spotlight falls on AWS Specialist Developer Advocate Mike Chambers, and we look at the latest service releases, news, articles, & more!

Aug 24, 2025

Welcome

In last week’s issue, our serverless experts were AWS Community Builder Chris Dobson and AWS Serverless Hero Sang (Chris) Park, and our spotlight fell on AWS Community Builders Program Manager Jason Dunn!
This week, our serverless expert is AWS DevTools Hero Matthew Bonig, our spotlight falls on AWS Specialist Developer Advocate Mike Chambers, and we look at the latest AWS service releases, blog posts, hints and tips, news and more!
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Leighton.

A Glimpse into My Week 🎤

This week, I published an article titled “AWS CDK Blueprints vs Custom Constructs vs Aspects“.

This article focuses on the new AWS CDK Blueprints, or ‘Property Injectors’ as they are known, and how I would personally use them alongside L3 constructs and Aspects.

📰 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 Marcin Sodkiewicz breaking down MCP.

Millipixels Interactive talk through ‘How They Reduced Deployment Time by 45% Using Serverless + CI/CD’.
AWS Community Builder Aki covers how to ‘Build a Lightweight Serverless ETL Pipeline to Iceberg Tables with AWS Lambda Athena‘.
Marcin Sodkiewicz covers ‘MCP in simple words‘ in this great article.
This was a really interesting case study titled ‘How I Diagnosed a Serverless Incident in 20 Minutes — with One Cursor.AI, a Dash of MCPs and a Pinch of Instinct‘.
Vadym Kazulkin discusses ‘Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime - Part 1 Introduction‘.
Benjamen Pyle covers ‘KEDA to build Event-Driven Applications on EKS‘.
Chanaka Supun has an interesting approach to ‘How They Orchestrated 400K+ Nested API Calls with AWS Step Functions and Lambda‘.
Itay Meller, Ran Isenberg, and Yossi Lagstein cover how to ‘Simplify multi-tenant encryption with a cost-conscious AWS KMS key strategy‘.

🎓 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 DevTools Hero Matthew Bonig:

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?

Serverless apps are also naturally very distributed, and once you stop centralizing all your logic in one place, understanding what the system is doing can be very difficult or tedious.

Treat good observability, like centralized logging and tracing, as a first class citizen. Don't ship anything without having it built in from day 1 and make sure you build it to be as lightweight to add and configure as possible. Don't have manually written log lines scattered throughout your code, use aspect-oriented loggers. Don't manually instrument all of your functions, leverage auto-instrumentation. Pass trace-ids on events and properly update spans to use them. Write SOLID code so that those traces and spans provide more value.

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

EventBridge enables a lot of good practices. It's usually not adopted enough.

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

Make sure you're writing your Lambda function handlers as service layer components that are solely responsible for handling the Lambda invocation specifics, like inputs and outputs.

All the business logic should be handled by other functions that the handler calls. All dependencies should be injected into that function. Do this, and you'll find your code is very easy to write and test, and you'll rarely get stuck waiting for Lambda functions to deploy to see if your code is right.

✅ 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!

🧠 Tips & Tricks

This week’s tip follows on from my article, showing how powerful property injectors can be in the AWS CDK:

In this example above, we can apply this to all L2 level S3 Bucket constructs in the app, amending the required default properties for our organisational blueprint, and making the user aware of the overrides on synth.

We apply it like so to our AWS CDK app:

Now all of our S3 Buckets have the required values set as default. This is a pretty cool feature which is in public preview.

🚀 New Releases

Here are the latest and most interesting releases this week in the AWS World:

⭐ This week, my favourite service release was Bedrock access to OpenAI open weight models!

🔥 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.

guidance-for-multi-agent-orchestration-agent-squad-on-aws - A demonstration of how AI agents and human support can work together in an e-commerce customer service environment. This project showcases intelligent query routing, multi-agent collaboration, and seamless human integration for complex support scenarios.
Amazon DynamoDB data modeling MCP tool - The official MCP Server for interacting with AWS DynamoDB.
grok-2 - now open source.
Amazon Q CLI v1.14 - hot swap custom agents.

✖️ Social of the Week

This week’s social is by Gregor Hohpe on LinkedIn:

I absolutely love this post, as it is exactly how I have set up the AWS Practice at Leighton for our pods, with our guiding principles, our daily ways of working (with a key focus on empathy, trust, agency and urgency), and flows showing which templates we use at what points in our project journeys (C4, event storming, technical designs, Well-Architected Reviews etc). The pods (teams) have a brand that they are proud of and work by - we deliver what we say we will, to fantastic engineering quality, by the time we said we would.

What are your thoughts on this post by Gregor? Feel free to leave a comment below.

🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts

Here are some of my favourite videos and podcasts this week covering serverless, AI, architecture, and software engineering.

⭐ My favourite video this week was by Eoin and Luciano discussing all things Kiro!

Mark Sailes and Matej Nedic cover ‘DSQL - The REAL serverless relational database‘ on Java In The Cloud.
Steve Smith covers ‘Why ‘You Build It, You Run It’ Works (Even If Developers Hate It)‘ on the Modern Software Engineering channel.
Wanjiko Kahara discusses ‘How to Choose a Foundation Model for your Use Case (Getting Started Overview)‘ on the AWS Developers channel.
Derek Comartin discusses ‘The #1 Reason Your Software System Gets Messy‘.
The Prime has a fun session called ‘Why Making a Debugger is So Hard‘.
Issue 147 of the AWS Bites podcast covers ‘Spec coding with Kiro’.
Allen and Andres walk through ‘Enough Vibing, We’re Spec Coding Again‘ building out a Battleship game using spec driven AI coding.

Weekly Case Study 🔍

This week’s case study comes from ecbeing which streamlined its operations using services like AWS WAF and Amazon CloudFront:

ecbeing, a leading Japanese e-commerce platform provider supporting over 1,600 sites, streamlined its operations and enhanced security by integrating AWS edge services like Amazon CloudFront and AWS WAF.

Initially adopted for image caching and CDN performance, CloudFront now hosts entire sites via reverse proxies, reducing origin server load and optimising infrastructure costs.

AWS WAF was introduced to meet PCI DSS v4.0 compliance, enabling centralised rule management and rapid deployment, cutting WAF implementation time from one month to a single business day. This unified edge architecture has strengthened DDoS protection, simplified cross-cloud operations, and improved user experience through innovations like a virtual waiting room.

🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts

This week’s inspirational quote is by American author L. Frank Baum:

“No thief, however skilful, can rob one of knowledge, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire.“
L. Frank Baum

I personally love this quote, as I have always had a key focus on acquiring knowledge and experience when working with AWS for the past ten years or so, and this can never be taken away from me, regardless of changes in employers, roles, or any other circumstances.

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 your go to service for containers on AWS?”.

Interestingly, 50% of people said AWS Fargate, followed by 25% for both EKS and ECS. I’m surprised nobody went with App Runner since it is super easy to set-up and start working with!

This week, we ask the question, “Have you used Amazon Aurora DSQL in your production workloads?”.

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.

AWS North Community Conference graphic reads: Save the date, 16th October 2025, Newcastle upon Tyne, northcommunityconf.com

🎟️ To note, tickets are available for the AWS North Community Conference, which I am helping organise so go check it out!

Other fantastic events happening soon:

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 Specialist Developer Advocate Mike Chambers:

Mike is an ex AWS Machine Learning Hero and now a Specialist Developer Advocate for Machine Learning at Amazon Web Services (AWS), speaker, writer, and open-source contributor/maintainer, where he helps developers create innovative and impactful applications using generative AI and cloud computing.

I personally love the work of Mike on YouTube and regularly share it in the newsletter, with a great example below where he runs a really cool and informative session on Strands Agents and MCP on AWS: