In this episode, I spoke with Matt Carey, founding AI engineer at StackOne, founder of AI Demo Days and member of the OpenUK AI Advisory Board. Everyone needs a friend who works in AI to help them filter the AI news and get the signals from the noise. Matt is that friend for me! We discussed AI agents, MCP, and the challenges of AI benchmarks, whic…

In this episode, I spoke with Waldemar Hummer, founder and CTO of LocalStack. We discussed what's new in the latest version of LocalStack and highlighted some of the most interesting additions. One particular highlight for me is the ability to visualise and troubleshoot event-driven architectures end-to-end and quickly identify problems such as mis…

In this episode, I spoke with Khawaja Shams, co-founder of Momento, about cell-based architectures and how it allows Momento to scale to millions of transactions per second (TPS) while maintaining a healthy blast radius within their multi-tenant system. Links from the episode: Momento Khawaja on X Khawaja on LinkedIn Believe In Serverless community…

In this episode, I spoke with Aniket Mitra, founder of CW, to learn more about knowledge graphs and how they are making a comeback in the era of AI and LLMs. Opening theme song: Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.…

In this episode, I spoke with Alex Bouchard, co-founder and CTO of Hookdeck, to learn more about Hookdeck and how it differs from Amazon EventBridge. This episode contains a live demo of Hookdeck, for the best viewing experience, please watch the recording on YouTube here. Alex gave me a demo of Hookdeck, which has some nice features for addressing…

In this episode, I spoke with David Boyne, the creator of EventCatalog, to learn more about the most common challenges with Event-Driven Architectures and how EventCatalog can solve the governance problem - how events are versioned, schema'd, discovered and tested. This episode includes a short demo of EventCatalog, if you want to see the demo in a…

Thank you to Momento for supporting this episode. Momento's real-time data platform empowers developers to build innovative products faster and more reliably than ever before. Visit gomomento.co/theburningmonk for more information. In this episode, I spoke with Matthieu Napoli about the Bref framework for developing serverless applications in PHP -…

Thank you to Hookdeck for sponsoring this episode. If you're looking to level-up your event-driven architecture, then check out their serverless event gateway at hookdeck.com/theburningmonk and help support this channel. James Eastham is a developer advocate at Datadog and co-author of "Crafting Lambda Functions in Rust". In this episode, we dive i…

Thank you to Momento for supporting this episode. Momento's real-time data platform empowers developers to build innovative products faster and more reliably than ever before. Visit gomomento.co/theburningmonk for more information. I spoke with Andrew Brown, renowned educator in the cloud space, to get his take on how cloud learners can break into …

Thank you to Hookdeck for sponsoring this episode. If you're looking to level-up your event-driven architecture, then check out their serverless event gateway at hookdeck.com/theburningmonk and help support this channel. AWS Serverless Hero Luciano Mammino shares the history of Middy, the popular middleware engine for AWS Lambda functions; why he's…

Thank you to Momento for supporting this episode. Momento's real-time data platform empowers developers to build innovative products faster and more reliably than ever before. Visit gomomento.co/theburningmonk for more information. David Behroozi, a 15-year Amazon veteran, tells us the inception story of Amazon Cognito and the cheat code for succee…

Thank you to Hookdeck for sponsoring this episode. If you're looking to level-up your event-driven architecture, then check out their serverless event gateway at hookdeck.com/theburningmonk and help support this podcast. Thomas Nixon, CTO of Baseline, shares stories from the trenches about the challenges of adopting serverless technologies. He gave…

Thank you to Hookdeck for sponsoring this episode. Please check them out and help support this podcast. Allen Helton on being an enabler, building communities, and is serverless dead? Links from the episode: Help Olivia's Fight Against Leukemia! Believe In Serverless community Ready, Set, Cloud! Momento, serverless cache Ep102: Peek behind the curt…

Take a peek behind the AWS Heroes and Community Builders programmes with Farrah Campbell, who was a former AWS hero turned AWS employee. Nowadays, Farrah heads up both the AWS Heroes and Community Builders programmes. Links from the episode: How to become an AWS hero by Danielle Heberling S3 no longer charges for unauthorized requests AWS Heroes di…

In this episode, I spoke with Brian LeRoux, co-founder of begin.com and creator of the Architect framework. Brian is also an AWS Serverless Hero and is currently working on enhance.dev, an HTML-first full-stack web framework. In a wide-ranging conversation, we discussed: the Architect framework Lambdalith vs. Single-purpose functions Building a fas…

In this episode, I spoke with Waldemar Hummer, founder and CTO of LocalStack. We discussed what's new in the latest version of LocalStack and highlighted some of the most interesting additions. One particular highlight for me is the ability to identify IAM permission errors between direct service integrations. For example, when an EventBridge pipe …

In this episode, I spoke with Ian Griffiths, a Technical Fellow at Endjin, a Microsoft MVP, and the author of O'Reilly's Programming C# 10.0. In this episode, we took a deep dive into Azure Functions, how it works and how it differs (significantly) from AWS Lambda. Links from the episode: Bye bye Azure Functions, hello Azure Container Apps WASI (We…

In this episode, I spoke with Bob Hannent, the principal architect of DAZN's video playback and delivery system. This system is responsible for streaming live sporting events to millions of concurrent viewers. We discussed the many challenges that come with streaming live videos at scale. How to ensure uptime even when your CDN partners suffer an o…

In this episode, I spoke with Richard Davison, the creator of the new LLRT (Low Latency Runtime) for Lambda. We talked about the motivation for a specialised JavaScript runtime for Lambda, how it achieves the insane cold start time and the trade-offs they had to make. Links from the episode: GitHub repo for LLRT API compatibility list QuickJs engin…

In this episode, I spoke with Jack Ellis, who is a co-founder of Fathom. We into the cost optimizations that he used to save Fathom $100k/year on their AWS bill. Links from the episode: Fathom's technical blog Jack's personal page Jack's newsletter Opening theme song: Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-c…

In this episode, I spoke with Mark White, who is a principal engineer at Dunelm, a leading home furnishing retailer in the UK. We talked about Dunelm's journey from on-premise infrastructure to serverless and how they stayed agile while migrating their systems to this new paradigm safely. We discussed the challenges of shifting the engineering cult…

In this episode, I spoke with Austen Collins, founder and CEO of Serverless Inc. about the upcoming release of Serverless Framework v4. We talked about the origin of the Serverless Framework and the challenges it faces. We discussed the rationale behind the upcoming changes in v4. Including the ability to easily switch between containers and Lambda…

In this episode, I spoke with Sam Williams about his drive for work-life balance and discussed his experience of building AI-powered apps using serverless technologies. Links from the episode: Sam's YouTube channel OpenAI's Vision API smol-developer Episode 92 with Shawn Wang Production-Ready Serverless workshop Sam's course Luc van Donkersgoed's a…

In this episode, I spoke with Shawn Wang, who coined the term "AI Engineer" as a new title for engineers who are building the chains and agents that powers AI applications. This is likely to be the highest-demand engineering job of the decade. We talked about the evolution of software development and how AI is changing everything. And why ambitious…

In this episode, I spoke with Patrick deBois, who is known as the "father of DevOps" as he coined the term "DevOps" in 2009. In a wide-ranging conversation, we talked about the evolution of DevOps, what it means in 2023 and how it related to "Platform Engineering". We also talked about AI, how AI technologies are impacting software development, and…

In this episode, I spoke with Hieu Do, who is a Solution Architect at FPT Software in Vietnam. As a side project, he built a hotel booking system for a friend using entirely serverless technologies. He shared his experience and learnings from building this system and how he was able to keep the cost down. After running the system for a year, the sy…

In this episode, I spoke with Sandro Volpicella, who is a platform lead at Hashnode, a fully serverless blogging platform. He is also the co-author of AWS Fundamentals (https://awsfundamentals.com). We explored Hashnode's architecture and went deep into its caching strategy, which is a crucial ingredient of a scalable and performant blogging platfo…

In this episode, I spoke with AJ Stuyvenberg, who is an AWS Hero and staff engineer at Datadog. We discussed the findings from the latest state of serverless report and spoke about Lambda cold starts at length. AJ has done some incredible research into Lambda cold starts and shared the 4 biggest mistakes people make regarding Lambda cold starts. If…

In this episode, I spoke with Anton Babenko, who is an AWS Community Hero and creator of the Serverless.TF framework. We spoke at length about serverless development with Terraform and the problems that Serverless.TF aims to solve. We also discussed the recent seismic split in the Terraform community, with HashiCorp's license change and the initiat…

In this episode, I spoke with Ran Isenberg, who is an AWS Serverless Hero and Principal Software Architect at CyberArk. Amongst other things, we talked about platform engineering at CyberArk, how they adopted CDK and how they approach testing and tenant isolations. Links from the episode: * Ran's blog * Open positions at CyberArk * cdk-nag * Ran's …

In this episode, I spoke with Matthew Bonig, who is an AWS DevTools Hero and co-author of The CDK Book. We talked about the Dos and Don'ts of CDK, and Matthew shared some tips on testing and how to organize your CDK project. Links from the episode: The CDK Book Advanced CDK Course Construct Hub CDK Patterns CDK Community Survey 2023 cdk.dev Wing La…

In this episode, I spoke with Charity Majors, who is the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, a popular observability platform. We had a wide-ranging conversation about Parse (and its acquisition by Facebook), observability, devops and why you should deploy on Fridays (but you still need to apply good engineering sense!). Links from the episode: Honeyc…

In this episode, I spoke with Gerard Sans, who is a Google Developer Expert and my co-author for the AppSync Masterclass. We talked about Google's new AI platform, what it entails and how Google's AI offerings compare to OpenAI. For example, what can you do with Bard and Duet AI and why one might consider using them instead of ChatGPT or CoPilot. W…

In this episode, I spoke with Heitor Lessa, who is a principal solution architect at AWS that specializes in serverless. He's also the man behind the popular AWS Lambda Powertools project which is available in a number of languages. We talked about the history of the Lambda Powertools project, and the challenges and learnings from building in publi…

In this episode, I spoke with Matt Carey, who's a senior engineer at Aleios, a premium AWS consultant that focuses on serverless technologies. The focus of our conversation was LangChain, Matt explained what it is and demoed some AI applications that he has developed with LangChain. Such as the popular Quivr app and Code Review GPT. If you want to …

In this episode, I spoke with Randall Hunt, who's the VP of Cloud Strategy and Innovation at Caylent and had previously worked at Vendia, Facebook AI, AWS and SpaceX. We talked about AWS Bedrock, what is it and how it works and saw a demo of a simple AI application built with Bedrock and LangChain. Randall explained the advantages of using Bedrock …

In this episode, I caught up with Ben Kehoe, who is an AWS Serverless Hero and one of the earliest adopters of serverless technologies. In a wide-ranging conversation, we discussed many topics around serverless and AI, including: The natural evolution of marketing terms and the need to focus on specific functional characteristics rather than defend…

In this episode, I spoke with Eduard Bargues, who is a Principal Engineer at Ohpen, a cloud-native open banking platform. We talked about Ohpen's migration from EC2 to a mix of Fargate and Lambda, and along the way, we touched on many topics: migration patterns the "serverless-first" mindset how to choose when to use Lambda vs Fargate why monolith …

In this episode, I spoke with Luca Mezzalira, who is the author of "Building Micro-Frontends" by O'Reilly, and a Principal Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS focusing on serverless. We talked about micro-frontends and dived deep into his experience with them at both DAZN and AWS. We got a high-level overview of micro-frontends: what it is, how t…

In this episode, I spoke with Eric Peterson who is the founder and CTO of CloudZero, a leading vendor that helps AWS customers reign in their AWS spending by revealing hidden savings and preventing costly mistakes. We discussed a range of topics, including common mistakes AWS users make and how CloudZero once saved a customer potentially a million-…

In this episode, I spoke with Dax Raad to talk about SST and the challenges of building an open-source community. Honestly, I think AWS can learn a thing or two from Dax's approach towards open-source, an approach that puts the needs of the customers first at the cost of the convenience of the maintainers. We talked about some shortcomings of CDK, …

In this episode, I spoke with Kirk Kirkconnell to talk about his experience with database technologies and serverless. Kirk had been involved with databases his whole career, including recently with the DynamoDB and Momento teams. We talked about single table design with DynamoDB - when to use it and some common drawbacks to consider. We discussed …

In this episode, I spoke with Vijai Ramcharan to talk about his experience with introducing serverless at NN, a 175 years-old financial services company based in the Netherlands. We touched on many topics, from changing existing mindsets and training engineers about AWS and serverless, to vendor lock-in and challenges with adopting serverless at th…

In this episode, I caught up with Rowan Udell to talk about his book The Practical AWS IAM Guide and get his takes on IAM best practices. Links from the episode: AWS IAM Analyzer Cloudsplaining IAM live Permissions.Cloud TrackIAM AWS services that work with IAM This episode is sponsored by Momento. Get all the benefits of database caching and none …

In this episode, I caught up with Ben Bridts, who is an AWS Community Hero and consultant at Cloudar in Belgium. We talked about many topics, including common mistakes companies make in AWS; the problems with AWS Organizations; pitfalls with platform teams; and some success stories from his work as a consultant. Links from the episode: Alex DeBrie'…

In this episode, I caught up with Sarah Hamilton, who is an AWS Community Builder and a software engineer at LEGO. We talked about her journey into serverless and LEGO's serverless adoption has changed since I spoke with Sheen and Nicole on this podcast. In the two years since they have grown from 6 features teams to over 25, all focused on serverl…

In this episode, I spoke with Sam Williams, who runs the Complete Coding YouTube channel where he teaches about AWS and Serverless. He recently published a new video course called "Master AWS Serverless with 7 Real World Projects" and shared some helpful tips on picking the right course and how you can get the most from these courses. Sam is also a…

In this episode, I spoke with AWS Serverless Hero Luc van Donkersgoed about how PostNL is using serverless technologies and discussed the challenges of building event-driven architectures and how PostNL tackles problems such as schema validation and testing. Links from the episode: Build cloud-native apps with Serverless interaction testing IT vaca…

In this episode, I caught up with Eoin Shanaghy to talk about his work at FourTheorem, a boutique consultancy based out of Ireland. We touched on many topics, including the challenges for serverless adoption at enterprises and a super interesting client project he worked on, which involved using serverless at scale in a high-performance computing e…

In this episode, I spoke with Nick Tune and Kacper Gunia to talk about Team Topologies, i.e. how to structure businesses and teams so that you can get stuff done faster. Companies often struggle to adopt modern software development practices and technologies because their team structures are misaligned with the practices they're trying to adopt. In…