🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Steve Morland, CTO at Leighton and AWS Community Builder. Steve is directly responsible for the enablement of some of the best serverless minds in our community today. He’s currently organizing the AWS North Community Conference, which is sure to be an amazing event with some brilliant minds all in one place. Thank you Steve, for everything you do for the community!

💯 Spotlight

We got an excellent insider opinion from Marc Brooker last week when he shared a blog post about how AWS uses Firecracker. He talks through some of the expected use cases they had when they released it in 2018, and some of the interesting new use cases that have popped up for it - like session isolation in AgentCore Runtime. Marc has a great way with words, it’s really neat to see his perspective on such a fundamental component to the services we use every day.

🔥 My Favorite Content

Every time I stumble upon a thorough walkthrough of an AWS service and how you should use it in every major scenario I think to myself “I wish this existed when I was first learning AWS.” I got this feeling last week when I read through Brian Rinaldi’s deep dive on SQS. This is an exceptional reference for people who are trying to understand when and why to use SQS in their systems. It goes over the types of queues, how to use them with functional code examples, and also covers a little bit of cost modeling.

Couple that article along with one from Pubudu Jayawardana about detecting EventBridge target failures and you have a production-ready EDA on your hands. Pubudu shares how and why you would want to capture when EventBridge is unable to deliver an event to its configured destination. I learned a thing or two in this article about how the dead letter queues work in EventBridge, thanks Pubudu!

Many developers are all-in on agentic code editors, but it’s the wild west out there. So many steering docs, extensions, and MCP server combinations out there give you mixed results, especially when comparing simple vs complex tasks (and your prompting ability!). With all this in mind, I found Vivek V’s blog post from last week particularly refreshing. He wrote about his lessons migrating a 58,000 line app with Kiro and walked us through all his configuration and why he chose to set it up the way he did. I don’t see lots of content like this, and am really grateful for the explanations.

💡 Tip of the Week

You probably know by now that Andres Moreno and I host a live AI web show every two weeks. What you might not know is that we finally have started taking clips from the show and sharing them on YouTube and social media. Now, you can get the best tidbits without committing to watching us for an hour (it is a fun show though)! Here’s a clip about a mental reframing of determinism with AI agents.

🐣 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 released the Nova Act IDE extension, which allows you to build browser automation agents in your IDEs like VS Code, Kiro, and Cursor. I’ve never built one of these types of agents before, but seeing how easy it is now, I just might.

Several AgentCore services just got an extended amount of support for things like VPCs, PrivateLink, CloudFormation, and tagging. AgentCore is still in preview, so it’s nice to see this production-readiness features start to trickle in.

Last Words

Special shoutout to Pubudu Jayawardana who told me last week the emails haven’t been hitting your inboxes for a couple of weeks. As you can see, that has been fixed! I’ve been working on converting the newsletter backend into something more robust and reusable for the community, and inadvertently broke sending emails, which means I have some alerts to build 😅 Anyway, thank you Pubudu!

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