#60 Serverless DevOps ⚙️
This week, our expert is AWS Hero Dheeraj Choudhary, our spotlight falls on AWS Hero Johannes Koch, and we look at the latest service releases, news, & more!
Welcome
In last week’s issue, our serverless expert was AWS Hero Daniel Aniszkiewicz, and our spotlight fell on AWS Community Builder Suzana Melo!
This week, our serverless expert is AWS Hero Dheeraj Choudhary, our spotlight falls on AWS Hero Johannes Koch, 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 article this week was by Heeki Park discussing credential management in agentic applications.
Heeki Park covers ‘Managing credentials and secrets in agentic applications with AgentCore Identity‘.
Ricardo Cino discusses ‘AWS Lambda Stubs for unit testing‘.
Datadog has just launched the 2025 State of Containers and Serverless report.
Stav Ochakovski has a great article titled ‘How Dependent Is My Production Environment on AWS?’.
Ran Isenberg discusses that ‘Platform Engineering Isn’t Just for Kubernetes—Serverless Needs It Too!‘.
Abdalluh Mostafa has a great article titled ‘From $500 to $20/Month: My Journey to Single ALB Architecture in EKS‘.
Greg Farrow has a great article on ‘Why Leighton Standardised on Zod for Schema Validation, and Why You Might Make the Same Choice‘.
Rahul Nath covers how to ‘Make Your .NET AWS Lambda Logs Searchable with JSON Structured Logging‘.
Vadym Kazulkin discusses ‘Micronaut 4 application on AWS Lambda- Part 7 Measuring Lambda cold and warm starts with GraalVM Native Image and REST API’
🎓 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 Hero Dheeraj Choudhary:
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 building massive, monolithic Lambda functions that try to do everything. They basically lift-and-shift their existing application logic into a single function, and then wonder why they’re dealing with terrible cold starts and debugging nightmares.
Here’s the thing serverless works best when you actually embrace small, focused functions. Each one should have a clear job to do. Yes, it means more functions to manage, but you get way better performance, your costs make more sense, and when something breaks, you know exactly where to look. It’s a mindset shift, but once you get it, you don’t go back.
2. Which serverless tool or service are you most excited about right now, and why?
AWS Step Functions has really won me over lately. For the longest time, orchestrating multiple Lambda functions was a pain, you would end up with functions calling other functions, error handling scattered everywhere, and good luck tracing what went wrong.
Step Functions changed all that. You get this visual workflow that actually makes sense, built-in retry logic, and you’re not writing a ton of boilerplate just to handle failures. The Express Workflows are great when you need high throughput without breaking the bank. It’s one of those tools that makes you wonder how you lived without it.
3. What is your favourite trick or tip when working with serverless that the readers may find interesting?
Test locally before you deploy-seriously, this will save you so much time and money. Use SAM CLI or the Serverless Framework to run your functions on your laptop with real event payloads.
Here’s what I do:
- I keep a folder of actual event samples from production in my repo. So when I am building or fixing something, I can test against real-world scenarios instantly.
- Which saves me from the cycle of deploying to dev, checking logs, tweaking code, and deploying again, that cycle kills productivity.
- Catch your bugs on your machine, and your CloudWatch bill will thank you.
✅ 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 from one of my team, Ronnie Winter, and a very easy way to speed up your Jest tests massively with one quick config change:
The TL;DR is that you can switch out your TypeScript pre-processor to @swc/jest which dramatically speeds up the running of your tests. The speed difference mainly comes from the fact it is written in Rust and super quick. Simply change your Jest config like so:
module.exports = {
transform: {
‘^.+\\.(t|j)sx?$’: ‘@swc/jest’,
},
}I now use this approach on all of my projects, alongside other packages like CDK Booster (for the win!).
🚀 New Releases
Here are the latest and most interesting releases this week in the AWS World:
⭐ This week, my favourite release was the change in pricing for Amazon Cognito M2M app clients (but it’s still not free like it used to be).
Amazon CloudWatch Agent adds support for NVMe Local Volume Performance Statistics.
Amazon Cognito removes Machine-to-Machine app client price dimension.
Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics adds multi-browser support in AWS GovCloud Regions.
Amazon OpenSearch Serverless now supports FIPS compliant endpoints.
Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals adds AI-powered Synthetics debugging.
Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights expands anomaly detection in on-demand analysis.
AWS B2B Data Interchange is now available in AWS Europe (Ireland) Region.
AWS Advanced .NET Data Provider Driver is Generally Available.
Amazon VPC Lattice now supports custom domain names for resource configurations.
Amazon Cognito user pools now supports private connectivity with AWS PrivateLink.
Amazon CloudFront announces cross-account support for VPC origins.
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime now supports direct code deployment.
🔥 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 Kelsey Hightower on LinkedIn:
The posts from Kelsey recently have been really honest, humorous, and enlightening, and I think this is a fair summary of K8s.
Feel free to leave a comment below.
👷🏻 Tools & Frameworks
Check out the latest open-source frameworks, news, and tool updates from the past week.
aws-lambda-stubs - This repository provides simple stubs for AWS Lambda services, allowing you to focus on writing and testing your Lambda functions without the overhead of continuously writing the same boilerplate stubs.
architecture-decision-record - A great resource for people looking to learn more about ADRs. My teams use these alongside spike documents.
eol-dr - A crowd-sourced guide to help techs help their non-tech spouses / partners / parents / kids when we are at the end-of-life.
EventCatalog - gets a number of updates including EventCatalog Schema Explorer and Data Stores.
cloudwatch-appsignals-mcp-server - An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that provides comprehensive tools for monitoring and analyzing AWS services using AWS Application Signals.
😂 Just for Fun
This week’s “just for fun” post is by Alex Reid on LinkedIn, and he is obviously becoming fairly close and relaxed in this special relationship with this model:
This made me laugh this week, but in all honesty, would we actually like to see models where you stipulate a personality, voice, and an avatar? What would yours be like?
🎙️ 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 my friends Allen and Andres on their new(ish) channel ‘Null Check TV’.
The Zacs’ Show cover ‘AI Becomes Your Cloud-Native Engineer‘.
The Modern Engineering Channel, Dave Farley and Sam Newman, ask the question ‘Is AI the End of DevOps as We Know It?‘.
Derek Comartin covers ‘You Don’t Need an Interface for Everything‘.
The Prime covers ‘OpenAI Is A Ponzi Scheme‘.
Simon Brown covers ‘The C4 model: misconceptions, misuses and mistakes‘.
Andres and Allen have another great live stream on ‘Agent-in-the-loop: Replacing human intervention with more agents‘.
The vBrownBag channel covers ‘From Speech to Speech: A Tale about Amazon Nova Sonic‘.
Johannes welcomes Lou to discuss ‘Will Ona and coding agents replace software engineers?‘.
Weekly Case Study 🔍
This week’s case study comes from Experian:
Experian Data Office utilised AWS Transform for .NET, an Agentic AI service, and deployed on Amazon EKS to successfully modernise seven mission-critical legacy .NET Framework applications to .NET 8.0. This automation transformed a massive 687,600 lines of code, leading to a circa 40% reduction in developer effort for the migration projects. Ultimately, the company saved approximately 300 engineering days, achieving significant efficiency gains, improving performance, and accelerating their DevOps maturity.
🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts
This week’s inspirational quote is by author Vlad Mihalcea:
“If you want to become an expert in a given technology, start writing about it.
You’ll learn way more than just reading documentation.“Vlad Mihalcea
I honestly couldn’t agree more with this statement, and it was a major part of my journey to becoming an AWS Hero. After writing well over 100 articles with supporting code repos, I worked my way through most AWS services - and then naturally ventured into key topics and areas like EDA, DDD and more..
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 “How much of your day-to-day code is generated using AI?”.
Interestingly, 40% said none, which really surprised me. Following that it was a split between 20% of people saying a fair bit (around 25%), and 40% saying at least half. For me personally, I would say I sit in the “fair bit” vote at around 25%.
This week, we ask the question: “What kind of desk do you work from?”
Please feel free to leave a comment below on your answer.
📘 Books
A quick shoutout to Luciano and Mario for this superb book, ‘Node.js Design Patterns‘, which I am busy working through. So many nuggets in here, from going back over the basics, to more advanced patterns.
So far this has been a great addition to my library, go check it out.
📅 Serverless Events
The following serverless events are upcoming, so mark your calendars.
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 Johannes Koch!
Johannes is a Principal Architect at FICO, an AWS DevTools Hero, blogger, YouTube channel host, entrepreneur, part of the team that organises the AWS Community Day in the DACH region, and much much more besides!
I have had the pleasure of being on Johannes great YouTube channel (see below - think we chatted so much it ended up a two-part video), and he is genuinely one of the nicest guys you can meet in tech! I always look forward to catching up with him in Vegas at re:Invent, and this guy oozes “community’ and makes everyone feel welcome!
Also go check out his latest ‘build in public’ project, Nexus Share, which is super cool!
Thank you for everything you do for our amazing community Johannes!
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
