🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Ashwaq Salim, data scientist at Moonpig. Ashwaq is someone I genuinely enjoy learning from because of how openly she shares her journey into tech. She’s honest about the challenges of breaking in, thoughtful in how she talks about growth, and consistently encouraging to others earlier in their careers. Her willingness to show the messy middle of learning and building is something our industry needs more of. Thank you for the impact you’re making, Ashwaq, and for helping others believe they belong here!

💯 Spotlight

There has already been a lot of content posted on the new Lambda Durable Functions feature released at re:Invent. I found Chris Dobson’s article on workflow orchestration with Durable Functions to be the most helpful one so far. Instead of drawing simple comparisons to Step Functions, Chris does the dirty work and shows us how to build with the different components and describes their business cases. This is a great one to bootstrap your knowledge and feel prepared enough to go try it yourself. Nice work, Chris!

🔥 My Favorite Content

You’re about to see a storm of “re:Invent recaps” for the next couple of months in various forms. I’ll do my best to shield this newsletter from being flooded with them. That said, I really appreciate Minoltan Issack’s article last week framing his recap as your 2026 serverless strategy. Instead of just listing out new features, Minoltan explains the problems each release is solving and exactly how it solves it. Love it being positioned this way almost as a checklist for going into the new year.

There’s nothing quite like being grounded in humility by your app growing faster than you expect. Many of us have ambitions to build “that one SaaS app that will take off” so we don’t have to work anymore, but do we really know what that looks like? JK Gunnink shared a story last week where he scrambled to build batch writes to save on serverless costs after he onboarded a big customer. My biggest takeaway from this is the danger vibe coding can get you in for solo-devs. Fortunately for JK, he knew what was going on and how to fix it. But for people who don’t know what their codebase looks like - there could be some really scary surprise bills at the end of the month.

Despite lots of tools coming out to build AI agents, I haven’t seen a great end-to-end “what does AWS recommend” for agentic chat bots. Mike Chambers answers this question in a post last week where he shows us exactly how to build streaming agents on AWS. This post explains how and why to build with API Gateway, AgentCore Runtime, and Cognito to stream responses quickly and securely to users. While I think more and more use cases are popping up for autonomous agents (agents that run behind the scenes rather than interacting with people directly), it’s still good to see a best practice come from AWS on this.

While not serverless or AI related, I published an article on something very real in production cloud deployments last week. I had an article published on the Valkey blog explaining how to secure Valkey deployments through defense in depth. The tips I share in there apply (mostly) to Redis as well and many of them apply to any provisioned box in the sky. This is one of those articles that make sense when you read it, but you might not have figured it out without being prompted. Stay safe!

💡 Tip of the Week

I don’t see as much chatter about DevRel these days as I used to (thank goodness). But I did see a social post last week calling out what many people think DevRel is and how it definitely isn’t that. While I think some of the items in this list are a reach, the core idea hits home. Great insight by Marcos Placona.

🐣 New Releases

The week after re:Invent is generally pretty slow, but there were a couple cool things last week.

Aurora DSQL can now create clusters in seconds, down from minutes. This gives it a much more “serverless feel.”

Kiro gained a new Aurora PostgreSQL power last week, giving you quicker access to building apps backed by PostgreSQL.

Last Words

I’m still recovering from re:Invent. I saw chatter from tons of attendees saying they got sick after getting home, and I was one of them as well. I’m getting better slowly but surely - and it at least is giving me some time to poke around with cool new features that were released a couple of weeks ago.

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