Real World Serverless with theburningmonk

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, which help explain the disconnect between the benchmark results and the anecdotal experiences of AI users, such as myself.

Links from the episode:

• Google's whitepaper on AI agents
• Anthropic Building Effective AI Agents
• Simon Willison on X
• Thorsten Ball's Joy & Curiosity newsletter
• AI Demo Days
• MCP has a prompt injection problem

Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

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 missing IAM permission.

Lots of exciting new features in LocalStack v4!

This episode include a live demo of LocalStack v4. To get the most from the demo, please watch the episode on YouTube here.

Links from the episode:

• My conversation with Waldemar after LocalStack v3
• LocalStack v4 announcement
• My blog post on when to use Step Functions vs running everything in Lambda

Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

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

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 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 common developer experience problems with EventBridge. For example:

• Deliver events to local targets
• Audit history of event deliveries
• Issues page of failed event deliveries
• Replay failed events

Links from the episode:

•  Check out Hookdeck

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 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 action, then check out the video version on YouTube here.

Links from the episode:

• EventCatalog
• Winglang

Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.

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 - how it works, why PHP and how it compares with Laravel Vapor.

This episode includes a short demo of Bref, if you want to see the demo in action, then check out the video version on YouTube here.

Links from the episode:

• Bref framework

Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.

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 into writing Lambda functions in Rust and why you should invest in learning Rust.

Links from the episode:

• NSA whitepaper on memory safety
• Julian Wood’s Lambda internals talk at re:Invent 2022
• Jame's YouTube channel
• Crafting Lambda Functions in Rust
• Ep106 on middy with Luciano Mammino
• Ep97 on LLRT (the superfast JavaScript runtime for Lambda)

Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.

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 the cloud and forge a successful career.

Links from the episode:

• Andrew's paid courses
• Andrew's free courses
• Andrew's AWS examples

Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

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 sold on writing Lambda functions in Rust and why you should too!

Links from the episode:

• AWS Bites channel
• Middy
• How to sponsor Middy
• Crafting Lambda Functions in Rust
• Easy mode Rust
• Using Node.js ES modules and top-level await in AWS Lambda
• Using Middy with Typescript
• Ep97 on LLRT (the superfast JavaScript runtime for Lambda)

Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0