🦸 Community Superhero
Our community superhero this week is Ruth Ikegah, open source program manager, GitHub Star, and Community Lead for CHAOSS Africa. Ruth started her career as a microbiology graduate with no coding background, found open source through a community of friends, and became the first African woman to win a GitHub Star 🤩. Today she helps lead GitHub’s All In Africa initiative, trains developers across 40+ countries, and maintains the DEI working group at the CHAOSS Project. Thank you so much for everything you do, Ruth, you’re an inspiration!
💯 Spotlight
I have a real treat for y’all this week. Linda Mohamed wrote a phenomenal article about an AI film crew she built on AWS and it is absolute gold. Her system design is just as impressive as her writing ability (both great) and it’s a genuinely motivating read. She explains that a problem she’s had is going through hundreds of clips and trying to compile them cohesively. What normally would take weeks of work was boiled down to only three minutes. There’s so much in this article, it’s hard to summarize everything. Go read it!
🔥 My Favorite Content
Those of us in this industry know the infamous “build vs buy” debate and how incredibly frustrating it can be. This is a topic that engineers seem oddly passionate about in one way or the other. Seth Orell gave us his take on it, but from a different “Proudly Found Elsewhere (PFE)” perspective. The article brings in recent arguments from around the internet, cites the law of comparative advantage, and naturally, loops in how AI fits into it these days. I like his grounded take on the matter, a level head goes a long way with polarizing arguments.
If you haven’t tried Aurora DSQL yet, it’s about time to give it a shot. It’s continuing to roll out across the world and we’re getting stronger and stronger docs that help iron out the nuance of using this service. Darryl Ruggles shared a blog post sharing his practical guide to using DSQL which includes invaluable information like how to configure it with IaC, configuring IAM roles, comparing it to other services, and a lot more. This guide is packed with pragmatic information for builders and should be a go-to resource for anyone using this service.
Connecting an SQS queue to a Lambda function is simple. But if you’ve ever tried to figure out some behavioral oddities when running this pattern at scale, you know how tricky it actually is. Rehan van der Merwe did extensive research on event-source mappings (ESM) between SQS and Lambda and documented 7 scaling behaviors you should know about them. Rehan breaks down his 7 findings with numbers, charts, and takeaways in this enlightening research. This blog has great info in it that you could take and immediately update some of your services with. Great work, Rehan!
I wrote an article last week talking about prefix caching with LLMs and how they don’t work for conversational agents. The blog itself is more of an observation than anything else. I unfortunately don’t have the answer to making chatbots easier to cache, but I found my research fascinating and wanted to share an issue that we’re seeing everywhere.
💡 Tip of the Week
I know many of you that subscribe to this newsletter have been around the proverbial “cloud block” once or twice. But I saw a post last week from Julio Casal on the fundamental cloud-native patterns that was clean and visualized them in a way I hadn’t seen before. It’s always good to get a refresher on the basics.
🐣 New Releases
Reminder, all releases from AWS can be found on AWS News by Luc van Donkersgoed. Below are my favorite from last week.
AWS agents got some big boosts last week with the Security Agent pen testing going GA and the DevOps Agent going GA.
A handful of services and features in AWS are moving to maintenance or are being sunset. Notable services are AWS App Runner and Amazon Workmail, among others.
CloudFront now supports SHA-256 for signed URLS and cookies, giving us stronger cryptographic signing for access to restricted content.
Last Words
I’ve been busy making some behind-the-scenes updates to the software that powers this newsletter. I’m hoping pretty soon to write a blog post around what I did and have it start tailoring content automatically based on your preferences (still catered by me though). It’s all still an experiment, but my goal is to continue bringing you the best content every week that is of particular interest to you!
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