Logicata AI Bot
November 5, 2025
The Logicata AI Bot automatically transcribes our weekly LogiCast AWS News Podcasts and summarises them into informative blog posts using AWS Elemental MediaConvert, Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Bedrock, co-ordinated by AWS Step Functions.
In this week’s LogiCast AWS News podcast, host Karl Robinson of Logicata was joined by lead cloud engineer Jon Goodall and guest Fabien Zucchet, an AWS community builder, to discuss the latest developments in the world of Amazon Web Services.
Lambda Payload Size Increase
The first topic of discussion was the recent increase in AWS Lambda’s maximum payload size for asynchronous invocations, from 256 kilobytes to 1 megabyte. Jon expressed a lack of excitement about this change, stating, “I’ve never personally had a problem with lambda payload sizes.” He suggested that while it might be useful for scenarios like thumbnail generation, he struggled to think of many use cases that would require such a large payload.
Fabien agreed, noting that the only time he had encountered issues with the previous limit was in some LLM (Large Language Model) applications. However, he pointed out that in event-driven serverless architectures, you’re often working with multiple services that may still have lower limits. Fabien said, “Even if you need large payloads, that’s a chance you might go over 1 megabyte, so you need to have a mechanism to basically solve that issue if need be.”
Both Jon and Fabien expressed concern about the pricing model for this new feature. Jon calculated that users could end up paying up to 13 times more for larger payloads, stating, “It just feels nasty. I don’t get it.”
Step Functions Metrics Dashboard
The conversation then shifted to the new metrics dashboard for AWS Step Functions. Jon, who has experience with Step Functions, welcomed this improvement. He said, “I like automated dashboards, I like new metrics, I like being able to see these sorts of things.” He emphasized that for large-scale users of Step Functions, such as the Lego Group, these metrics and dashboards are crucial for monitoring and alerting.
Fabien, while less experienced with Step Functions, agreed that “having more metrics, more observability is always a good thing.” He highlighted the usefulness of having billing costs on the dashboard, especially for those less experienced with the tool or AWS in general.
Handling Sensitive Log Data in CloudWatch
The podcast then discussed an article from the AWS cloud operations blog about handling sensitive log data using Amazon CloudWatch. Fabien shared his experience with this feature, stating, “We use it quite a bit. We have our functions as well… It’s fairly easy to just integrate either in your learning zones or in your actual shared constructs.”
Jon emphasized the importance of this feature for compliance with regulations like GDPR, particularly when dealing with Personally Identifiable Information (PII). He said, “This service gives you the option to just more or less plug something in, to paper over that little problem that you’ve developed for yourself by not accounting for it upfront.”
Major AWS Service Outage
A significant portion of the podcast was dedicated to discussing the recent major AWS service outage that occurred on October 19th. The outage was caused by a DNS race condition, which, as Jon pointed out, highlights how “at scale, simple stuff becomes incredibly hard.”
Fabien noted that the incident demonstrates how “even the best engineers working on this high-tech stuff can oversee some issues and get caught with this kind of issue.” He emphasized the importance of implementing best practices like jitter (random delay) and circuit breakers in system designs.
Interestingly, the podcast hosts experienced some technical difficulties during this part of the discussion, which they jokingly attributed to talking about outages.
AWS Financial Growth
Despite the recent outage and news of layoffs, Amazon’s stock jumped as AWS cloud growth accelerated. Jon explained this seemingly counterintuitive market reaction: “Layoffs tend to increase share prices in American companies, much more than any other, if you look at this historically, because it’s a very immediate signal to the markets that margins are going to improve.”
The podcast noted that AWS is growing at a pace unseen since 2022, according to CEO Andy Jassy. The company is doubling down on AI spending, which seems to be driving much of this growth.
Conclusion
This episode of LogiCast provided insights into recent AWS developments, from technical updates to financial performance. The discussions highlighted the complex nature of cloud computing at scale and the ongoing importance of AI in driving growth in the tech industry.
This is an AI generated piece of content, based on the Logicast Podcast Season 4 Episode 41.
