🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Daniel Gaina, AWS Community Builder and senior cloud engineer at Aevi. Daniel knows a thing or two about AWS - he’s holds the elusive golden jacket! He also is a wonderful public speaker and shares practical tips on AI/ML. Thank you for everything you do and congrats on the All Builders Welcome Grant, Daniel!

💯 Spotlight

We’ve all rolled our eyes at the argument that “containers should be used for everything.” While they absolutely have a bunch of use cases and optimized workloads, you should never talk in absolutes (see what I did there 😅). For the Lambda naysayers, which I know none of you are that subscribe to this newsletter, there are some really good reasons to use it. Don’t just take my word for it. My top content from last week is from Daniele Frasca, who says it in probably the best way I’ve ever seen it written. His article, “when (not if) containers misbehave,” talks about the human cost of running containers, even in serverless solutions like ECS Fargate. This is worth the time to read, let it soak in, and read again.

🔥 My Favorite Content

It’s a pretty common pattern to see events go straight into a queue to buffer processing of heavy workloads. But what happens when your events are coming from a globally distributed app? Or even worse, what if they’re coming from separate accounts in your organization? This common pattern quickly becomes tricky when you start layering on the realities of an enterprise application in production. Luckily, Pubudu Jayawardana wrote up a short-but-sweet blog post on how you can handle that with EventBridge and SQS. He cuts straight to the good stuff and runs you through 4 different scenarios for event delivery. Super useful and timely (most of these capabilities are new this year)!

Marko makes some very cool projects that solve some pretty substantial problems. Over the past few years, he’s released Serverless Spy and the Lambda Live Debugger, and now he’s back with a new incredibly useful and easy tool - the CDK Booster. This NodeJS package makes it faster to build your TypeScript or JavaScript Lambda projects with no code changes. All you need to do is install the package and update your cdk.json file and you’re off to the races! Thanks Marko!

Last week I started 6-part live series on enterprise AI agent design principles with Andres Moreno. Our first session was all about the system prompt. Andres and I are trying to separate the design principles from code, so we built a test harness, the Promptatron 3000 🤖, to show how different system prompts can drastically affect the output of an LLM. We even built a meta-agent to grade how deterministic our system prompts are. If you’re building AI agents, be sure to catch this series!

It’s not often I read about a project someone built where I flip back and forth between “this is a good idea” and “I’m not sure I like this.” But that’s exactly how I felt reading Artem Tokarev’s post last week about how he created an open-source password manager. The article is written really well and documents the evolution of this thought process, showing architecture diagrams of how his app evolved. Dealing with secrets is (obviously) a big deal when it comes to security and I’m undecided about how I feel with where his solution ended up. You guys tell me what you think about it.

💡 Tip of the Week

I stumbled across a post from Danilo Poccia last week that felt so surreal. He built a web page that lets you poke through AgentCore memory resources visually. This feels like something from a movie in the 90’s that predicted what the future was going to be like. Equally cool and scary.

🐣 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!

Amazon EventBridge now allows you to use CMKs for rule filter patterns and input transformers.

Step Functions now allows you to process Athena manifest and parquet files in distributed map. It also lets you use tap into S3 directly for distributed map, removing the pre-processing phase when iterating over S3 objects.

Q Developer CLI now supports remote MCP servers. This one has been a long time coming, I’m really glad to see more support for remote.

Bedrock announced support for DeepSeek-V3.1 and Qwen models last week. DeepSeek is good for code generation, agent tooling, and global apps due to its multilingual capabilities and cultural sensitivity. The Qwen models have a lot of use cases based on the one you pick - seems like a great update!

Last Words

Northern hemishere - happy first day of fall! Southern hemisphere - happy first day of spring! The seasons are changing as we roll into that last part of the year. What do you have planned? Is it too early to start talking about re:Invent? I’ll be there this year and look forward to seeing all of you!

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