🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Vicky Seno, an AWS Container Hero and computer science professor at Santa Monica College. Vicky has spent years empowering the next generation of builders through her hands-on AWS courses, open-source workshops, and approachable DevOps content. She makes complex topics like containers and Kubernetes accessible to everyone, inspiring students and professionals alike to level up their cloud skills. Thank you, Vicky, for teaching, mentoring, and proving that sharing knowledge is one of the most powerful ways to grow a community.

💯 Spotlight

A couple of weeks ago, Valkey released version 9.0, with some genuinely amazing new features. But looking beyond the feats of engineering that went into the release, what stands out most about it is the community focus. These updates were labors of love rooted in community heartache and came from engineers from GCP, AWS, and more. In a time where people have never been more polarizing, it’s great to see some true open source pioneers pushing to make things better for everyone. Khawaja Shams wrote this blog post linking the major feature releases back to their roots in community. 💙

🔥 My Favorite Content

Amazon EventBridge is a wonderful service, and works beautifully for connecting your services together in async workflows. But what might seem difficult to many of us is getting it to work at enterprise-scale. Cross-org message delivery, centralized registration, and cross-account trust relationships quickly increase the complexity of what’s already a hard-to-understand concept for many developers. Marcin Sodkiewicz published a blog post last week aimed to make it dirt simple to implement. His article on organization-wide EventBridge broadcasting explains why you need it, how to do it with IaC, and offers some advice on schema validation as part of your implementation. Fantastic write-up!

I remember sitting at my computer a few years ago looking at a blank dashboard after I was tasked with “build monitoring into the app.” Yes, seriously 😅. I didn’t know what to do. My team had built an event-driven system, but I had no idea what I needed to monitor to set our SREs up for success. I wish I had seen James Eastham’s video from last week on the metrics to care about in event-driven systems. It would have helped me so much. James talks about the important metrics to focus on, how to capture them, observing infrastructure, and building your observability dashboards. Finally!

💡 Tip of the Week

I normally embed my favorite post of the week from social media directly in the newsletter, but this post specifically didn’t allow embedding, so I’ll share it in link form because I loved it so much. Mark Sailes asked a simple question last week: “Is there something about Lambda that makes people think that they shouldn’t apply standard software engineering practices to it?” and the Lambda hot takes are EVERYWHERE in the comments.

Just as I thought we were past a lot of the misunderstandings around Lambda, a post like this pops up and assures me there’s still work to do. Highly recommend the read. Get your popcorn. Link

🐣 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!

How do I know AWS re:Invent is almost here? Oh right, we’re getting new features out the wazoo! Here are some cool serverless ones from last week.

Amazon released Nova Multimodal Embeddings, which creates embeddings from basically any data type. Thi sis a nice unified embeddings model you can throw anything at.

Nova also got a big upgrade with web grounding. This is a turnkey offering for Nova models that aim to prevent hallucinations by fact checking itself against the internet.

Creatives rejoice! Stability AI released four new image tools: outpaint, fast upscale, conservative upscale, and creative upscale.

Step Functions released a new metrics dashboard offering usage and billing metrics.

Last Words

A bit of a light week for content, but that’s ok! I expect as we continue to get exciting releases leading up to re:Invent we’ll get some cool builder articles that show us how to build with the latest and greatest.

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