🦸 Community Superhero
Our community superhero this week is Luca Casonato. Luca is a rockstar developer, having his hands in Deno, Deno Deploy, JSR, and Fresh, among other things. He’s a fantastic open source dev and has made an astonishing number of contributions over the years. If you want someone to model a developer career after, you found him. Thank you for everything you do, Luca!
💯 Spotlight
There’s been something on my mind recently that I haven’t quite been able to articulate. Something with the state of the industry and how AI has disrupted it. I’m seeing such a disparity both in the volume of people using AI and their success with it. Granted, you always see this with any emerging technology, but not at this scale. Monica Colangelo wrote an entire disposition last week titled The renaissance is human that describes what we’re seeing perfectly. It’s a long read, but her arguments and opinions are so well said that you get sucked into the story nodding along at every new turn. This one is hard for me to summarize, so I’ll say this: no matter where you are in your AI journey, Monica has captured your feelings about it and put it to words and visuals. This one teaches us a little bit about ourselves. Great read.
🔥 My Favorite Content
In fully serverless applications, we don’t think much about staging environments. When they aren’t being used, they don’t cost anything. Deploy and done. We even have a pattern for self-destructing staging environments. The reality for most of us though, is that many of our applications are stateful or have pieces of it that are. This makes staging environments relatively expensive when you spin one up every PR. But Jatin Mehrotra has a solution. He figured out a way to use Lambda MicroVMs as a staging environment, cutting costs by up to 78%! The post walks through the solution, how to test it, how much it costs compared to alternatives, and even has some bonus tips for production usage of Lambda MicroVMs.
Speaking of Lambda MicroVMs, Cyrus Wong wrote a great article on how to use them to build a serverless LiteLLM Gateway. It’s got a lot of important technical details in it, explaining what problems his solution solves and how it all works in a production-ready way. He even open sourced his code and has an easy way to deploy it with the CDK. An LLM Gateway is an important piece of infrastructure you need before shipping your agents to production if you’re going to be running at scale, so take note!
I found Yuuki Yamashita’s blog from last week incredibly thought-provoking. He posed the question “will cash disappear” and answered it with a deep dive on the x402 protocol that allows agents to pay for things with crypto. Apparently this protocol is being widely adopted by power players, and we’re seeing non-trivial usage of it on the rise. The part I found the most interesting was Yuuki’s thought on cash as a concept being what lasts compared to the physical component of it. Given everything we talk about in this newsletter, I feel like Yuuki’s on to something.
For some deep engineering excitement, check out the Cloudflare blog where they introduce Meerkat, a global consensus service they built for strong consistency and fault tolerance. I get the same kind of vibes from this as I do from the Aurora DSQL deep dives, and I love every bit of gritty engineering depth they share. As always, I’m incredibly impressed with this post from Cloudflare, both in the writing quality and in the engineering expertise they show. As of today, Meerkat isn’t in production, but hopefully it will be soon. It will be a great experiment for systems engineers to follow along with as they iterate on it.
💡 Tip of the Week
I stumbled upon an exciting announcement from Gunnar Grosch last week saying he’s started a new podcast called “Yells at Cloud” that features a rotating panel of AWS Heroes that talk about the cloud like it’s personally insulted them. Should be a fun listen when the first one comes out soon. Be sure to subscribe to it to listen as the episodes drop!
Last Words
I’ve noticed a huge positive reaction to Lambda MicroVMs, who would have thought (actually not sarcasm)? Bringing the statefulness component into Lambda is something so many of us wanted, and to me that’s a huge turnaround from the big stateless push from a few years ago. Everything truly does go full circle. I’m happy to see AWS pushing the mold on what’s possible and meeting customers where they are.
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