Kyler Middleton

I just wrote the last article in my Vera@Teams series (image related). I'm sad to see it go, but I'm very excited for my next foray into MCP enabled bots, particularly my current project - an SRE bot that can read PagerDuty, Splunk, Jira!

Super cool stuff coming, I'll publish what I can!!

I've discovered strands (strandsagents\.com), an open-source project from AWS that lets folks build MCP-compatible agents with nearly no code, and I'm THRILLED.

Is anyone else using Strands yet? It rules. Write-up coming!!

Registering an app to your Teams Enterprise is a surprisingly complex endeavor. But I got chu. Read along for all steps, including a lot of the tricky image, regionality, and authentication stuff.

Now free forever, and several more articles in this series paid (free coming) if you're interested.

🍀 🍀 🍀 🍀 🍀 🍀 🍀 🍀 🍀 🍀 🍀 🍀 🍀 🍀 🍀 🍀 🍀 🍀 🍀 🍀 🍀

Wish me luck!!

🔥Building a Teams Bot with AI Capabilities - Part 5 - GenAI Integration with Teams🔥 aka, what are all these GUIDs and why don't these APIs exist?

Hey all!

Part 5 of the Let’s Do DevOps Teams bot series is live. This one covers how the bot reads Teams conversations, grabs context, pulls attachments, and builds a (hopefully) smart reply. Teams makes this painful, but we make it work.

I don't like writing code with agentic AIs today. It seems we currently require front-loading design and decisions before the AI starts. If you leave gaps, it guesses, makeing random choices that might ruin the code.

Does anyone have a workflow where the AI can push back on any gaps it identifies?

The first article in the Teams GenAI Bedrock series is now FREE FOREVER!

Go build your own compliance-friendly GenAI bot using AWS Bedrock. All code is open source and free!

buff.ly/0aafcG6

I'm finally reading this paper but my first thought is anybody on earth good at predicting how long a task will take them....?

Setting aside the small person sample, randomizing the tasks within developer is....super odd? Wouldn't we start to expect a lot of order effects?

🔥Building a Teams Bot with AI Capabilities - Part 4 - Receiver Lambda for OAuth2 Tokens and State🔥 aka, I don't want to authenticate to SSO each time I send you a message

The next article in the Vera Teams series is now out! PHEW

This one covers all the magic I'm doing to make a stateless app (lambda) stateful using dynamoDB, and how Entra works

It's REAL cool, check it out: buff.ly/3LAHRJK

#LetsDoDevOps #Lambda #AIEngineering #EntraIdP #OAuth2

Our talk is now posted! Come learn about the platform engineering precepts that underpin modern cloud AI application development :)

Thanks #FwdCloudSec !

buff.ly/ldOVlpq

I'm at Fwd:CloudSec this week, so no new article this week - look out for that next week!

Instead, check out a write-up from Allen Helton on his Ready Set Cloud! newsletter :D Thanks Allen!

buff.ly/LQvhQsz

🚨 Sonnet 4 for CoPilot is out of Preview, go enable it right now (it rules)🚨

Is your security program hard on the outside, and soft and squishy on the inside?

Remember to bring your security inside your perimeter! Don't be an M&M.

OpenTofu 1.10.0: A Well-Seasoned Release | OpenTofu OpenTofu 1.10.0 brings a rich blend of features and improvements, delivering the most comprehensive update yet to the open-source infrastructure as code tool.

Tofu v1.10.0 gets OCI registry support which works offline, from an enterprise cache, which is pretty cool. Also now supports deprecation messages on modules and negative indices so you can pick the last item in a list in a less convoluted manner than Terraform.

JessG got an incredible picture of me speaking at ReInforce!! Next up, FwdCloudSec in Denver, let me know if you'll be in town!!

Traceability and explainability on your GenAI guardrails helps your users understand what the automation did and why.

I walk through how to enable AWS Bedrock Guardrails Tracing, and how to mine that data when you get blocked to show enriched messages to your users.

Article now FREE FOREVER!!!!

How can organizations empower teams with generative AI capabilities while maintaining rigorous data security standards responsibly? Veradigm initially hesita... AWS re:Inforce 2025 - Veradigm's security-first approach to amplifying potential with GenAI (DAP201)

ReInforce talk on Vera has posted!

youtu.be/r_JwSp-mS34

Wish I had time to rest, but @SaiG and I are presenting on AI/ML architecture patterns and platform engineering principles at Fwd:CloudSec next week in Denver! Let's gooooo 🎉🥳🎈

I was just accepted as a LinkedIn Learning Instructor LETS GOOOOOO

I'm going to be focusing on the nexus of DevOps and AI. Anyone have any specific skills you want to sharpen? I think starting on how to do agentic IDEs safely and cheaply is a great start!

What do ya'll think? ;D

ahhhh I'm speaking at AWS Re:Inforce today (for the first time! To 200+ people! With the incredible Meg Peddada!), wish me luck!

The way Azure issues SSO oauth2 tokens inherently defeats stateless apps, like how I've implemented Vera using AWS Lambda. Sooooo, lets add some state!

Lets talk why it's the right decision regardless, and how we'll build some state for our Vera Teams application.

Come check it out!!

On Wednesday I'll be presenting to about 200 people with Meg Peddada about how I built Vera, our internal AI.

LETS GOOOOOO

The Results slides from my ReInforce talk with Meg@AWS - look at that growth! We now have a multi-platform GenAI bot (available on Slack, Teams, Jira) that is trained on internal data from across many knowledge stores, and is working for far cheaper than you can buy.

buff.ly/5YRhAS0

I wrote about a GenAI technique I've been testing, where you have a model pre-contextualize your data before the knowledge base. It helps your KB entries be relevant, even when KB input is "fuzzy", and your relevant data is exact.

It helps a ton. This article is now FREE FOREVER. Please enjoy :)

I can't get Vera to stop hallucinating knowledge base entries, but I can for sure clean up her responses. Boom! Changes coming to the open soure codebase as soon as I can find time!

I completed the implementation of Vera on Teams! I'll be writing up a new series on LetsDoDevOps to cover all the steps. It's a dramatically different implementation due to Teams' APIs being so different vs Slack.

The first post of the series is live already, and one more is coming tomorrow!

UMM WAIT IM NOT SURE ABOUT THIS AI STUFF ANYMORE

Part 2 of building a GenAI Teams Bot is now live!

How to register and test your shiny new GenAI App in Azure Teams Developer Portal.

All steps included, so you can do it too. LetsDoDevOps. Link in image.

I've released all code for Vera on Teams on GitHub, open source on an MLP-2.0 license.

This is a fully functional lambda-based AI bot, which you can register in your corporate Teams tenant, and consume AWS Bedrock AI tokens.

Instead of seated licenses, you're not paying pennies for tokens.

I've never felt like less imposter syndrome than when I write an apology to future developers for my code

I have a nuanced take - AI is getting pretty good at programming, but is still super bad at software engineering.