Episodes

  • Evolving Lambda: from ephemeral compute to durable execution

    Evolving Lambda: from ephemeral compute to durable execution
    Mar 4 2026
    In this episode, Romain sits down with Michael Gasch, Product Manager at AWS for Lambda Durable Functions, to explore one of the most exciting launches in the Serverless space in recent years. Michael shares the full story: from the early days of Lambda and the evolution of the serverless developer experience, to the challenges developers face when building multi-step, stateful workflows — and how Durable Functions addresses them natively within Lambda. Discover the evolution of AWS Serverless and why last year was 'the year of Lambda', key launches including IDE integrations, Lambda Managed Instances, and Lambda Tenant Isolation. Learn what Lambda Durable Functions are and what they are not, the checkpoint-replay model and how it enables resilient, long-running executions, and wait patterns including simple wait, wait for callback, and wait for condition. Explore real-world use cases: distributed transactions, LLM inference orchestration, ECS task coordination, and human-in-the-loop workflows. Michael shares unexpected feedback from customers about architectural simplification, how coding agents like Kiro dramatically accelerate writing Durable Functions, and when to choose Durable Functions vs. Step Functions vs. SQS/SNS. Plus, what's coming next: more regions, and the Java SDK (now available!).
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    1 hr and 7 mins
  • Mike Chambers: From OpenClaw to AI Functions — What's Next for Agentic Development

    Mike Chambers: From OpenClaw to AI Functions — What's Next for Agentic Development
    Feb 25 2026
    Mike Chambers is back — calling in from the other side of the globe — and he brought a lot to unpack. We pick up threads from our first conversation and follow them into genuinely exciting (and occasionally mind-bending) territory. We start with OpenClaw, the open-source agentic framework that took the developer world by storm. Mike shares his take on why it happened now — not just what it is — and why the timing was almost inevitable given how developers had been quietly experimenting with local agents for the past year. Then we go deep on asynchronous tool calling — a project Mike has been working on since mid-2024 that finally works reliably, thanks to more capable models. The idea: let your agent kick off a long-running task, keep the conversation going naturally, and have the result arrive without interrupting the flow. Mike walks through how he built this on top of Strands Agents SDK and why he's planning to propose it as a contribution to the open-source project. We also explore Strands Labs and its freshly released AI Functions — a genuinely new way to think about embedding generative capability directly into application code. Is this Software 3.1? Mike makes the case, and Romain pushes back in the best way. The episode closes with a look ahead: agent trust, observability with OpenTelemetry, and a thought experiment about what software might look like in five years if the execution environment itself becomes a model.
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    1 hr and 19 mins
  • Chris Miller on AI Coding, Multi-Agent Systems, and the Silicon Valley Vibe

    Chris Miller on AI Coding, Multi-Agent Systems, and the Silicon Valley Vibe
    Feb 18 2026
    Join us for an engaging conversation with Chris Miller, an AWS Hero since 2021 and AI Software Engineer at Workato. Chris shares his journey from accidentally winning a DeepRacer competition to becoming a community leader in the San Francisco Bay Area. We dive deep into the realities of AI-assisted development, exploring multi-agent architectures, the Road to re:Invent hackathon experience, and what it's really like to be building in Silicon Valley's AI boom. Discover how Chris moved from DeepRacer champion to AWS Hero and community leader, his experience building a multi-agent imposter architecture featuring Jeff Barr, Swami, and Werner Vogels for the Road to re:Invent Hackathon, and the reality of moving beyond 'vibe coding' to responsible AI development. Learn about multi-agent orchestration patterns, token management, recursion limits, and the current state of AI development in San Francisco. Chris shares insights on developer tools like Kiro, the Strands framework, autonomous agents, and best practices for code review, testing, and transparency in AI-generated code. Whether you're exploring AI-assisted development, building multi-agent systems, or curious about the Silicon Valley AI scene, this conversation offers practical insights from the trenches.
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • From MCP to Multi-Agents: The Evolution of Agentic AI (and What's Next)

    From MCP to Multi-Agents: The Evolution of Agentic AI (and What's Next)
    Feb 11 2026
    Mike Chambers reflects on 2025 as 'the year of agents' - though not quite in the way he predicted. From MCP's rocky launch to the rise of AI coding assistants, Mike shares hard-won lessons about what actually worked in production, the security challenges developers face, and why the future might be about giving agents access to filesystems and command lines rather than endless tool definitions. Discover how MCP evolved from standard IO to becoming the plugin ecosystem for IDEs, the security concerns around giving agents local machine access, and context overloading challenges. Mike walks through the framework evolution from heavy prompt engineering to model-centric approaches, why he abandoned his own framework for Strands Agents, and the rise of lightweight frameworks like ADK, Strands, and Spring AI. Learn about the real agent success story of 2025: AI coding assistants like Kiro, and Claude Code expanding beyond just code. Mike shares insights on agent skills for progressive disclosure, giving agents filesystem and command line access, long-running multi-agent systems, and moving from laptop productivity to production-scale agents.
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    1 hr and 8 mins
  • Spec-Driven Development in Practice: A AWS Hero Journey

    Spec-Driven Development in Practice: A AWS Hero Journey
    Feb 4 2026
    Christian, AWS Hero and Solution Architect at Bundesliga, shares his journey and hard-won lessons from adopting spec-driven development with AI coding assistants at enterprise scale. Learn when to use specs vs vibe coding, how to build effective steering documents, and practical strategies for helping engineering teams transition from traditional development to AI-assisted workflows. Discover the difference between spec-driven and vibe coding approaches, when to use each, and how to build effective steering documents that guide AI assistants. Christian shares enterprise adoption strategies that actually work, including the show-and-tell approach to reduce AI adoption fear, treating AI as a peer teammate, and creating centers of excellence for sharing learnings. We explore custom agents and the single responsibility principle, context engineering over prompt engineering, and dive into exciting re:Invent announcements like Lambda Durable Functions. Whether you're leading engineering teams, exploring AI-assisted development, or looking to optimize your development workflow, this conversation offers practical insights from real-world enterprise implementation.
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    59 mins
  • Native Speed, Modern Safety: Swift for Backend Development

    Native Speed, Modern Safety: Swift for Backend Development
    Jan 29 2026
    Join us as we explore Swift beyond iOS with Sebastien Stormacq, AWS Developer Advocate and Swift specialist. Discover why Swift is becoming a compelling choice for server-side development, offering native compilation, memory safety without garbage collection, and modern concurrency features that deliver exceptional performance and cost efficiency. Seb shares how Apple processes billions of daily requests using Swift on AWS infrastructure, achieving 40% better performance and 30% lower costs when migrating services from Java. We dive into the technical advantages that make Swift competitive with traditional backend languages, explore the vibrant server-side ecosystem with frameworks like Vapor and Hummingbird, and discuss practical implementations including serverless architectures on AWS Lambda. Whether you're a Swift developer curious about server-side possibilities, a full-stack developer looking to unify your tech stack, or a backend engineer evaluating language options, this conversation offers practical insights into Swift's capabilities beyond the client.
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    49 mins
  • Local Unit Testing for Step Functions

    Local Unit Testing for Step Functions
    Nov 28 2025
    Join us as we dive into the new local unit testing capabilities for AWS Step Functions with Jas Narula, Product Manager from the Step Functions team. We explore how developers can now test their workflows locally using the enhanced Test State API, moving beyond the limitations of the discontinued Step Functions Local container. Jas walks us through the new mocking capabilities, support for advanced states like Map and Parallel, and how this API-based approach gives you the same production runtime for testing. We also discuss the partnership with LocalStack for offline testing, the developer experience with popular testing frameworks like PyTest and Jest, and why this new approach makes Step Functions development more like traditional test-driven development. Whether you're orchestrating Lambda functions, calling Bedrock APIs, or building complex business workflows, this episode shows you how to test with confidence before deploying to the cloud.
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    39 mins
  • Building AWS Builder Center: Architecture Lessons from a Large-Scale Community Platform

    Building AWS Builder Center: Architecture Lessons from a Large-Scale Community Platform
    Nov 21 2025
    In this episode, we dive deep into AWS Builder Center, the new community platform designed to consolidate all AWS developer resources into one central hub. Roopal Jain, Software Development Engineer on the Builder Center team, explains how this platform brings together previously scattered AWS community properties like re:Post, Skill Builder, and community.aws into a unified experience for builders. Beyond exploring what Builder Center offers - from articles and events to toolboxes organized by programming language - we take a technical deep dive into how the team built this large-scale web application. Rupal shares the architectural decisions behind their serverless microservices approach, the challenges of integrating Neptune graph database for social features like user following, and creative solutions for handling dual authentication methods in API Gateway. The conversation reveals real-world implementation challenges that many developers face, from VPC networking complexities to service-to-service authentication patterns. We also discuss Builder ID, AWS's new individual identity system, and get a glimpse of what's coming next for the platform.
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    42 mins