After a couple of years of cancelled bookings due to COVID-19,
this year was the first time I’ve been able to attend AWS re:Invent.
What a conference. Unlike any other event I’ve ever seen, the scale of this thing is wild, even for Vegas.
Everyone warned me about travelling through LAX on the busiest travel day of the year.
But overall, things were pretty smooth.
After over 24 hours of flights and layovers, the trip from Adelaide->Sydney->Los Angeles->Las Vegas ended in a wonderful thanksgiving lunch with friends I hadn’t seen since 2019.

The conference was incredible. But here are five lessons for next time…

RQ is a great library for building a simple decoupled worker queue, which can invoke arbitrary functions from your code base.

As the name implies, it requires a redis service. If you’re deploying on AWS, you might already have familiarity with SQS and prefer to use that instead. Inspired by RQ, here’s how we do it with no dependencies whatsoever…

AWS App runner is fairly new and currently has no high level CDK support.
But it does have CloudFormation support, which means we can still use L1 Constructs in CDK.
Let’s look at how to do that.

We’re doing some numerical work in Lambda.
There is some numerical instability and we want to make sure that we can reliably get the same results.
We could use the AWS SDK to invoke Lambda in parallel…