50 episodes listed below
Production cloud systems, explained by practitioners.
Real World Serverless with theburningmonk brings engineers and technical founders into detailed conversations about systems that actually ship. Episodes move from AWS and event-driven design to AI agents, LocalStack, multi-tenant architecture, webhooks, knowledge graphs, and the friction of building production services.
PRESS PLAY
Real World Serverless with theburningmonk is a practitioner-led technology show about building modern cloud systems once the whiteboard is gone. It favors specifics. Guests describe production services, developer tools, AI systems, event pipelines, and multi-tenant platforms in enough detail for working engineers to follow the tradeoffs. Serverless is the anchor, but the conversation regularly stretches into AI agents, MCP, workflow orchestration, benchmarks, observability, graph databases, and local cloud simulation. The result is a show about architecture as practiced, not architecture as advertised. Recent conversations with Matt Carey examine where AI workflows end and agents begin, including tool loops, orchestrator agents, static DAGs, and the problem of deciding what counts as real agency. Waldemar Hammer discusses LocalStack v4, Event Studio, multi-cloud support, Snowflake, X-Ray-style tracing, resource graphs, function logs, and the value of opening the black box during local development. Khawaja Shams brings the conversation into multi-tenant systems and cellular architecture. That episode spends time on per-customer SLAs, fleet-wide error rates, DynamoDB-style scale, and what happens when a customer jumps from ordinary traffic to very large request volume. Aniket Mitra adds a data and AI thread through knowledge graphs, vector databases, graph neural networks, and retrieval workflows for LLM applications. Alex Bouchard brings Hookdeck into the picture as a serverless event gateway built around webhooks, HTTP-shaped events, local replay, and the difference between integration-heavy product teams and more traditional event-driven systems. Earlier episodes widen the lens with serverless work at NN and LEGO, plus teaching-focused conversations with Sam Williams. The show is technical without being sterile. Questions often begin with a product or platform announcement, then move quickly into how teams debug it, model it, test it, or explain it to customers. It is also refreshingly willing to sit with ambiguity. A workflow can look like an agent. A webhook platform can feel odd to someone from an enterprise integration background. A global service can look healthy while one customer is having a bad day. Those tensions are the substance of the show. For engineers building on AWS, serverless platforms, event-driven systems, or AI infrastructure, Real World Serverless with theburningmonk offers grounded conversations with people close to the implementation details.
Made for: Best for backend engineers, cloud architects, platform teams, and technical founders who already know the basics of serverless and want production-level judgment. It also suits AI and infrastructure builders comparing agents, retrieval systems, observability tools, and event-driven platforms.
What sets it apart: The show stays close to implementation details: logs, traces, local replay, SLAs, tool loops, resource graphs, and traffic spikes. Instead of broad cloud commentary, it uses working systems and named tools as the path into architectural reasoning.
A podcast where we talk about real-world use of Serverless technologies from engineers who work with them day-to-day. We will discuss use cases, why they chose serverless and the pain points and challenges they face. If you want to know what it's REALLY like to work with serverless, this is the show for you.
A million requests per second, and you get the question your fleet-wide SLA forgot to ask.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Matt Carey draws a practical boundary between AI workflows, agents, and tool-calling loops.
AI agents can sound slippery when a workflow already includes some model-driven branching, and this episode keeps that line in focus. The host and Matt Carey, a founding AI engineer at StackOne, separate a static DAG or state machine from a system that can choose its next move.
LocalStack 4.0 sharpens serverless inspection while broadening its cloud development ambitions.
LocalStack 4.0 comes through as a release focused on making serverless systems less opaque. Waldemar Hammer, LocalStack's CTO, explains how event studio opens up event processing, surfaces trace information, and could connect users to logs and resource state.
A gaming surge turns serverless scale into a sharp lesson in multi-tenant architecture and customer-level accountability.
The clearest hook is the leap from 10,000 TPS to more than a million, turning a gaming customer's sudden breakout into a real test of multi-tenant serverless design.
A clear, grounded discussion of how graph structure and vector similarity can work together in AI retrieval.
Knowledge graphs enter the AI chatbot discussion through a practical engineering question: what relationship should a system keep intact when it retrieves information?
A practical look at HookDeck's Cloudflare Workers approach to external events and local webhook testing.
HookDeck gets a practical turn as a serverless event gateway, with Alex Pouchard laying out how the service is built on Cloudflare Workers and where it sits beside AWS tools like EventBridge and SNS.
Power Platform news with practical static.
Matt Carey, a founding AI engineer at StackOne and co-founder of AI Demo Days, compares MCP, agent-to-agent systems, and the gap between AI hype and practical integration work.
Waldemar Hammer, LocalStack's CTO, returns to discuss version 4.0, which the team timed around re:Invent 2024 and paired with a new Event Studio preview.
Momento saw one gaming customer jump from 10,000 TPS to over a million TPS overnight.
Real World Serverless with theburningmonk brings on Aniket Mitra, founder of SaveA, to explain why knowledge graphs matter for AI and LLM systems.
Real World Serverless with theburningmonk features Alex Bouchard, co-founder and CEO of Hookdeck, on building an "event gateway" for webhook-driven systems and AWS-heavy teams.
An interview with Vijay Ramcharan about his role at NN and the company's digital transformation using serverless technologies.
Interview with Sarah Hamilton about advanced event-driven patterns at LEGO and the evolution of their serverless stack.
Interview with Sam Williams, a serverless consultant and teacher, discussing his journey into serverless and the challenges of learning it.
Interview with Owen Shanahee about Full Theorem's serverless consultancy work, including enterprise migrations and modernization on AWS.