In Season 5, Episode 1, Karl and Jon are joined by Peter Sankauscas, an AWS Hero and User Group Leader. They discuss whether AI is replacing younger employees and what that could mean for businesses, OpenAI’s potential investment from Amazon, and AWS leadership changes — including Peter DeSantis’s new role. They also cover AWS flat-rate pricing plans for CloudFront and WAF, the 2026 Answers for AWS survey, and even ask whether AI data centres could be affecting the world’s weather.

04:47 - AI replacing young employees

AWS CEO Matt Garman stated that replacing young employees with AI is a bad idea for businesses. The discussion highlighted the importance of junior employees for company growth, innovation, and diversity of thought. The speakers also touched on how AI is changing customer service roles.

15:04 - OpenAI's potential investment from Amazon

The article discussed rumors of Amazon potentially investing $10 billion in OpenAI. The speakers debated the implications of this investment, including its impact on the AI industry and potential financial risks. They also discussed OpenAI's relationships with other tech giants like Microsoft.

19:38 - AWS leadership changes

Peter DeSantis was appointed to lead a new organization focusing on AI models, the Amazon Nova portfolio, and AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). The speakers discussed the significance of this role and its potential impact on AWS's AI strategy.

26:37 - AWS flat rate pricing plans

AWS announced new flat rate pricing plans for CloudFront and WAF, potentially competing with services like Cloudflare. The speakers discussed the benefits of these plans and how they might affect customer choices and costs.

35:02 - Answers for AWS survey

Peter Sankauscas explained the annual community-run survey he conducts to understand trends in AWS service usage. He discussed new categories added for 2026, such as AI SDLC, and highlighted some interesting findings from the previous year's survey, including the adoption of Graviton and the popularity of DynamoDB.

LInk to this years survey https://answersforaws.com/survey/

In Season 4, Episode 46, Karl and Jon are joined by Matheus Guimaraes, AWS Lead Developer Advocate. Together, they cover the AWS CodeCommit resurrection and roadmap, the AWS Builder Center wishlist feature, ECS Express for simplified container deployment, an ECR archiving tier for cost optimization, blue-green deployments in Aurora Global, and accelerated recovery in Route 53 to speed up DNS updates during outages. They also discuss a recent AWS outage and its impact, then wrap up by joking about launching a “Shot Clock Karaoke” segment in future episodes where they’d have to sing AWS parody songs against the clock.

09:51 - CodeCommit resurrection

AWS brought back CodeCommit due to customer feedback and demand. It's now back in general availability with a public roadmap, including features like Git LFS support and expanded regional availability. The decision to resurrect the service was based on customer needs and integrations.

19:55 - AWS Billing Transfer

AWS Billing Transfer for centrally managing AWS billing and costs across multiple organizations

24:32 - ECS Express

ECS Express is a new mode that simplifies container deployment on Amazon ECS. It creates clusters with best-practice defaults, allowing teams to focus on container deployment without extensive setup. It's suitable for production use and can be customized later.

30:55 - ECR archiving tier

Amazon ECR now offers an archiving tier for container images, addressing compliance needs and cost optimization. Images can be automatically moved to the archive based on usage patterns and easily restored when needed.

35:06 - Blue-green deployments in Aurora Global

Aurora Global now supports blue-green deployments across up to 10 regions, simplifying database updates and migrations with minimal downtime. This feature extends to schema changes, potentially solving complex database DevOps challenges.

39:26 - Accelerated recovery in Route 53

In response to recent outages, AWS introduced an accelerated recovery feature for Route 53. This allows customers to continue making DNS updates with a 60-minute SLA even if a primary region (like North Virginia) is down.

In Season 4, Episode 45, Karl and Jon are joined by AWS Hero Johannes Koch for a recap of the big AWS re:Invent 2025 announcements, including Lambda Managed Instances, Database Savings Plans, new EKS capabilities for workload orchestration and cloud resource management, and AWS AI Frontier Agents (Kiro, Security, DevOps) — and despite the looming threat of AI agents coming for their jobs, the guys decide to keep calm and carry on coding!

08:40 - Lambda Managed Instances

This new feature allows users to run Lambda functions on EC2 instances they manage. It aims to provide more control over the underlying infrastructure while maintaining Lambda's serverless model. There was debate about whether it truly eliminates cold starts and its potential use cases.

16:25 - Database Savings Plans

AWS introduced savings plans for database services like RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, and others. This allows customers to commit to usage for a 1-year term in exchange for discounted rates. While generally seen as positive, there were discussions about its limitations and potential impact on database choices.

23:56 - New EKS Capabilities

Amazon announced new features for EKS, including managed Argo CD and capabilities for deploying AWS infrastructure from Kubernetes. This was seen as part of AWS's strategy to expand EKS's control plane capabilities and take on more management responsibilities for customers.

33:28 - AWS AI Frontier Agents

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-devops-agent-helps-you-accelerate-incident-response-and-improve-system-reliability-preview/

Three new AI agents were introduced - for Kiro (code development), Security, and DevOps. These agents aim to automate various tasks and provide intelligent assistance in their respective domains. The speakers discussed the potential benefits and concerns around these new AI tools.