Build On re:Cap 2023

Okay, you may be asking yourself: "What am I going to learn during these three days?". Well here is the plan of what we will be building with each day. (Please note, this is just an idea what we will be working with, and we will definitely explore far and wide, and welcome you - chat, yes you - to come and suggest things we can use 💜):

If you would like get notified about this, download these fancy Calendar blockers:

*December 12 - Google Cal | iCal
*December 13 - Google Cal |iCal
*December 14 - Google Cal | iCal

If you've missed the live show, fear not, here are the show notes, links and videos from each of the days for your viewing pleasure! 💜

On the first day we leaned our focus to serverless applications. Namely we built a bunch of Lambda functions, and deployed some React applications. Here are some of the highlights:

We kicked off the show with Chris and Brandon, as we discussed the finer points on Do people still build stuff with Visual Basic or not 🤔 But then we looked at how do you write .NET Lambda functions. Easy, you use Microsoft Visual Studio with the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio. What Brandon showcased here is how easy it is to author a Lambda function, deploy it to the cloud, and run AND test it all from the comfort of your IDE ☕️ . Check out that portion of the stream in the video below 👇

In the second part, we bid farewell to Brandon and Chris, and we have Erik enter the stage. Yes, it's time for some AWS Amplify 🎉 Specifically in this segment we are looking at a Preview feature of AWS Amplify - Gen 2. This gives You a chance to use Amplify to build front-end AND back-end applications with the power of TypeScript and CDK! In this segment, Erik and Darko deploy a simple NextJS application to AWS, and implement an Authentication feature to it with AWS CDK and Amazon Cognito. Check out how it went, and our amazing Holiday spirit in the video below 👇

Let's got back to Lambda functions, as we are joined by Julian and the most amazing Linda, and we take a peek at some of the features and improvements to Lambda Functions that came from this year's re:Invent. In the following segment Julian demonstrates us the new scaling capabilities of Lambda and it's new advanced logging controls.

What stood out for me in this segment is how fast we can get Lambda functions to spin up. If you want to see how fast it takes to have 10 000 (TEN THOUSAND) concurrent executions of Lambda functions, and how long it takes Lambda to process 200K SQS messages, check out the video below 👇

Lastly, it's time for me (Darko) to attempt a thing. And attempt is the key word - I wanted to use my new found knowledge of .NET Lambda functions, and deploy a PoweShell Lambda function... yes! It's almost the same thing! 😅 This is all possible by using a custom AWS Lambda PowerShell runtime and AWS SAM.

This time we, almost got to the solution on time, but we ran out of time. So here is a challenge for you, dear reader:

*Create a Lambda Function that uses this PowerShell runtime
*Modify one of the existing example lambda functions to include the AWS.Tools.S3 PowerShell module
*Make it upload a file with a random name to an S3 Bucket
*Now, make a new S3 bucket that uses the Amazon S3 Express One Zone high performance storage class
*See how fast those Lambda functions can create file in that bucket.
*????
*Profit 🥳
And, enjoy the video 👇

Would you look at that, day 2 has come and gone, and has left some amazing content in its wake! Today, I was joined by three amazing Amazonians, as we look at all things Data and Video Streaming. And we also got a chance to play around with some hardware. Today I wanted to focus on Data, and Data related launches so that is exactly what we did, but we also used the opportunity to put our old-man-in-tech hats on and talk about the "good" old times!

Speaking of Good Old times, the first thing we did this morning (and by "we" I am talking about Tony and Ibrahim) is look at the latest feature of Amazon RDS - A "new" Database engine! Yes, now you can launch IBM Db2 Databases on RDS 💾 What a time to be alive.

What really stood out for me here, is that you actually need a licence key from IBM to be able to launch it. I've never seen things work such a way in the cloud, but I guess this is a very special type of Database. And for all the jokes we made, this is a very important launch for all those customers who are looking to migrate legacy workloads to the cloud, who are looking to gain from all the benefits of a fully-managed database, while still running their most critical workloads. Go give IBM Db2 on RDS a look. 👏

Oh two more things that can be a snag when launching this database (as of the time of writing this):

Enjoy the video of us doing exactly this 👇

With the advent of AI/ML, we are in need of more and more data to be processed. Lot's of times that data sits in some sort of a Data Warehouse like Amazon Redshift but to get that data from production databases to there, you need to run some ETL - Extract, Transform, and Load - Operations on it. Historically this would require specific services and tooling to sit in-between these databases and perform all this. Well, this is no more! Now you can get your data straight from an Amazon RDS database into something like Amazon Redshift with zero-ETL 🔥

In the following segment, Tony and Ibrahim showcase just that. We also share this wonderful lab you can follow yourself if you want to check out how this works. More in the video below 👇

Lastly, here was the fun part of the Data focused segment of the stream - watching Darko fail! Yes, we've looked at the latest feature coming out of Amazon ElastiCache - ElastiCache Serverless. This gives you the ability to launch an Redis or Memcached cluster that is able to launch in under a minute and can instantly scale based on usage! 😎

We started out great, and we managed to launch it without issues. However we ran into issues in connecting to the cache using redis6-cli. After a lot of trial and tribulations we figured it out. A single cli parameter of --tls was the culprit! 😧 Yes, since we are encrypting the data in transit, we needed to tell the redis tool to use TLS! Oh well!

If you want to see the tool in action, as well as us scratching our heads, check out the video below 👇

Alright, it's time for Todd. 🥳 And straight off the bat Todd brings his a-game! Yes, he made fun things with microcontrollers! 😍 In this segment, Todd showcases how he used an ESP32 microcontroller, the Twitch API and Amazon Bedrock to play music notes that Twitch chat shares with us, from a speaker attached to the ESP32 and attempt the song that was played! 🎵

Oh, and he built an ugly Christmas sweater that lights up whenever we get a new Twitch channel follower! 😍 Check out these shenanigans below 👇

Last, but definitely not least, Todd showcases some of the latest features of Amazon IVS. A service that enables you to create your own live streaming platforms and tools. In this segment we looked at a way you can run your own real-time live streams with server side compositing with Amazon IVS. If you want to do it yourself, Todd has given us this fancy document that outlines all the steps we did. But if you want just to watch us do this, and more, check out the video below 👇

And, finally, day 3 and the final day of this year's re:Cap streams is here. It's been quite a ride, and it's time for us to wrap it up with something fun, something useful, and something everyone is talking about: Generative AI. And today I am joined by none other than Brooke, Francois, and Chris. Let's see what happens today!

First off, we are welcomed by Francois and Chris. Our resident experts in all things AWS Toolkit and Visual studio. Like on day 1 we are getting a first-hand demo on how the AWS Toolkit works in Visual Studio, but this time with a slight lean on how Amazon CodeWhisperer nails creating some .NET code. What stood out for me here is how CodeWhisperer is concious of the entire context of your written code. For example, the .NET example used by Francois is writing to an Amazon DynamoDB database. Seems simple enough, right? Well, the AWS SDK for .NET has two ways of writing to this DB. And depending on what module is imported CodeWhisperer suggests different code snippets that adhere to said module - magical 🔮

Oh, and if you wish to see CodeWhisperer and its chat functionality in action on the JetBrains Rider IDE, you can see it in the video below 👇

Lastly, as we are wrapping up today, Broke and I decided to have some fun. Now, with PartyRock, a free generative AI playground where you can build applications with the power of Generative AI, with Generative AI. YES! 🥳 What we have built here is an application which will summarize AWS Blog posts, and give you a version of it with a thick Australian Slang (Brooke, as our resident Aussie, has confirmed it's authenticity). On top of that, we've also introduced a chat bot which you can ask questions about the blog post. Yowza!

Check out the way we built it, how much we laughed, and the tool in action below 👇

And that's all folks. We really hope you enjoyed these three days of live streams. We hope you will come back again next year. And we hope to see you soon LIVE 🟣 on a Twitch channel near you! 💜