Chris Dobson
Senior engineer @ Trustpilot & AWS Community Builder
Huddersfield, United Kingdom
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Chris has been developing software for longer than he cares to remember. Having spent time working in healthcare and video streaming he is currently plying his trade at Trustpilot where he spends most of his time designing and building AWS workloads and implementing good coding and devops practices.
He is an AWS Serverless Community Builder, certified AWS Solutions Architect Professional and Devops Engineer Professional as well as being an AWS Certification Subject Matter Expert.
Outside of work he is a proud Dad of Chloe and Lydia, a distinctly average cricketer and a very slow runner with a couple of half marathons behind him.
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Streamlining an Event-Driven Architecture: A real world transformation
If we are not careful as an event driven architecture matures it can evolve into something resembling the well documented ‘big ball of mud’.
This talk will look at how my team has been transforming a production EDA. It will show how a sparsely documented set of AWS SNS topics used to publish and consume cross-domain events have been transformed into an architecture exhibiting discoverability, governance and observability while continuing to run in production without any data loss.
How the **** do I test this?
How can I debug this? Is it even possible? What about automated testing? How can this fit into CI/CD? These are all very valid questions that are often asked when developing serverless applications on AWS. Realistically it becomes difficult once you get past unit testing a Lambda, let alone trying to debug a Step Function, test what we’re publishing to SQS, EventBridge or SNS, or finding an issue in a direct integration.
This talk looks at a number of different real world situations in which teams I’ve been part of have needed to debug and test various parts of serverless applications and show how they solved the problem. During the talk, I'll be showing demos of various setups that have been successfully used ranging from running everything locally, to everything in a remote environment, to automated inside a Github Actions pipeline.
While not claiming to have solutions for every possibility you should come away with some full solutions and some ideas to take back to your day to day work.
Orchestrating a workflow in Lambda
There’s a new kid on the block in the world of workflow orchestration, the Lambda Durable Function, which allows an orchestration to be created as a single Lambda Function which can run for up to a year.
- How do you build an orchestration?
- How much will it cost?
- What pitfalls should you look out for?
- Can it do everything you need?
- How do you test or debug it?
Are just some of the questions developers will have about this new extensions to Lambda.
This talk will take an existing production workflow and look at how it could be built as a Lambda Durable Function from start to finish. I’ll implement the complete workflow, look at how the checkpoint/replay execution model affects this implementation, test and debug the workflow, and look at the built-in observability all through a number of demos and hope to have answered those questions.
AWS North Community Conference Sessionize Event
AWS Community Summit - Manchester 2025 Sessionize Event
Malta AWS Community day 2025 Sessionize Event
Chris Dobson
Senior engineer @ Trustpilot & AWS Community Builder
Huddersfield, United Kingdom
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