Rust in the Cloud: Building AWS Applications That Scale

Abstract

Want to leverage Rust’s performance and safety in AWS? This practical session demonstrates how the AWS SDK for Rust enables developers to build reliable, cost-efficient cloud applications using familiar patterns.

We’ll explore the SDK’s modular architecture, individual service crates for S3, DynamoDB, SQS, Lambda, and more, all powered by code generation. You’ll see how unified configuration through aws-config handles credentials across profiles, SSO, IAM roles, and AssumeRole scenarios. The SDK’s async-first design with Tokio integration provides built-in retry logic, pagination, streaming support, and resource waiters.

Through real-world patterns, we’ll map these capabilities to common architectures: file processing pipelines with S3 + SQS, serverless APIs on Lambda, containerized services on ECS/EKS, and high-performance data access with DynamoDB. We’ll cover observability through tracing integration, security best practices with least-privilege IAM and KMS, plus deployment strategies for creating small, fast binaries.

Key takeaways: Understanding when to choose which AWS service, how Rust’s compile-time safety prevents runtime surprises through strongly-typed builders, and practical techniques for building production-ready applications that take advantage of Rust’s performance characteristics without getting lost in lifetime management.

You’ll leave equipped to build scalable, reliable AWS applications in Rust, focusing on cloud architecture patterns.