🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is David Sol, Cloud Architect at Caylent, co-organizer for the Python Mexico user group and AWS Community Builder. David constantly helps people out in the community by answering any type of question, giving great presentations and being a very enjoyable person to talk to. I encourage anyone to reach out to him, and I’m pretty sure you’ll have a meaningful conversation around any topic. David, thank you for everything that you do!

💯 Spotlight

AWS introduced tiered pricing for M2M authentication in Amazon Cognito last year. While this was a surprise, it has had a good impact on the service as they’ve added a lot more functionality. Buuuut this might have been inconvenient for a lot of people (including me) since we were using this without any cost implications. As we near the 12 month grace period for existing M2M users (May 2025) Yan Cui provides five alternatives to Cognito M2M.

🔥 My Favorite Content

We’ve typically seen the trade-off triangle where you have Performance, Cost and Reliability on each vertices and you can only ever pick two. In Serverless architecture this changes since reliability is already done by the cloud provider. This is why Luc Van Donkersgoed, shows us a different trade-off triangle in The Serverless Trilemma: Cost, Performance, and Complexity.

In Part 1 of his series on rate controlling in distributed systems, Omid Eidivandi explores how different levels and layers of system coupling to external services impact rate limiting, outlining key challenges and attributes like concurrency, speed, and state consistency that affect performance and reliability.

Allen shows us How to Build Real-Time Push Notifications the Easy Way with AWS. In this video, Allen builds a fun game using Amazon EventBridge API destinations, AWS Step Functions and Momento topics.

Orel Bello shares practical strategies for optimizing serverless costs at scale, focusing on AWS Lambda tuning, avoiding common pitfalls like over-provisioning and unnecessary logging, and leveraging tools like Step Functions, Graviton processors, and Savings Plans to significantly reduce cloud expenses.

Anton Aleksandrov and Rajesh Kumar published a post in the AWS blog where they share best practices for handling billions of Lambda invocations, covering strategies like shuffle-sharding, intelligent queue partitioning, proactive traffic isolation, and key observability metrics, all aimed at building resilient, scalable serverless applications inspired by Lambda’s internal architecture.

BONUS: Spanish Content

As a native spanish speaker, I would like to highlight some of the great content that has been created in this language.

Hector Fernandez has been very busy by giving us two great episodes from his podcast Cloud Para Todos where he shares strategies to diagnose and strengthen DevOps culture and to manage cloud costs transparently and efficiently, thereby boosting team collaboration and optimization. He didn’t stop there, he also released a post about manipulating payloads using the newly released JSONata feature in Step Functions.

Augusto Valdivia released a free GenAI bootcamp. This includes a series of 35 videos to help you start your GenAI journey.

If you are looking for a quick weekly update in Spanish Marcia Villalba has got you covered with her weekly Spanish newsletter desplegando.cloud.

💡 Tip of the Week

The Lambda Live Debugger by Marko, allows you to debug your AWS Lambda by executing your local code, removing the need to redeploy your functions every time. This can really speed up your feedback loop when developing Lambda functions.

🐣 New Releases

It’s not exactly a new release, but this week Fauna announced that it will be sunsetting the service over the next few months. They are committing to open-sourcing the technology. It’s sad to see these things happen as this affects not only the consumers of this service but the people who worked on it very hard. I wish the best to all the employees affected by this.

The AWS Console Mobile App adds support for 24 additional AWS services. This allows you to manage more things on your environments when you are on the go.

CloudWatch RUM now supports JavaScript source maps for easier error debugging. This allows you to get better visibility from the stack trace when you have minified code.

Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) SDK for JavaScript version 3 and for Go version 2 are now available, allowing you to build applications that use DAX with these versions of the SDK.

Amazon Redshift Serverless now supports Current and Trailing Tracks for release updates, This allows you to run Amazon Redshift with the latest and greatest features by using the Current Track, if you want to lag for a few weeks before taking the changes you can use the Trailing Track which would give you time to run any validations necessary before adopting the new features.

Last Words

Thank you for having me for yet another week while Allen is out. I always enjoy summarizing my top picks of the week for you. If I have missed anything cool or interesting, please send them to me. I’m always happy to keep learning from all of you.

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.

Until next time!

Andres