Talks and Presentations
Rethinking Microservices: Lessons from Refactoring to AWS Lambda Durable Functions
For more than a decade, software teams have been balancing the trade-offs between monoliths and microservices on AWS. From simple Lambdaliths to complex design patterns to achieve microservices benefits, this debate has been anything but settled. At AWS re:Invent, AWS introduced Lambda Durable Functions with an interesting premise: build like a monolith, deploy as microservices. By bringing durable execution to Lambda Functions, AWS is challenging assumptions about how serverless applications should be designed. In this talk, I will walk through a real-world refactor of a multi-step data pipeline at PostNL, migrating from AWS Step Functions to AWS Lambda Durable Functions and still respecting the application's design pattern. We’ll explore what worked, what didn’t, and the trade-offs we encountered along the way. When you walk out of this session, you will understand how Lambda Durable Functions work under the hood, when they are a better fit than state machines, the trade-offs they introduce, and how they influence microservice design decisions in practice, or whether this marks the end of the monolith vs. microservices debate as we know it.
Next-Level Infrastructure as Code with AWS CDK and LocalStack
You know the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) lets you define infrastructure as code using programming languages like TypeScript and Python, but what if you could do much more than that? In this talk, we will see code: from CDK Constructs, Blueprints, and Aspects to fine-grained assertions. Then, we will explore the powerful combination of CDK and LocalStack, showing how simulating AWS environments locally or in CI can help you level up your infrastructure. When you walk out of this session, you will learn how to structure your AWS CDK projects with TypeScript, when and how to apply fine-grained assertions for regression testing and how to apply best practices with reusable CDK Constructs and enforce consistency with Blueprints and Aspects. Additionally, you will learn why LocalStack can be the best friend of your CDK project.