🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Anne Stein, Cloud Consultant at superluminar and AWS Community Builder. Anne is a wonderful speaker and contributor in the community, sharing her knowledge, mentoring others, and helping people understand the cloud. Anne’s enthusiasm for learning and teaching is contagious, and her impact in uplifting others makes my heart warm. Thank you for everything you do, Anne!

💯 Spotlight

Last week, I was at the AWS Hero Summit where I spent 3 days with some of the best engineers in our industry. A hot topic that came up over and over again was what software development will look like in 5-10 years. It’s a fascinating (and honestly a little scary) conversation that raises more questions than it answers. My favorite content from last week is from self-proclaimed junior developer JiYeon Choi where she weighs in on the topic. Compared to my recent conversations with experienced career engineers, it was incredibly refreshing to see what concerns someone new into the field has. While the post doesn’t quite speculate on the future, she does a great job identifying the areas that make her stressed and what she did to take it into her own hands.

🔥 My Favorite Content

I know lots of people, devs or otherwise, that love the idea of having a personal website but are intimidated at the idea of building one themselves. Their solution? Use a site builder that is way more expensive than it needs to be and may or may not be optimized for static sites. While there’s nothing wrong with this approach, I feel like with the right guidance, they could have the site they actually want. Paul Santus gave us that guidance last week in a blog post where he shared how he replaced his Wordpress site using the Amazon Q CLI. It’s a great success story that gives us exactly what he did and how you can do it yourself. I’ll be honest, I felt inspired.

You know all those wide-open public MCP servers you’ve been creating? It’s time to stop doing that. They need auth. We can’t realistically expect widespread adoption of MCP until the default is remote and protected. But how do we do that? There’s surprisingly little content out there showing us how to secure an MCP server. That is, until Marcin Sodkiewicz showed us how to secure them with Amazon Cognito. The post walks you through step-by-step getting setup with Cognito and wonderfully explains new concepts along the way. In the end you have a secure MCP server and a surprising amount of know-how. Great write up!

People love data. Especially when someone else does all the hard work to find the cool metrics and insights for us. Channy Yun shared the 2025 Amazon Prime Day stats for AWS services last week with some genuinely staggering numbers. It’s crazy to not only see the year-over-year growth of Prime Day, but also to see the volume of scale some of these services are taking on. My favorite stat - ElastiCache serving over 1.5 quadrillion requests a day 🤯

💡 Tip of the Week

Here’s a quick little lesson from Aman Dhingra offering some advice if you use SQS as an event destination for Lambda. This makes a lot of sense!

🐣 New Releases

Reminder - AWS News is the best source for AWS-related service announcements. For all releases and summaries of what happened, head over there!

AWS App Runner just got support for IPv6 for both inbound and outbound traffic.

OpenSearch Serverless now has ABAC for data plane operations. This allows you to build identity policies that accept/deny based on data attributes.

Admins can now control MCP Servers used in Amazon Q via the AWS Console. They can also turn off the functionality entirely for an organization if they desire.

Last Words

Being surrounded by almost 200 AWS Heroes last week was amazing. With the past 1.5 years I’ve had, the unwavering support and genuine care of these community-leaders-turned-friends was exactly what I needed to not only re-energize my passion for community but to keep healing. Y’all are truly amazing people and your friendship means more than I can say.

Now for the things I’m not allowed to talk about! 🤐

I actually seriously am not allowed to say anything, but I will tell you this - re:Invent is going to be exciting this year. The pace of innovation coming from the AWS service teams is astonishing and they might be on point on a thing or two 😜

That’s my take on the week, but what’s yours?

What did I miss? What made you nod along (or 🙄)? Hit reply if you’re reading the email. Prefer socials? Ping me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or email.

Happy coding!

Allen