🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Pravesh Sudha, content creator and AWS Community Builder. Pravesh is a prolific creator, and covers a wide range of cloud topics ranging from containers to AI to web development. He publishes real, grounded content full of builder opinions (in a good way) that make topics feel easily approachable. Thanks for everything you do, Pravesh!

💯 Spotlight

We’ve seen quite a few articles the past month and a half on Lambda Durable Functions. These mainly show how to build with them and compare the functionality with Step Functions. But Michael Walmsley broke that mold last week with an article about encrypting checkpoint data with custom keys. Michael explains how Durable Functions work and shows you exactly how to encrypt data to adhere to strict compliance regulations. If you’re interested in learning how it all works - give this a read.

🔥 My Favorite Content

I love builder articles. Posts that share stories of a problem someone had and what they built to solve it. Jimmy Dahlqvist is a pro at this, and he did not disappoint last week with his article on how he built a serverless AI bartender. It goes through the architecture, but also has some great info on getting setup with DSQL and some gotchas to look out for. Love this!

Speaking of builder articles, I found one from Nori showing us how to send Trello reminders to WhatsApp. This is a guided tutorial that walks you through the connective glue between these two systems using AWS. While it’s not a novel build architecturally, it does showcase some clever engineering to do things yourself and solve a real-world problem I assume many of us have.

This is our last newsletter issue for January, which means our last “2026 prediction” article. This time, we get one from Asif Awan on the CNCF blog about the four pillars of platform control for autonomous enterprises. This article predicts a widespread adoption of autonomous AI agents in the enterprise and outlines the key components to them being successful. These aren’t outlandish claims, they feel grounded in pragmatism to me.

💡 Tip of the Week

Here’s an existential question about API Gateways posed by Kin Lane last week. There are some really good answers in the comments along with a few funny ones 😜

🐣 New Releases

There were no notable releases I found last week that this crew would be interested in. But remember to check out AWS News to keep up with the latest releases.

Last Words

Wow, 200 issues already! We’ve come a long way the past four years - and I can’t honestly say I expected to get here! What an incredible journey and what a huge change this newsletter has gone through. For kicks, have a look at issue #1 sent on April 4, 2022.

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