For one-off tasks, AWS Lambda really can be incredibly easy. You write a few lines of code, deploy it, and you have a function running in the cloud ready to respond to events, scale automatically, and that only costs you pennies.But as your application grows, so does some necessary complexity. When a few one-off functions become a full serverless backend architecture made up of interconnected services, you’ll need to pay careful attention to best practices to ensure that your application is easy to debug, maintain, and scale.That’s where AWS Powertools for Lambda fits in. It’s a suite of reusable utilities designed to simplify bringing best practices around things like logging, tracing, metrics, idempotency and more to your Lambda functions with minimal effort.This demo session will dive into some of the functionality provided by the AWS Powertools (TypeScript) core libraries, such as:Encapsulating best practices into reusable libraries for structured logging, metrics collection, idempotency, and more.Leveraging Middy middleware to integrate common cross-cutting concerns, such as injecting Lambda context or automatically flushing metric.Enabling local testing with LocalStack, allowing you to deploy and debug Lambda functions with structured logs, trace data, and embedded metrics.Providing modular examples that can be deployed to AWS or LocalStack with ease, enabling developers to explore libraries.

Most people think the cloud is just files floating in the sky.Spoiler: it's not.In this episode, I’m breaking down what “the cloud” really is, why everything you’ve been told is probably wrong, and why it's the engine behind everything from Netflix to AI to your online checkout.This is the kickoff to WTH is the Cloud?! a fun series that makes cloud technology make sense.

Ever wonder why some teams intentionally break their own systems? Welcome to the world of chaos engineering — a practice that's not just for Netflix-scale infrastructure, but for any team that wants to build resilient, reliable applications.In this session, we'll demystify chaos engineering and explain why intentionally breaking things is actually the smart move. You'll learn:What chaos engineering really is (in plain English, no buzzwords)Why waiting for production failures is a terrible strategyHow to start experimenting with controlled failure locally, before it happens in the wildReal-world examples of chaos experiments that catch bugs you'd never find in traditional testingTools and techniques to get started without blowing up your infrastructureThrough practical demos using LocalStack's cloud emulation and chaos engineering tools, we'll simulate failures like network latency, service outages, and resource exhaustion right from your laptop.If you've ever said "it worked on my machine" only to watch it crash in production, this talk is for you—let's break things intentionally so they don't break unexpectedly.

Testing in the cloud = slow builds, fragile staging, surprise bills.Let’s talk about how developers are flipping the script and using local cloud environments to test smarter, faster, and cheaper — without breaking production.Bonus: You’ll learn how LocalStack lets you simulate AWS on your machine. Game changer.