Serverless

Managing AWS costs becomes increasingly complex as infrastructure grows. Organizations often struggle with cloud cost management, spending valuable engineering time manually analyzing Cost Explorer data, identifying optimization opportunities, and implementing changes. Even with dedicated cost management tools, the analysis and remediation process remains largely manual, requiring specialized expertise to interpret cost data and translate it into actionable steps. This post demonstrates how to build an automated agent that analyzes AWS costs and generates actionable recommendations to reduce cloud spend. By combining AWS Bedrock’s analytical capabilities with Cost Explorer data, the system identifies cost outliers and provides specific optimization steps that go beyond basic visualizations to deliver meaningful insights. ...

Code reviews are essential for maintaining code quality, but they can be time-consuming and often repetitive. Developers find themselves commenting on the same issues across multiple pull requests: missing tests, inconsistent naming, inadequate error handling, and numerous other routine concerns. This creates a bottleneck in the development process, as team members wait for their code to be reviewed while reviewers struggle to balance thorough reviews with their own development work. ...

“Where can I find our vacation policy?” “What’s the process for requesting new hardware?” “Can you explain our security guidelines?” These questions echo through company Slack channels daily, interrupting workflows and creating redundant work for team leads and HR staff. The same questions get asked repeatedly, and answers are buried in documentation that’s difficult to navigate. In this post, I’ll show you how to build a simple yet powerful Q&A bot for Slack that leverages your company’s documentation to provide accurate, contextual answers. The best part? It runs entirely on AWS managed services, minimizing operational overhead while delivering immediate value to your organization. ...

Enhancing Security: Adding AWS Cognito Authentication to Your Serverless App Our serverless survey application is a great example of a modern cloud native application. It’s fast, scalable, and cost-effective. But it’s missing one critical feature: user authentication. In this post, we’ll walk through how to add robust, secure authentication using AWS Cognito. Why Add Authentication? Right now, anyone can vote, and anyone can reset the entire survey. In a real-world application, we need to control access. Authentication allows us to: ...

At an AWS Road Show this fall, Darko Mesaros demoed a URL shortener he’d built in Rust called krtk.rs. Something about watching a clean, fast URL shortener just work stuck with me. I’ve built a few of these for demos since then, but I wanted to try something different this time: build one in Python with a retro 90s vibe, and let Kiro handle most of the heavy lifting. Kiro is one of AWS’s three frontier agents announced at re:Invent 2024—autonomous AI systems that maintain context and work independently for hours. While DevOps Agent handles incident response and Security Agent conducts penetration testing, Kiro is your AI developer that takes specifications and generates production-ready code. ...

Back in November, I was preparing for the Cracking the Cloud presentation at UNC Charlotte. I needed a way to explain how the cloud fundamentally changed what’s possible on the internet—not through abstract concepts, but through something students could immediately relate to. That’s when I remembered Thomas Game Docs. If you’ve never heard of her: she’s a YouTuber who makes incredibly well-produced video essays about video games. And she sometimes runs surveys asking her audience things like “Who’s the LEAST popular Pokémon?” or “Who’s the LEAST popular Animal Crossing villager?” ...