"Since 2018, we have increasingly leveraged Rust for critical workloads across various [AWS] services like S3, EC2, DynamoDB, Lambda, Fargate, and Nitro, especially in scenarios where hardware costs are expected to dominate over time." We've seen a lot of success with Rust at AWS, including our work on Firecracker, on Lambda's container dataplane, and on many other systems we've built. I love the fact that we can get memory safety without compromising performance or efficiency. I also enjoy seeing how much less time my teams spend tuning runtimes or debugging memory issues. I also really appreciate this sentiment from Werner's post: "... this is not a call to rewrite everything in Rust. ... It’s about using the right tool for the right job. This means questioning the status quo, and continuously looking for ways to incrementally optimize your systems – to tinker with things and measure what happens." Make decisions about programming languages the same way you make all critical engineering decisions: with data!
Tinkering fuels innovation and curiosity. It allows us to truly understand the tools and systems we work with at a granular level. Recently, I've been tinkering with Rust, a language gaining popularity for building reliable, safe, and sustainable systems at scale. The best way to learn is by doing. So, I turned our simple summarization proof of concept, Distill, into a CLI leveraging Rust's performance and memory safety advantages. As builders, it's our responsibility to continuously look for optimizations in everything we do. To ask questions and challenge the status quo. To learn and be curious. I encourage you to give Distill CLI a try, tinker with it, and share your feedback. And as always – now, go build! #AWS #tinkering https://lnkd.in/e7HUQwEt
