Choosing The Right AWS Service For Your Website + API

Have you ever been confused by the myriad of choices offered by AWS for hosting a website or an API?

Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, Lightsail, AppRunner, Amplify, S3 (and more!) can each host websites + APIs. But which one should we choose?

Which one is cheapest? Which one is fastest? Which one will scale to meet our needs?

Join me in this session as we dive into each AWS hosting service to determine which one is best for your scenario and explain why!

Blazor WebAssembly on AWS, what you need to know

Building a SPA fully in .NET 6 with Blazor WebAssembly has become a hot topic in the last few months. AWS offers you several hosting options for your Blazor WASM apps. However, if you want to interact with AWS Services, there are a few things you need to know.

In this session, I will demonstrate the different hosting options you have on AWS. Then I will discuss what you need to know to interact with AWS Services from your Blazor WASM app.

Lessons learned from building a Generative AI playground

Generative AI, there are those who talk about it and those who build with it.

In this session, I share the lessons learned from building the [.NET FM Playground](https://github.com/build-on-aws/dotnet-fm-playground). This project has started as a way to educate myself on this broad and new domain. No better way for me to learn than getting my hands dirty. During the session, you get a hands-on, developer oriented understanding on how to use Generative AI in your application. You won't hear about training large language models (LLMs), I'm no ML expert.

We walk through the different playgrounds to understand a few key concepts. The Text playground helps us to make our first steps with LLMs and do a bit of prompt engineering. The Chat playground surfaces why and how you can memorize your conversation. The Voice Chat playground showcases how you can mix and match different AI technologies to deliver voice-based interactions. The Agent playground illustrates how you can use Retrieval Augmented Generation pattern to overcome LLMs knowledge limitation and how you can make them accomplish complex tasks.

When you walk out from this talk, I hope you go build your first Generative AI enabled app.

Generative AI and Foundation Models, what’s in it for us, developers?

As developers, our first contact with Generative AI has most likely been Github Copilot and ChatGPT. They are end-user usage of Foundation Models and Large Language Models.

But what are Foundation Models? What are Large Language Models? How are they related? How do they work? What are the use cases they cover? How can we use them? Do they replace all existing AI services? What is prompt engineering? What is an agent? What does RAG mean?

In this session, I answer to those questions and try to demystify Generative AI and Foundation Models from a developer perspective. It means I will illustrate all my talking points with live coding & demo.

In this session, I leverage my PhD in Computer Science on handwriting recognition to democratize this hot topic that everyone get excited about but not really know.

Avoid configuration headaches by packaging your application and infrastructure as a unique asset

Imagine a world where you never face discrepancy between your application infrastructure requirements, your configuration and your actual infrastructure. In this world, the only thing you need to know is your preferred high-level programming language. In this presentation, I will introduce you to this world.

Using source control management tool is now a common practice for both the code of our application and the code of our infrastructure. However, we often continue to manage them separately. There are many reasons for this. The most common one is that the team managing the application and the team managing the infrastructure are two distinct teams.

But, today, more and more teams are embracing the 2-pizzas team model where they are accountable for what they ship from code to production. In this case, why couldn't we manage everything at once?

I will show you how we can achieve this with the AWS Cloud Development Kit.

Audience: software developers
Level: 200
Prerequisite: know C# or a high level programming language, know does Infrastructure as Code mean
Reviewer notes: This talk showcases the concepts with AWS CDK but first discuss the benefits of this approach. New talk

How to build a modern .NET application leveraging AWS in 2024

.NET has a long history on AWS. It is supported since 2009. The AWS SDK for .NET has been the first unified AWS SDK ever released.

If you are building a modern .NET application, you can expect to use the full breadth and depth of AWS services. But with 200+ services, it can be hard to know where to start.

In this session, I will live build and deploy a modern .NET application with my favorite AWS serverless services covering hosting, database, storage, authentication & authorization, observability and AI.

REST, gRPC, SignalR and GraphQL for .NET developers. Which is right for your use case?

REST, gRPC, SignalR and GraphQL. As .NET developers, we hear a lot about those four technologies to build API. However, it is not always crystal clear how to decide the one to pick for a use case. REST is a software architectural style. gRPC is a cross-platform open source Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework. SignalR is a free and open-source software library. GraphQL is an open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs.

In this talk, we discuss their core concepts and the problems they are trying to solve. Finally, we propose a decision-tree to help you decide the right one for your use case.