In the last few months, the "generative AI" discussions have been dominated by LLMs (or Large Language Models). We ended up short-cutting the (magical) experience you can get and the models that make it possible... as if there was nothing in between. I am going to argue that there is a ton in between (that is …

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I spent the last 30-ish years of my professional life working on what I generally refer to as "compute systems abstractions". I started in 1994 at IBM working on "the PC" (Personal Computer) almost by chance and I specialized, over the years, on physical servers, operating systems, hardware …

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In the last few months, I have talked to a couple of Beanstalk customers that wanted to explore ways to modernize their deployments. They like Beanstalk but they see the value of moving to a more container-native deployment to intercept more modern development tool-chains. This did not surprise me. Beanstalk customers …

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I know, I am boring. Some people relax doing Sudoku. I relax writing Step Functions state machines. Not that I am any good, I just enjoy doing it (I am that weird). As I was searching for my next Sudoku state machine challenge, I bumped into this Amazon ECS roadmap request to introduce support for tasks timeouts. The …

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In (virtual) part 1 of this blog post (yes it has a different title) I have shown how to use a combination of AWS Step Functions and Amazon EventBridge to modify the behaviour of Amazon ECS and virtually adding a new feature that doesn't exist in the product itself. Ok this may sound a big hyperbolic, and it probably …

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In an effort to dive deeper into event driven architectures, I have lately been experimenting with AWS Step Functions as I have documented in this blog post where I have refactored the application logic of my demo application Yelb into a set of state machines. As I wanted to dive deeper into Amazon EventBridge, I was …

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Code is a liability. That’s not only the code you write but also (and predominantly!) the code that you need to operationalize for your own business logic to work. In this blog post I would like to demonstrate how it is possible to reduce, for relatively simple use cases, that liability by many orders of magnitude. …

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Yelb is the demo application I use to experiment with and learn technologies. A few years ago I have refactored the yelb-appserver component to work with Lambda and the yelb-ui component to be hosted on S3. At the time of this writing, this folder in the Yelb repository describes the architecture for this deployment …

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I have lately invested a lot of time keeping an eye on StackOverflow because there is a ton to learn in terms of how AWS customers are using our products. I do have all sort of filters setup and I reguarly spend a good chunk of my day there. A couple of days ago I bumped into this question that intrigued me a lot. …

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Part of my job at AWS is to explore the art of possible. A few weeks ago I came across an open source project called re:Web. What intrigued me about re:Web is that it allows a traditional container image (wrapping a traditional “web service” application) to be repurposed and deployed to AWS Lambda. The idea for this …

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