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01Amazon Web Services · architecture

Automate medical coding with Step Functions and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore

Automating medical coding requires a hybrid approach that combines deterministic orchestration with bounded agentic reasoning to ensure safety, auditability, and human oversight. The team built a workflow using AWS Step Functions, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore that evaluates terms cheapest-first via block-lists, exact matching, and finally an LLM agent for ambiguous cases. This design successfully autocodes confident cases while routing ambiguous ones to human reviewers with full audit trails and decision explanations.

DEPTH ■■■■■15 min read3 days ago

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02Martin Fowler · architecture

When Software Meets Hardware

A software engineering team modernizing a large-scale retail IoT system of 800,000 battery-powered sensors faced challenges integrating software practices with embedded hardware. By building physical sensor farms, virtual emulators, and self-diagnosing firmware, the team learned to design for intermittent connectivity, power efficiency, and fleet-level observability. The project succeeded by treating the physical world, hardware constraints, and engineering environments as core parts of the system lifecycle.

DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read10 days ago

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03Amazon Web Services · architecture

Multi-region disaster recovery for Amazon API Gateway WebSocket APIs

Real-time applications using WebSocket connections face disruptions during regional AWS outages because connections are tied to specific regions. The team implemented an active-passive multi-region disaster recovery architecture using Route 53 DNS failover, DynamoDB Global Tables, an automated canary health probe, and client-side exponential backoff with jitter. This design automatically detects failures, redirects traffic, and restores client state without manual intervention.

DEPTH ■■■■■10 min read11 days ago

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04Martin Fowler · performance

Are Harnesses Worth the Cost?

An experiment was conducted to evaluate whether behavioral harnesses improve coding agent reliability when building a complex backend-for-frontend service. While frontier models succeeded consistently with or without a harness, the harness significantly increased token usage, time, and cost without improving final output. However, for a cost-optimized model, the harness improved success rates from 30 percent to 100 percent.

DEPTH ■■■■■17 min read12 days ago

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05Amazon Web Services · architecture

How UTS established a modern curriculum data services foundation on AWS

University of Technology Sydney rearchitected its curriculum data integration using serverless AWS services to decouple systems of record from downstream consumers. By implementing domain-driven design with an event-driven architecture and purpose-built persistence layers, the team achieved zero production incidents, low latency, and reduced operational overhead while managed by a single engineer.

DEPTH ■■■■■9 min read11 days ago

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06Amazon Web Services · tooling

Scope workloads and share resilience policies with AWS Resilience Hub

Engineering teams often struggle to scope workloads and maintain up-to-date resilience policies in shared Kubernetes clusters after migrations or deployments. AWS Resilience Hub introduced features enabling Kubernetes label-based resource scoping, generative AI-powered dependency insights, and cross-account resilience policy sharing via AWS Organizations. These capabilities allow teams to isolate specific workloads, prioritize dependency investigations, and enforce centralized recovery standards.

DEPTH ■■■■■14 min read11 days ago

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07Amazon Web Services · architecture

Stopping business email compromise with AI-driven email security: How VIPRE protects modern enterprises on AWS

VIPRE developed an AI-driven, cloud-native email security solution on AWS to protect enterprises against business email compromise and advanced phishing attacks. The system uses layered machine learning, semantic analysis, and dynamic sandboxing orchestrated via serverless containers and message queues to evaluate over half a million messages daily. In production testing, the architecture successfully identified thousands of BEC attempts while maintaining low-latency processing and reducing administrative overhead.

DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read12 days ago

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08Yelp · architecture

The making of the Yelp Assistant UI

Yelp developed a chat interface called Yelp Assistant using a hybrid approach combining native UI components and a server-driven UI framework called CHAOS. This architecture allows the team to dynamically update the chat experience without waiting for app store releases. The system separates views from data using reactive datasets and MessageEvents to manage the chat loop, state, and user interactions.

DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read3 weeks ago

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09Amazon Web Services · architecture

Bulk Executor for Amazon DynamoDB, Part 2: Lessons we learned the hard way

Engineering a bulk execution tool for Amazon DynamoDB using AWS Glue required addressing several architectural challenges, including cost estimation, graceful job termination, and error handling across hundreds of parallel workers. The team overcame limitations in CloudWatch logging and the Spark connector by combining serverless execution with direct API calls and distributed rate limiting. As a result, the tool provides a scalable, script-like interface for managing large-scale table operations safely.

DEPTH ■■■■■14 min read12 days ago

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10Martin Fowler · practice

Fragments: October 21

This post discusses commentary on AI usage in writing, the cancellation of the Grace Hopper Celebration, and reviews a detailed article by Cindy Sridharan on debugging with AI agents. The reviewed article highlights that AI agents excel at processing raw data rather than reading code first, and outlines a three-step debugging process involving controls, signals, and hypothesis validation. The lesson is that engineers must guide AI agents by setting up verification loops and providing raw data rather than human-centric abstractions.

DEPTH ■■■■■5 min read4 days ago

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11Amazon Web Services · architecture

Agentic antimicrobial resistance surveillance with AWS HealthOmics and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore

Processing public bacterial sequencing data for antimicrobial resistance surveillance typically requires specialized bioinformatics and SQL skills. To streamline this process, the team built a reference architecture using AWS HealthOmics, Amazon S3 Tables, and an Amazon Bedrock AgentCore conversational agent that ingests raw reads, normalizes findings, and answers plain-language questions with cited evidence. The resulting system automates the path from public accession numbers to natural-language epidemiological answers.

DEPTH ■■■■■10 min read13 days ago

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12Martin Fowler · practice

Practitioner Voice: The Writing Category Nobody has Named Yet

The author explores a missing category of writing called Practitioner Voice, which is grounded in earned experience and visible personal judgment rather than academic rigor, corporate polish, or AI generation. They examine how AI can be used as an extended cognitive tool for practitioners without losing human accountability. Ultimately, the piece argues that maintaining personal judgment and consequence-bearing experience is essential for authentic professional writing.

DEPTH ■■■■■39 min read12 days ago

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13Amazon Web Services · tutorial

Deploy Oracle Database step by step on Amazon EVS with FSx for ONTAP

This post provides a step-by-step guide to deploying Oracle Database 19c on Amazon Elastic VMware Service using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP as an NFS datastore. It covers provisioning storage, mounting datastores, installing Oracle, configuring SnapMirror for cross-region disaster recovery, and outlining four migration paths. The result is a fully functional enterprise database deployment that preserves existing operational workflows.

DEPTH ■■■■■11 min read3 weeks ago

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14Amazon Web Services · architecture

Architect highly available Oracle Database on Amazon EVS and FSx for ONTAP

Enterprises migrating Oracle databases to Amazon Elastic VMware Service face challenges with storage latency, disaster recovery, and operational consistency. The team designed a highly available architecture combining Amazon EVS bare metal instances with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP NFS datastores and cross-region SnapMirror replication. The resulting setup delivers sub-millisecond storage latency, preserved VMware operational workflows, and robust disaster recovery capabilities.

DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read3 weeks ago

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15Martin Fowler · practice

Fragments: October 4

This post discusses the evolving role of software development and code in the era of large language models. It explores how shifting from deterministic building to inferential nurturing changes processes, why high-level representations remain critical for managing context windows, and how conceptual modeling becomes more important than the mechanical act of writing instructions.

DEPTH ■■■■■7 min read2 weeks ago

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16Amazon Web Services · tooling

Deploy open source Regional availability tools in your VPC

Engineering teams planning multi-Region architectures often struggle with evaluating AWS service availability and managing compliance risks. The team built and open-sourced two VPC-hosted solutions that deploy an automated Regional availability dashboard and a workload analysis pipeline using CloudTrail and CloudFormation. This setup allows organizations to securely filter and inspect the 20 to 30 services they actually use instead of hundreds.

DEPTH ■■■■■13 min read3 weeks ago

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17Martin Fowler · practice

Principles for effective slides

Presenters often rely on text-heavy slide decks that distract audiences and undermine storytelling. To fix this, speakers can use minimalist slides as a complementary visual channel to control the rate of information and manage cognitive load. This approach leads to more engaging presentations where visuals reinforce the spoken narrative rather than replace it.

DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read3 weeks ago

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18Amazon Web Services · migration

Accelerating airline retailing innovation: how Datalex modernized with AWS Experience-Based Acceleration and agentic AI

Datalex partnered with AWS for a three-day Experience-Based Acceleration workshop to modernize its mission-critical airline retail platform from Java 8 and EJB2 to Spring Boot on Java 21. The team used parallel workstreams and agentic AI to prove migration feasibility, implement automated CI/CD pipelines, and integrate generative AI capabilities without disrupting existing airline operations. This effort successfully established repeatable migration patterns, reduced memory usage by 35%, and accelerated the timeline for long-term platform evolution.

DEPTH ■■■■■14 min read3 weeks ago

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19Amazon Web Services · architecture

Running multi-day AZ evacuation drills with ARC Zonal Shift

This post explains how to run multi-day Availability Zone evacuation drills using ARC Zonal Shift to prove application resilience under sustained stress. The team details step-by-step procedures across ECS, EKS, and PostgreSQL databases to uncover hidden failure modes like unoptimized scaling and stale connections. The result is a practical framework for moving from theoretical multi-AZ architectures to proven operational resilience.

DEPTH ■■■■■19 min read3 weeks ago

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20Amazon Web Services · architecture

How MHK built a HIPAA-eligible agentic AI solution on Amazon Bedrock

Healthcare technology company MHK faced fragmented AI infrastructure and lengthy development cycles while trying to process unstructured medical documents under strict HIPAA standards. To solve this, they built a multi-tenant, event-driven agentic workflow framework called the SmartProminence AI Orchestrator on AWS using Amazon Bedrock, ECS, and SQS. The new system reduced manual review effort by 90% and shortened AI feature deployment times from months to weeks.

DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read3 weeks ago

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