🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Elena van Engelen-Maslova, freelance engineer and new AWS Community Builder! Elena is a 💣 Kotlin developer, and regularly shares her expertise in various online communities. Thank you for everything you do, Elena!

💯 Spotlight

Migrations are hard. Whether you’re moving and transforming data, swapping frameworks, or you’re a goose in the spring, there’s a lot of challenges about a migration that you might not be aware of. I found David Behroozi’s article last week on migrating from Serverless Framework to CDK to be particularly helpful to not only illustrate the difficulty of switching IaC providers, but how to get around some of the trickiness. His post shows you how to migrate multiple types of resources with pictures and IaC code snippets. It’s a lot of manual work, but David has done the hard part for us. Thanks David!

🔥 My Favorite Content

We seem to be hitting our stride when it comes to AI innovation in recent months. MCP, multi-agent collaboration, and agentic workflow builders are surging in popularity and as a result, we’re seeing some great content come out. Alexy Grabov shared a post on how to create a multi-agent collaboration service using Amazon Bedrock. While I don’t necessarily agree with his wild claims in the article about SaaS being dead, I do appreciate his explanation of AI agents and how they work together. This is really cool.

As an app developer, whenever I hear service developers talk about how things work under the hood, things tend to go over my head really quickly. But that wasn’t the case with Yan Cui and Khawaja Shams last week on the Real World Serverless podcast. The duo talked about building a multi-tenant system with cell-based architecture and the big wins you get when you implement your service that way. Khawaja talks about how building Momento services this way allows them to scale instantaneously and basically infinitely with minimal overhead 🤯 This is a great talk where they explain tough technical concepts in an easy, engaging manner.

I don’t know what Arpad Toth is building on the side, but I like it. In a cool post about things you can do with Cognito, Arpad taught us how to implement manual user registration with approvals in Step Functions. He uses a pre sign-up trigger to start a Step Function workflow with a wait step in it to allow admins to approve or deny registrations. Arpad wonderfully describes both the problem and solution, and walks you through the code to do it.

We sometimes get into a bit of an echo chamber in our siloed tech communities. People validate each other over and over and before you know it, what we’re doing is the only way to do things. It’s a dangerous path to “the way we’ve always done it.” With this in mind, I really liked a post from Jason Nathan stating that your tech stack is overrated. The premise of his article is that frameworks come and go, but architecture is built to last. I like the thought - it’s good to be passionate about things, but sometimes we choose the wrong hills to die on.

💡 Tip of the Week

The surprise of the week came from a livestream I did with Andres Moreno where we tried out v0 for the first time. I prompted it to “Build a battleship game using Momento Cache as the data store and Momento Topics for interactivity. The rest of the design is yours to choose.” And all I can say is WOW! It built an entire working application in literally 2 minutes with managed game state, Battleship rules, and functional interactivity that just worked. It took a bit of debugging to figure out a couple of small issues, but color me impressed.

🐣 New Releases

Multi-agent collaboration in Amazon Bedrock went GA last week. Welcome to the virtual office!

DeepSeek-R1 is an available model in Bedrock.

EventBridge supports IAM execution role in Lambda, SNS, and SQS, a big update for consistent permissions policies.

AppSync events now supports WebSocket publishing. This is a big quality of life improvement - the first release of the service supported publishing messages through HTTP only. Love this update!

Last Words

I’ve been tuning back in after a long leave of absence and I’m really excited about the innovations I’m seeing in AI. We’re past the “reasoning hump” with GenAI and firmly in the actionable/agentic camp with it. Are you doing anything with multi-agent collaboration or with MCP or something new? I’d love to hear about it.

If you’d like to make a recommendation for the serverless superhero or for an article you found especially useful, send me a message on Twitter, LinkedIn, or email.

Happy coding!

Allen