Marc Brooker
@marcbrooker.bsky.social
3.5K followers 120 following 160 posts
Serverless, databases, and serverless databases at AWS. Views my own. Check out my blog: https://brooker.co.za/blog/
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
marcbrooker.bsky.social
New blog post, reflecting on nearly seven years since the Firecracker launch, and how we're using Firecracker to power serverless databases (in Aurora DSQL) and infrastructure for AI agents (in Bedrock AgentCore).

Here's the post: brooker.co.za/blog/2025/09...
Seven Years of Firecracker - Marc's Blog
brooker.co.za
Reposted by Marc Brooker
jaffray.bsky.social
NULL BITMAP: Using Huffman Coding for Sampling Discrete Distributions: buttondown.com/jaffray/arch...
marcbrooker.bsky.social
In DynamoDB, writes and their preconditions are evaluated atomically, and are linearizable. You could say that makes them strict serializable transactions, but that's not the most useful mental model for the app developer.
marcbrooker.bsky.social
TL;DR Despite the similar name, Dynamo and DynamoDB have fairly little in common architecturally, and make some very different decisions.
Reposted by Marc Brooker
qianli.dev
Qian Li @qianli.dev · Aug 16
Seattle friends - in case you missed it: lu.ma/umtmqb38
The Seattle Systems group is hosting their very first meetup! @marcbrooker.bsky.social will be presenting Aurora DSQL.

Excited to see more systems groups popping up (thanks @eatonphil.bsky.social). My colleague @devhawk.net is co-organizing.
Transactions and Coordination in Aurora DSQL · Luma
Join us for a Seattle Systems talk that’s definitely worth your time as we welcome Marc Brooker, Distinguished Engineer at AWS, for a deep dive into the inner…
lu.ma
marcbrooker.bsky.social
People often ask me about the differences in architecture between Amazon Dynamo (the 2007 SOSP paper), DynamoDB (the AWS serverless NoSQL database), and Aurora DSQL (the AWS serverless SQL databases).

I memoized the response on my blog. brooker.co.za/blog/2025/08...
Dynamo, DynamoDB, and Aurora DSQL - Marc's Blog
brooker.co.za
marcbrooker.bsky.social
LLMs are more powerful, more dependable, more efficient, and more flexible when deployed as a component of a carefully designed system.

New blog post: brooker.co.za/blog/2025/08...
marcbrooker.bsky.social
I had a great time talking to Ben and Will from Antithesis on the BugBash podcast about software testing and validation at AWS.

In this wide-ranging hour we talk deterministic simulation testing, fuzzing, formal methods, the history and future of testing, and much more.
Reposted by Marc Brooker
clare.dev
Fun conversation with @jkxosound.com about where I think things are going in the AI agents space, Strands Agents, and rats 🐀
jkxosound.com
@clare.dev is one of the leaders making AI engineering simple and scalable at AWS. Had a great time chatting with her as we discussed Strands Agents and patterns like “Retrieval as a Tool”.
marcbrooker.bsky.social
I hear TPC-C is the best, most representative, benchmark for modern analytics applications.
marcbrooker.bsky.social
I sat down with Darko Mesaros to talk about Kiro, specification-driven development, and putting AI-powered development in context of the history of computing.

Is an LLM a compiler? What is a spec? How are specs like SQL? Check it out: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdD9...
✨ Beyond Prompts: The Future of AI-Assisted Development | Marc Brooker x Darko Mesaros 🧠
YouTube video by Kiro
www.youtube.com
marcbrooker.bsky.social
I've been using Kiro as my primary IDE for a couple months, and am super happy to see it launch.

Spec-driven development is super powerful. More reliable, more repeatable, and easier to control than prompt-based vibe coding.

Kiro's hooks are also pretty great. I use them to keep clippy happy :)
kiro.dev
Kiro @kiro.dev · Jul 14
This is Kiro - the AI IDE that works on your messy, real-world projects. Other AI tools lose context when projects get complex. Kiro gives you spec-driven development that scales beyond prototypes.
Preview: kiro.dev/blog/introducing-kiro/?trk=6b579e54-2920-4e24-a25b-d3c887a6ffdf&sc_channel=sm

marcbrooker.bsky.social
Finally got to fixing the "related posts" feature in my blog. The Amazon Titan embedding model on Bedrock, plus cosine similarity, does a nice job:
Reposted by Marc Brooker
loige.co
🚀 New AWS Bites episode!

We tried Amazon #DSQL so you don’t have to (but you might want to) 👀

Luciano and Eoin put Aurora DSQL through its paces in #AWS Bites #Podcast Episode 145

🧵 Here’s what we found:
Cartoon-style illustration of Eoin (left) and Luciano (right) from the AWS Bites Podcast reacting with surprise and excitement. Eoin has his hands raised and mouth open, while Luciano points toward a glowing database icon in the center. The title above reads “First look at AMAZON DSQL” in playful lettering.
marcbrooker.bsky.social
Here's the answer.

On the left, we see the great "exponential benefit at linear cost" impact of redundancy. But that quickly tapers off as the single point of failure dominates.

What can this teach us about building good HA architectures?
marcbrooker.bsky.social
Wrote a monte carlo simulator in Python. Took 300 seconds to run. Asked Q CLI to translate it to Rust, compile, and run. Took 48 seconds, including the translation, and gave exactly the same result.

Is Claude 4 the best Python compiler?
marcbrooker.bsky.social
Availability intuition quiz!

I have an architecture with N redundant components, each available 99% of time time, and one non-redundant component available 99.999% of the time.

Sketch, on the provided axes, the end-to-end availability curve versus N.
marcbrooker.bsky.social
New blog post, about some of my favorite papers from this year's HotOS program. Love Little's law? Hate fork? Think static analysis of shell programs sounds fun? Had enough of the f threshold model? Check it out for some papers to read: brooker.co.za/blog/2025/06...
Systems Fun at HotOS - Marc's Blog
brooker.co.za
marcbrooker.bsky.social
"You will never experience eventuality. Eventual consistency is an abstract concept, not a guarantee you can count on."