In Season 4, Episode 41, Karl and Jon are joined by AWS Community Builder Fabien Zucchet to discuss AWS Lambda’s increased payload size for asynchronous invocations and what it means for developers building event-driven applications. They cover the new metrics dashboard for AWS Step Functions, best practices for handling sensitive log data in Amazon CloudWatch, and insights into a major AWS service outage and its widespread impact. The episode wraps up with a look at Amazon’s stock jump despite recent challenges, as the trio reflect on the resilience of cloud providers in a constantly evolving market. And then the guys joked about how their video call issues were secretly caused by discussing cloud outages, as if the streaming platform was taking revenge.

03:57 - AWS Lambda payload size increase 

AWS Lambda increased its maximum payload size from 256KB to 1MB for asynchronous invocations. The speakers discussed potential use cases and pricing implications, noting that while it solves a problem, it may not be widely necessary and could lead to increased costs for some users.

13:21 - AWS Step Functions metrics dashboard 

AWS announced a new metrics dashboard for Step Functions. The speakers viewed this as a positive development, improving observability and providing better insights for users, especially those operating at scale.

17:19 - Handling sensitive log data in Amazon Cloudwatch 

The article discussed methods for masking sensitive information in Cloudwatch logs. The speakers highlighted the importance of this feature for compliance with regulations like GDPR and protecting personally identifiable information (PII).

23:56 - AWS service outage 

A major AWS outage occurred due to a DNS race condition, affecting multiple services. The speakers discussed the complexity of operating at AWS's scale and the cascading effects of the outage on various dependent services.

33:29 - Amazon's stock performance 

Despite recent challenges including the service outage and layoffs, Amazon's stock jumped due to accelerated AWS cloud growth. The speakers discussed how layoffs can paradoxically lead to stock increases and the continued strong performance of AWS as a key driver of Amazon's success.