#51 Incremental Solutions 🔩

This week, our expert is AWS Community Builder Tobias Schmidt, our spotlight falls on AWS Community Builder Kate Gawron, and we look at the latest service releases, news, articles, & more!

Aug 31, 2025

Welcome

In last week’s issue, our serverless expert was AWS DevTools Hero Matthew Bonig, and our spotlight fell on AWS Specialist Developer Advocate Mike Chambers!
This week, our serverless expert is AWS Community Builder Tobias Schmidt, our spotlight falls on AWS Community Builder Kate Gawron, 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.

📰 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 Jeroen Reijn, discussing all things budget-related in this fab article!

Jeroen Reijn covers ‘Enabling AWS Budget Notifications with SNS using AWS CDK‘.
Geethika Guruge has a fantastic blog titled ‘My AI Pit Crew: Building a Production App in a Single Stop‘, covering spec-driven development using Kiro.
Michael Flanagan has a great article titled ‘Bedrock Knowledge Bases with S3 Vectors: A [Preview] CDK Quickstart‘.
Eyal Estrin has an article titled ‘The Importance of an AI Strategy’.
Guilherme Dalla Rosa covers ‘The Serverless SaaS Playbook‘ in the AWS ComSum Quarterly.
John McCracken gives us a demo on ‘AWS IAM Roles Anywhere‘ in this article.
Vadym Kazulkin covers ‘Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime - Part 2 Deploy the agent with the AgentCore Runtime Starter Toolkit‘ in his series.

🎓 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 Tobias Schmidt:

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?

The biggest mistake I see is teams thinking they don't need a multi-region strategy when using serverless.

Just because you don't manage VMs or containers doesn't mean there won't be incidents. Either introduced by yourself or by AWS. Teams assume serverless automatically equals high availability.

The solution is surprisingly simple: With serverless architecture, it's easy and cheap to run a fault-tolerant active-active multi-region setup. Put a latency-based DNS in Route53 with health checks.

You get a slight latency benefit for backends. More importantly, you stay online if one region breaks down. Without lifting a finger once it's set up.

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

DSQL has me genuinely excited.

I've been following Benjamin Pyle's blog series about it since the announcement. His deep dives convinced me this isn't just another overhyped AWS service.

Most of my projects need a relational database, but Aurora Serverless is mostly overkill. For side projects or low-traffic applications, that's money down the drain.

DSQL charges per request. No idle costs, no capacity planning.

We're already using it for analytics at AWS Fundamentals and DynamoDB wasn't the right fit. No way for complex joins or aggregations across entities. Waiting for a chance to use it in a large-scale, high-traffic production app!

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

Use AWS AppConfig for feature flagging!

Most teams deploy new features by pushing new code. This couples feature releases with deployments. This is especially true for Serverless, as most teams deploy Lambda code directly through Terraform or CDK. Infrastructure and application code get bundled together.

You can't quickly disable a problematic feature without a deployment.

AppConfig solves this elegantly. You define feature flags in AppConfig and your Lambda functions retrieve flag values at runtime. AWS also provides a Lambda layer that handles caching, so don't fear expensive calls.

Want to disable a feature that's causing issues? Update the flag in AppConfig and your functions pick up the change within minutes. No deployment pipeline required.
Want to test something with 10% of users? Set up a percentage-based flag, monitor the results, and adjust instantly if needed.

I've used this for A/B testing, gradual feature rollouts, and environment-specific behavior. In my experience, it's the separation of concerns that brings the most trust to a team in their DevOps processes.

✅ 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 is for all you people considering AWS certifications, especially in the AI and ML space!

You can now save 50% on your exams and get access to exam preparation material when you join the AWS AI and ML Get Certified Challenge!

🚀 New Releases

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

⭐ This week, my favourite service release was a simple one - allowing the assigning of colours to each AWS account in the console!

🔥 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.

LambdaDB - LambdaDB is a serverless-native search engine built entirely on serverless components like AWS Lambda and S3.
PowerTools for AWS Lambda TypeScript - a new release of v2.25.2.
AWS DocumentDB - AWS joins the DocumentDB project to build interoperable, open source document database technology.
AWS X-Ray - X-Ray SDK and daemon end of support timeline.
sls-tinker - sls-tinker revolutionises debugging and development for serverless Laravel applications by creating a transparent bridge between your local Tinker session and remote Lambda execution.
Node.js - v24.7.0 is now out.

✖️ Social of the Week

This week’s social is by Jordan Ambra on LinkedIn:

I love this post, as it is exactly how I work personally - no over-engineering when proving out an idea, feature, or MVP within a startup or organisation. As long as you have built it in an evolutionary and modular way, you can incrementally change it later. My go-to is serverless, of course, as opposed to servers, but the sentiment remains.

I once migrated an internal application setup using Kubernetes that was used a handful of times a day at a cost of $ 5,000 per month across environments, to a serverless and Lambda-based solution, and it was closer to $5 per month (and most of that was CloudWatch, as you probably guessed…).

What are your thoughts on this post? 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 Daniel Terhorst-North covering the best programmer he knows. This is a must-watch!

Derek Comartin covers why ‘Netflix Ditched Kafka for THIS in CQRS‘ in this interesting video.
Season 4 Episode 33 on the Logicata podcast covers ‘Customized Dashboards, AI Agents, and Aurora's Decade‘.
Dave Farley asks the question: ‘Why Do Developers Struggle With Small, Simple Changes?‘.
The Serverless Craic Episode 71 covers ‘AI, DevOps & Serverless: Building Frictionless Developer Experience’.
Daniel Terhorst-North covers how he feels about ‘The Best Programmer I Know‘.
Eric Johnson discusses ‘The Complete Guide to ECS Blue/Green Deployments on AWS’ in this fun video.
Santiago has a super interesting video on ‘This is my AI setup to write software as a professional engineer.‘

Weekly Case Study 🔍

This week’s case study comes from one of my former companies, Sage, and how they have revolutionised their business software with AWS AI innovation:

Sage revolutionises business software for SMBs through their partnership with AWS, leveraging generative AI for real-time data capture, enhanced data reliability, and continuous business insights.

With AWS's robust computing power and comprehensive services, Sage is transforming how businesses operate, making AI-driven innovation accessible to companies worldwide.

🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts

This week’s inspirational quote is by author Frank Herbert:

“One learns from books and example only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things“
Frank Herbert

I absolutely love this quote, as it is very much how I learn… by building and doing! You typically need to read up from articles, books and YouTube videos to understand new services, features, and how you wire them up; but it is only through hands-on building that you truly learn about those things.

If I could recommend one key aspect for somebody starting their cloud journey, it would be to build as many throw-away code snippets and MVPs so you can really understand the cloud, but also to share your learnings with your wider community.

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 “Have you used Amazon Aurora DSQL in your production workloads?”.

Interestingly, 40% of people said yes, followed by 40% for ‘No - tooling is not mature enough’ and 20% for ‘No - other’. I totally get it, it’s a brand new service out of GA, and to me, lots of the tooling needs to catch up before I see mass usage.

This week, we ask the question, “Should AWS Solution Architects still code regularly to be effective in their roles?”.

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:

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 Community Builder, Kate Gawron:

Kate is a fantastic published author, blogger, YouTube content producer, AWS certified, database technology expert, and AWS Community Builder, who has often got me excited to learn more about new databases or their features through fantastic content. A great example is the series on DSQL, which covered the inner workings of the service, which inspired me to learn more!