AWS re:Invent for Platform Teams, GKE at 130k Nodes, and Killing Staging
In this episode of Ship It Weekly, Brian looks at re:Invent through a platform/SRE lens and pulls out the updates that actually change how you design and run systems.
We talk about regional NAT Gateways and Route 53 Global Resolver on the networking side, ECS Express Mode and EKS Capabilities as new paved roads for app teams, S3 Vectors GA and 50 TB S3 objects for AI and data lakes, Aurora PostgreSQL dynamic data masking, CodeCommit’s return to full GA, and IAM Policy Autopilot for AI-assisted IAM policies. This was recorded mid–re:Invent, so consider it a “what matters so far” pass, not a full recap.
Outside AWS, we get into Google’s 130,000-node GKE cluster and what actually applies if you’re running normal-sized clusters, plus the “It’s time to kill staging” argument and what responsible testing in production looks like with feature flags, progressive delivery, and solid observability.
In the lightning round, we hit Zachary Loeber’s Terraform MCP server and terraform-ingest (letting AI tools speak your real Terraform modules), Runs-On’s EC2 instance rankings so you stop picking instance types by vibes, and Airbnb’s adaptive traffic management for their key-value store. We close with Nolan Lawson’s “The fate of small open source” and what it means when your platform quietly depends on one-maintainer libraries.
Links from this episode:
AWS highlights:
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/11/aws-nat-gateway-regional-availability
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/11/announcing-amazon-ecs-express-mode
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/12/amazon-s3-vectors-generally-available/
Other topics:
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes/how-we-built-a-130000-node-gke-cluster
https://thenewstack.io/its-time-to-kill-staging-the-case-for-testing-in-production/
https://blog.zacharyloeber.com/article/terraform-custom-module-mcp-server/
https://go.runs-on.com/instances/ranking
https://nolanlawson.com/2025/11/16/the-fate-of-small-open-source/
Hosted by
Brian Teller