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.

With Chris Miller, AWS Hero (since 2021), AI Software Engineer at Workato, User Group Leader

AWS Builder Loft San FranciscoAWS Hero ProgramAWS Community BuildersChris Miller on BuilderCenterKiro IDE - AI-powered development environmentStrands - Multi-agent frameworkAWS BedrockAWS Amplify Gen 2SST - Infrastructure as CodeTheo Brown YouTube ChannelBenn Jordan YouTube ChannelWorking Backwards - Book on Amazon leadership principles

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.

With Mike Chambers, Senior Developer Advocate, AWS

MCP (Model Context Protocol)Strands Agents - Lightweight agent frameworkKiro IDE - AI-powered development environmentDeep Learning AI Conference (AI Dev 25)NeurIPS ConferenceAWS Developers YouTube Channel

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.

With Christian, AWS Hero, Solution Architect at Bundesliga, Creator of promptz.dev

promptz.dev - Community library of prompts and agentsKiro IDE - AI-powered development environmentKiro Powers - Packaged capabilities for specialized tasksStrands Agents - Framework for building agentic applicationsLambda Durable Functions - Long-running workflow capabilityAWS Community BuildersAWS HeroesAccelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene KimContinuous Discovery Habits by Teresa TorresTeam Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais

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.

With Sebastien Stormacq, Principal Developer Advocate, AWS

Download the Swift Expert Power for KiroThe Visual Studio Code extension for Swift is now available on Open VSX RegistryInterview with Chris Lattner: From Swift to Mojo and High-Performance AI EngineeringSwift AWS Lambda Runtime RepositorySwift on Lambda TutorialSwift Bedrock LibrarySwift Bedrock Library DocumentationSwift.orgGetting Started with Swift

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.

With Jas Narula, Product Manager, AWS

Step FunctionsBlog: Enhanced local testing in AWS Step FunctionsLocalStack

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.

With Roopal Jain, Sr. Software Developer, AWS

Builder center

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.

With Olly Pomeroy, Senior Specialist Solution Architect, Containers, AWS

Launch: Announcing Amazon ECS Managed Instances for containerized applicationsAmazon ECSBottleRocketPodcast: the platform at Adobe

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.

With Alexandra Huides, Principal Network Specialist Solutions Architect, AWS

Part 1 of this two-parts series. Should developer care about networking?What is Amazon VPC Lattice?Podcast episode with Moonpig.comGetting started with VPC LatticeVPC Lattice launch blog postAWS Networking Essentials

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.

With Alexandra Huides, Principal Network Specialist Solutions Architect, AWS

AWS Networking Essentials

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.

With Abrom Douglas, Solution Architect, Amazon Cognito

AgentCoreAgentCore IdentityAbrom's blog post about AgentCore IdentityAgentCore Identity sample code

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.

With Arron Bailiss, Principal Engineer, Strands Agents

Strands AgentsStrands on GitHub