Advertise on podcast: The AWS Developers Podcast

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this episode, we dive deep into Amazon ECS Managed Instances, a new compute option that bridges the gap between EC2 and Fargate for container deployments. Our guest Olly Pomeroy, AWS Container Specialist, explains how this new offering provides the flexibility of EC2 with the managed experience of Fargate. Learn about the architecture behind ECS Managed Instances, its pricing model, and how it handles instance lifecycle management automatically. Discover how AWS manages the underlying operating system using Bottlerocket OS, providing enhanced security through a read-only file system. Whether you're running GPU workloads, need specific instance types, or want to optimize costs, this episode covers everything you need to know about this new deployment option for containerized applications.

In this follow-up episode of the AWS Developers Podcast, we continue the conversation with Alex Huides, Principal Network Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS, focusing on Amazon VPC Lattice. We explore how developers can simplify networking concerns while maintaining robust connectivity between applications. Alex explains how VPC Lattice introduces a new boundary concept called service networks, which allows applications to communicate across accounts and VPCs regardless of IP overlap issues. The discussion covers how VPC Lattice abstracts away complex networking details, replacing traditional load balancers while providing secure, private connectivity between services. This episode demonstrates how AWS is removing undifferentiated heavy lifting in networking, making it easier for developers to focus on building applications.

In this episode of the AWS Developers Podcast, we dive deep into the world of networking from a developer's perspective. Join host Sebastien Stormacq and guest Alex Huides, Principal Network Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS, as they explore why developers should care about networking in the cloud. They discuss the evolution of networking roles from traditional IT to cloud environments, explain fundamental AWS networking concepts, and examine various connectivity options like VPC Peering, Transit Gateway, and PrivateLink. The conversation highlights the challenges of managing network connectivity at scale in multi-account and multi-region architectures, while setting the stage for a deeper discussion about Amazon VPC Lattice in next week's episode.

In this episode of the AWS Developers Podcast, we dive deep into Amazon Bedrock Agent Core Identity with Abram Douglas. Learn how this new service helps developers manage identities and authentication flows for AI agents at scale. Discover the seven core components of Agent Core and understand how the identity service simplifies complex OAuth2 flows and token management. Whether you're building AI agents that need to interact with third-party services like Google Calendar or Slack, this episode explains how Agent Core Identity removes the undifferentiated heavy lifting of identity management, token vaulting, and secure credential handling. Perfect for developers looking to deploy production-ready AI agents with enterprise-grade security.

In this episode of the AWS Developers Podcast, we dive deep into Strands Agents, AWS's open-source framework for building AI agents. Our guest Arron Bailiss, Principal Engineer and Tech Lead for Strands, explains how this framework evolved from an internal AWS tool to a developer-friendly, open-source solution. Learn how Strands simplifies AI agent development with just a few lines of code while maintaining production-ready capabilities. Aaron discusses the framework's unique model-driven approach, its support for both MCP and A2A protocols, and how it powers various AWS services including Amazon Q Developer and AWS Glue. Discover how Strands enables multi-agent systems through swarms, supports various deployment options, and get insights into the roadmap including TypeScript support and voice agent capabilities.

In this episode, we dive deep into Moonpig's migration journey from an on-premise ASP.NET monolithic application to a fully serverless architecture on AWS. Richard Pearson, Head of Engineering, and Alexis Lowe, Principal Engineer at Moonpig, share their experience transforming a 25-year-old e-commerce platform. They discuss how they tackled the challenges of migrating from SQL Server to DynamoDB, implemented multi-region deployment, and achieved seamless scalability for their peak trading periods. Learn about their "no VPC" policy, their approach to observability, and how they organized their teams to embrace DevOps culture. This episode is particularly relevant for organizations considering a similar journey to serverless architecture or looking to scale their platforms globally.

Update Oct 25.: After we recorded this episode (July 10th 2025), AWS launched Amazon Bedrock AgentCore (that went in preview on July 16th, 2025) and generally available since Oct. 13rd, 2025. AgentCore is the recommanded solution to deploy your MCP agents on AWS. We keep this episode available as a learning experience but deploying MCP on Lambda is not the recommanded architecture for your production workloads. In this episode, we dive deep into MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers on AWS Lambda. We explore what MCP is, how it enables AI systems to interact with tools through standardized protocols, and practical implementations on AWS Lambda. The discussion covers authentication mechanisms, deployment strategies, and the future potential of MCP servers as a marketplace for AI capabilities. Whether you're building AI-powered applications or interested in exposing your business capabilities to AI systems, this episode provides valuable insights into the technical aspects and business opportunities of MCP servers.

In this episode, we explore how Phagos, a French biotech startup, combines biology, data science, and cloud computing to combat antimicrobial resistance. Their innovative approach uses bacteriophages - natural predators of bacteria - as an alternative to antibiotics. We discuss how they leverage AWS services, including SageMaker and batch processing, to analyze genomic data and train specialized language models that can predict phage-bacteria interactions. Our guests explain how they process terabytes of genetic data, train and deploy AI models, and create user-friendly interfaces for their lab scientists. This fascinating conversation reveals how cloud computing and artificial intelligence are revolutionizing biotechnology and potentially helping solve one of this century's biggest health challenges.

Join us for an insightful conversation with Mike Davis, Engineering Manager, and Rob Nelson, VP of Engineering at Zilch, a leading UK-based buy now pay later platform. Discover how this cloud fintech scaled from a monolithic architecture to a sophisticated microservices ecosystem serving 5 million customers. Learn about their journey migrating from MSSQL to Aurora, their innovative use of AWS services including EKS, SNS/SQS for event-driven architecture, and API Gateway for WebSocket connections. The discussion explores their unique implementation of push notifications, in-app messaging, and how they leverage generative AI for merchant discovery. Get a behind-the-scenes look at their fraud detection system using Kinesis and Flink, and hear about their upcoming physical card launch.

In this episode, we dive deep into AWS Lambda runtime environments with Maxime David, Software Development Engineer in the Lambda runtime team. Discover how AWS manages and updates the foundation of serverless computing, ensuring millions of functions continue to run smoothly while being patched and updated behind the scenes. Learn about the complex deployment processes, security considerations, and the team's commitment to maintaining backwards compatibility. Maxime explains how Lambda runtimes are structured, from the operating system to language support and AWS SDK integration. We also discuss custom runtimes, the role of Firecracker in providing isolation, and the team's efforts toward open-sourcing their work

In this episode, we dive deep into the world of game development with our special guest Matheus, a former game developer turned AWS Developer Advocate. We explore why and how to get started in game development, discussing everything from game engines to the technical challenges of creating games. Matheus shares his personal journey from Brazil to becoming a game developer, and provides practical advice for developers looking to enter the gaming industry. We cover essential topics like game physics, matchmaking engines, testing strategies, and the intersection between game development and cloud computing. Whether you're a seasoned developer curious about gaming or a complete beginner, this episode offers valuable insights into the creative and technical aspects of game development. This episode is also available on video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RTglcxR9QA