🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Rola Dali, Senior Machine Learning Architect at Tech 42 and newly minted AWS Hero. Rola’s journey is truly inspiring – she transitioned from academia (with a PhD in neuroscience and genomics) to cloud engineering. As co-organizer of the AWS Montreal User Group and a mentor to women and students in tech, Rola actively shares knowledge through talks and in-person events. Thank you for empowering others to follow in your footsteps, Rola!

💯 Spotlight

I have a love/hate relationship with MCP. On one hand, I feel like it’s completely unnecessary because we (ok maybe just me) primarily build bespoke tool sets for agents and scope tools to exactly what the agent needs. On the other hand, MCP servers from trusted sources like AWS or Stripe are useful in my day to day development. I’m even talking about it in my re:Invent session this year. Anyway - despite my mixed feelings about it, I absolutely love what Dennis Traub released last week: an MCP Client for AWS IAM. His open-source project is essentially an IAM adapter for MCP servers, bypassing the need to setup an entire Auth0 or Cognito stack for OAuth support. It’s a brilliant proxy for IAM auth that keeps things clean and secure. Love it!

🔥 My Favorite Content

Agentic IDEs have been making it more and more of a possibility to build and run your own solo-SaaS these days. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to know the fundamentals! IDEs like Kiro and Cursor and CLIs like Claude Code help provide the best output when you understand and articulate the patterns you want during the design phase. And a MAJOR design pattern for SaaS was described by Lee Gilmore last week in his article about Amazon Cognito triggers for token manipulation. His “short” article goes through a complete use case of saving user records in a database after sign up and injecting claims into tokens upon login. Read this, understand it, and ask your IDEs to build it. Heck, give them the article so they use it as is! P.S. - a 16-minute read is not a short read, Lee 😝

Darryl Ruggles shared an article last week he claims is about building a kabob store side project using Aurora DSQL. While yes, technically, the article covers how he built one, I got so much more value out of the explanations Darryl gave for his engineering decisions. Instead of defaulting to easy-mode with AWS serverless, Darryl built his app in a runtime-agnostic way so he can swap out compute resources with barely any intervention. Lambda? Check. ECS Fargate? Check. EKS? Ew, but check. This is a well-thought-out solution that merits consideration the next time you build something new. Great job, Darryl!

I’ve gone through the full spectrum of AI agent use. At one point I thought it would be great to give every instruction in your system to an LLM and let it figure out what do to 100% of the time. But as we’ve matured as an industry and as I’ve tried and failed to build deterministic patterns, I’ve found agentic workflows with deterministic orchestration is the real way to go. I was tickled last week reading an article from Mason Egger and Steve Androulakis where they were addressing the misconception that you can’t build deterministic workflows with AI agents. They argue it’s the exact opposite - that AI agents work best in orchestrated environments (and I agree!). They spicily debunk claims about AI agents and show you how to make agent loops and complex processes with Temporal. You can take this concept to Step Functions or Postman Flows, too. Agentic workflows are one of the safest ways to build production software with agents.

To round us out with a non-technical article, Danielle Heberling reminded us last week that how we do it matters. Her short story recounts some powerful words from a former CEO saying that the real differentiator in success is how you go about doing things. Being kind. Empathy. Not by working 16 hour days or hiring the best sales people. Danielle brings us back with some real talk, and I love the message she sends with this story. In the end, we’re all people - and people respond the best when we’re kind to each other.

💡 Tip of the Week

I’m getting more and more excited for re:Invent, but also for my commute to Vegas! I’m one of 50 engineers hopping aboard a bus to compete in a 5-hour hackathon as we drive from LA to Vegas. It’s such a novel idea and I can’t wait to throw down some code live on air.

🐣 New Releases

pre:Invent is in full swing! Here are a few of my favorites from last week.

Lambda got a super cool tenant isolation mode, allowing builders to isolate execution environments to individual tenants.

Step Functions enhanced the TestState API to support local unit testing of workflows.

S3 now has attribute-based access control for general purpose buckets.

API Gateway introduces developer portal capabilities. Allowing users to create custom hubs for their APIs.

There were plenty more announcements, but I’ll keep it brief. For a full rundown, be sure to check out AWS News.

Last Words

Happy Thanksgiving week, Americans! And happy week before re:Invent everybody! I’m excited to see many of you next week. Rest up and start hydrating!

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