#58 AWS Conferences & Meetups! 🌎
This week, our expert is AWS Community Builder Igor Soroka, our spotlight falls on AWS Hero Thorsten Höger, and we look at the latest service releases, news, & more!
Welcome
In last week’s issue, our serverless expert was AWS Community Builder Darshit Pandya, and our spotlight fell on AWS Hero Anton Babenko!
This week, our serverless expert is AWS Community Builder Igor Soroka, our spotlight falls on AWS Hero Thorsten Höger, 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 🎤
Last week, I had a break from the Serverless Advocate Newsletter as I was helping to organise and run our first AWS North Community Summit Conference in Newcastle, with amazing globally recognised speakers, from AWS Heroes, to AWS Community Builders, and AWS staff, to technical experts and authors!
It was a very proud moment to see a year’s worth of organisation turn out to be a wonderful day for all involved, and we are looking forward to running the conference next year too!
I also spoke at the AWS North East User Group this week too which was a lot more chilled out, where I got a chance to chat and mingle to the local tech community.
📰 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 article this week was by Ian Brumby with a cool use case for AppSync Events and EventBridge Pipes!
Vadym Kazulkin has another series post with ‘Micronaut 4 application on AWS Lambda- Part 6 REST API application‘.
Pubudu Jayawardana covers ‘Monitoring multiple dynamic resources using single Amazon CloudWatch alarm‘.
David Behroozi has a super cool article titled ‘Migrating to LLRT‘.
Ian Brumby discusses ‘Realtime Event-Driven Applications with AppSync Events and EventBridge Pipes‘.
Another article from Vadym titled ‘Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Identity - Part 1 Introduction and overview‘.
Andrea Carratta has an interesting article called ‘AWS S3 IAM Secrets in C# with JetBrains Rider‘.
🎓 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 Igor Soroka:
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?
Too many teams are jumping between two edge scenarios. One lambda rules them all, or every small business operation needs a function. It often happens because of either rushing into implementation or over-planning. I think there should be a balance between the two extremes. There is no universal solution, but if your team needs a Serverless container, it is better to go with ECS/Fargate. However, when there is a need for just a single operation, think about direct integrations/resolves with API Gateway or AppSync. These are just the pointers - try to research and create POCs. Try to find a middle ground to balance various factors and requirements.
2. Which serverless tool or service are you most excited about right now, and why?
I have recently tried AppSync Events for the GenAI application. We needed a streaming response from Claude. This was quite simple to intrgrate because it is just lightweight Websockets with minimal setup. Even in the situation where it was Python for LLM-related functionality and TypeScript for a web application. Also, it feels very familiar to the original AppSync in terms of authorization. However, the naming gives a misleading interpretation. I explained too many times that it is not GraphQL server and not Subscriptions.
3. What is your favourite trick or tip when working with serverless that the readers may find interesting?
One hard truth I learned the hard way: design, plan, talk to people. Do not always rush into decisions and try not to lock yourself in Lambda Function for everything mindset. Also, it is useful to study videos and books about Domain-Driven Design and Event-Driven Architectures. Serverless is not a set of services, it is a mindset.
✅ 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 an open-source one, and from me! I have always thought that static config in the AWS CDK was not simple to inject into your given stage build (develop, staging, prod, etc), without a lot of custom code. Also, I hate to see process.env.something littered through the Lambda runtime code across multiple levels (adapters, business logic, etc)…
That’s why I looked at creating Envict, which is currently in Alpha, but gives you a way to easily grab the correct config based on stage, and also have a fallback to ephemeral environment config for unknown stages. Interestingly, I used spec-based AI development to build this using Kiro!
🚀 New Releases
Here are the latest and most interesting releases this week in the AWS World:
⭐ This week, there were a few DSQL and Bedrock features released, but my favourite is the lambda async payload size limit increase:
Amazon CloudWatch introduces interactive incident reporting.
Amazon S3 now generates AWS CloudTrail events for S3 Tables maintenance operations.
Amazon SES adds IP observability for Dedicated IP addresses (managed).
Amazon ECS now publishes AWS CloudTrail data events for insight into API activities.
AWS Lambda increases maximum payload size from 256 KB to 1 MB for asynchronous invocations.
Amazon Quick Sight announces the general availability of a new data preparation experience.
Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics now supports bundled multi-check canaries.
Amazon Nova now supports the customization of content moderation settings.
🔥 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.
✖️ Social of the Week
This week’s social is by Matt Wood, CTIO at PwC, where he has created a webpage which measures how far out your company is from the bleeding edge changes in AI:
This is such a cool idea, and the website is easy to navigate and answer the 6 questions.
Feel free to leave a comment below once you have tried it out! Where did your current company or organisation sit?
👷🏻 Tools & Frameworks
Check out the latest open-source frameworks, news, and tool updates from the past week.
jwtinfo 0.6.1 - jwtinfo is a tiny, fast CLI to inspect JWTs right from your terminal.
q-developer-wrapper - A lightweight SDK wrapper library for Amazon Q Developer CLI that enables seamless integration of AI capabilities into your applications, scripts, and automation workflows.
Nexus Share - AWS DevTools Hero Johannes Koch has created a tool to empower your social media presence by sharing content across multiple platforms with ease at once.
Async-profiler 4.2 - This project is a low-overhead sampling profiler for Java that does not suffer from the Safepoint bias problem.
🎙️ 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 Robbie Kohler, where he shares so much great knowledge and experience.
Dave Farley and Manuel Pais discuss “What Is The True Cost Of Cognitive Load In Software Engineering?“.
Robbie Kohler discusses “Beating the Iron Triangle: Trade-offs, Primitives & No Silver Bullets“.
Derek Comartin has a great video titled “47 Microservices… for 2 Requests Per Second?!“.
Raj Saha covers “Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway Ends MCP SDK?“ in this great video.
My buddy Mark Sailes has a great video titled “Handle Duplicate Transactions with Idempotency“.
Friend of the newsletter Sheen Brisals has a fab video titled “Embracing Complexity in Serverless“.
Mike Chambers discusses “Amazon Bedrock AgentCore“ in this tutorial.
The Prime discusses “AWS Outage And ANOTHER AI BROWSER????“ on The Standup.
Allen and Andres have a great video titled ‘Agent Design Principles - Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself‘ (with the best intro on YouTube ever!).
Weekly Case Study 🔍
This week’s case study comes from Artera, who offer AI-powered predictive and prognostic cancer tests, including the ArteraAI Prostate Test. Its mission is to facilitate personalised cancer treatment and shared decision-making between clinicians and patients.
Artera used Amazon EFS for massively scalable, shared storage of high-resolution biopsy slide images and Amazon EKS to run their ML/AI workflows, allowing them to process tens of thousands of image patches and thousands of files per slide.
Their AI-powered test delivers results in 2-3 days compared to ~6 weeks for traditional genomic tests, and handles 10,000+ image files per biopsy slide in its workflow.
🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts
This week’s inspirational quote is by former Head of Serverless Developer Advocacy at AWS, and PlanetScale Director, Chris Munns, talking after the major AWS outage in North Virginia:
“Even after today, you still don’t need multi-cloud.
Hell you probably don’t even need multi-region.
Hit the pub, take a long walk, watch a movie.
The cloud will be back to its normal working order tomorrow.“Chris Munns
I love this quote, as it is great for somebody to come out and say something knowledgeable, instead of the reams of rubbish posted on LinkedIn and Twitter/X with misinformation. I think Chris hits the nail on the head: most of the time, single-region is going to meet your needs, and on the rare occasion, multi-region. Multi-cloud is typically for banks and government agencies at best.
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 “Which AI tool are you currently using in your software development?”.
Interestingly, 43% said both ‘Other’ and ‘Copilot with VS Code’, with the remaining 14% saying Kiro. I’m super surprised more people didn’t vote for Cursor!
This week, we ask the question: “Do you actively contribute to open-source projects?”
Please feel free to leave a comment below on your answer.
📅 Serverless Events
The following serverless events are upcoming, so mark your calendars.
Serverless Architecture Conference - 20th-22nd Oct 2025
ACD Hong Kong - 2nd Nov 2025
ServerlessDays Sao Paulo - 5th Nov 2025
AWS re:Invent 2025 - 1st - 5th Dec 2025
Would you happen to have any upcoming events that you would like to highlight? Message me below!
⭐ Spotlight
This week’s spotlight falls on AWS Hero Thorsten Höger!
Thorsten is the CEO of Taimos GmbH, an AWS DevTools Hero, president of the Open Construct Foundation, maintainer of the Community-Driven CDK Construct Library, author, open-source maintainer/contributor, international speaker, and, to me, one of the original pioneers of the AWS CDK! I have learnt so much personally from his great content and The CDK Book.
A great example of one of his awesome talks is below:
Thank you for everything you do for our amazing community, Thorsten!
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
