🦸 Community Superhero
Our community superhero this week is Ewere Diagboya, AWS Container Hero and the Staff DevOps Engineer. Ewere has spent years making the cloud approachable for people who are just getting started, writing an endless stream of tutorials, authoring a book on Amazon CloudWatch, and building up the DevOps and cloud community across Africa. I admire him for giving away everything he knows and asking for nothing in return, and the number of careers he’s helped launch is staggering. If you want to see what generosity looks like in tech, go follow Ewere. Thank you for everything you do, Ewere!
💯 Spotlight
The spotlight this week is a special one, because it’s someone’s first technical blog post ever. Shout out to Tanya Vo, who put the new CloudFormation Express Mode through its paces and wrote up a great comparison piece. Express Mode skips the full resource stabilization checks before deploying dependent resources, and Tanya’s testing shows how much of an impact it makes (but no spoilers here, check out her article). Writing your first technical post is nerve-wracking enough, and doing it with hands-on benchmarks is a fantastic way to start. Go give it a read and show her some love. Congratulations and great work, Tanya!
🔥 My Favorite Content
MicroVMs have been a very popular blog topic recently, and the deep dives keep getting better. Eric Johnson wrote two fantastic articles last week on making a code sandbox for his iPad with MicroVMs and S3 Files and how he made it fast. A big takeaway for me was that the cold start slowness wasn’t the network mount like you’d expect, it was demand-paging the toolchain during boot. By using the /validate hook to prefetch those pages at build time, he cut mount times down to almost a negligible amount, and CLI launches to only a 1-2 second start time. This is not only a great example of innovative engineering, but also of how using AI assistants to hypothesize and verify can really open up doors we never thought of before.
I’ve said before that I love hard engineering numbers, and Simon Willison gave us a great one last week. He shipped sqlite-utils 4.0rc2, mostly written by Fable, and wrote about his experience doing it. I loved reading his thought process and opinions on using top-tier frontier models to build something then grade each other. But more importantly (to me), he shared the price breakdown of a major release like this across all the subagents of the independent work streams and hurdles. This is what responsible agentic engineering looks like in 2026.
By now you’ve probably built something with an agentic loop. And if you have, you’ve probably had an uneasy feeling about how you meaningfully test it. Tony Karrer shows us what he’s figured out last week in his post on evals for agentic loop applications. His argument is that checking an agent’s final output isn’t enough, you have to evaluate the trajectory, aka the path it took to get there. “A right answer through the wrong path is a lucky guess, not a passing eval.” This is a grounded piece that you can tell is learned the hard way. It’s a lot more than just going with the recommended answer from an LLM-as-a-judge setup (which he also talks about in the article).
How do you give every team access to Bedrock without handing out AWS keys? Nazmul Ahasan told us about his solution to build an LLM gateway instead of handing out keys. His gateway issues prefixed tokens with per-key model restrictions and token budgets, and logs everything for cost visibility. It’s a great story and I really appreciate his honesty with the stuff he got wrong and if he thought it was worth building vs buying an alternative.
💡 Tip of the Week
You might have had a bad Friday last week when you signed into AWS and saw that you owe a few billion dollars this month 😅 Don’t worry, it was a bug (probably). I loved seeing the good humor from lots of AWS Heroes on LinkedIn about it.
🐣 New Releases
Reminder, all releases from AWS can be found on AWS News by Luc van Donkersgoed. Below are my favorite from last week.
Amazon Aurora DSQL change data capture (CDC) is now generally available. You can stream insert, update, and delete events straight to Kinesis Data Streams with nothing to manage, which finally makes real event-driven patterns on a serverless SQL database feel natural. I’ve been waiting for this one.
Lambda announced self-managed code storage, letting you reference your function code directly from your own S3 bucket with no intermediate copy. That removes the old storage limits and trims cold activation time, and as a bonus the Lambda-managed quota jumped from 75GB to a whopping 300GB per region!
S3 Event Notifications now include system-generated tags. It sounds small, but it means you can filter events across thousands of buckets with a single EventBridge rule instead of wiring each one up by name. It’s the small things 😊
AWS also open sourced a Bulk Executor for DynamoDB, a no-code, Glue-backed tool for large-scale count, find, delete, and update operations on your tables. If you’ve ever built a throttling-aware batch script for a backfill, I think you’ll like this one.
Last Words
A few weeks ago I published an article talking about how AI has slowly been turning content creators into… software creators - slowly dwindling the community’s supply of content in favor of micro-SaaS apps. I don’t know what happened (maybe Fable) but I’ve seen a big uptick in it since I posted that piece, and I’m missing your opinions!
So here’s my nudge for the week: whatever you’ve been building or learning, write it down and put it out there. Someone needs to read it, and who knows, you might just end up in this newsletter next week 😉.
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