EP01: Essential Reading for Cloud Builders

Ideas, hands-on, how-tos, tools, books, what I read this week, and updates from around the cloud community.

Jul 29, 2025

Hi— this is Kisan from The Cloud Handbook. I am starting this new series called “Essential Reading for Cloud Builders”. Each week I will share curated roundup of the most insightful and practical resources from across the cloud community. This series helps you stay updated in cloud.

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☁️ Latest in Cloud

AWS Lambda enables developers to debug functions running in the cloud from VS Code IDE

“AWS Lambda now supports remote debugging in Visual Studio Code (VS Code), enabling developers to debug their Lambda functions running in the cloud directly from their local IDE. With this new capability, developers can use familiar debugging tools like breakpoints, variable inspection, and step-through debugging with functions deployed in the cloud without modifying their existing development workflow, thus accelerating their serverless development process.”

Some latest news:

🧭 What I'm Reading this Week

This week I’m diving into FinOps. FinOps is one of the most important part of modern cloud engineering. As your cloud infrastructure grow, it becomes more challenging to align your Cloud with business goals.

“FinOps is an operational framework and cultural practice which maximizes the business value of cloud and technology, enables timely data-driven decision making, and creates financial accountability through collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams.”

As a developer, spinning up a EC2 instance is much easier in technical view but we often forget to see the business impact of it. So, I believe every person who works in cloud most also have certain level of FinOps knowledge. It is necessary for not only for FinOps folks but everyone.

I found this talks on YouTube very informative called “How to Use the FinOps Framework 2024” from The FinOps X last year.

Also, you want to get started your career in FinOps, this conversation “FinOpsBE, Episode 1: What is a FinOps Career?” from FinOps Foundation is also very useful.

Here are other articles I read this week:

🛠️ Hands-on & How-tos

🔗 Developing cost allocation strategies of your AWS workloads
Why it's useful: Your perspective on where it fits — e.g., great for debugging Lambda cold starts.

In this hands-on workshop, you will learn about tools and techniques that can help you build and streamline effective cost allocation strategy. You must have your laptop to participate.

📦 Tools Worth Trying

AWS SAM
“AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) is an open-source framework for building serverless applications using infrastructure as code (IaC). With AWS SAM’s shorthand syntax, developers declare AWS CloudFormation resources and specialized serverless resources that are transformed to infrastructure during deployment. This framework includes two main components: the AWS SAM CLI and the AWS SAM project. The AWS SAM project is the application project directory that is created when you run sam init. The AWS SAM project includes files like the AWS SAM template, which includes the template specification (the shorthand syntax you use to declare resources).”
GitHub Link: https://github.com/aws/serverless-application-model
AWS FinOps Dashboard
A terminal-based AWS cost and resource dashboard built with Python and the Rich library. It provides an overview of AWS spend by account, service-level breakdowns, budget tracking, and EC2 instance summaries.
GitHub Link: https://github.com/ravikiranvm/aws-finops-dashboard?tab=readme-ov-file

📚 Book of the Week

Each week I will share a book that I think every cloud builders should learn. This week’s book is The DevOps Handbook.

The DevOps Handbook: How to Create the World by Gene Kim, Patrick Debois, Professor John Willis, Jez Humble

Following in the footsteps of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook shows leaders how to replicate these incredible outcomes, by showing how to integrate Product Management, Development, QA, IT Operations, and Information Security to elevate your company and win in the marketplace.

Link to the book (not affiliated): Amazon

💬 Quote of the Week

Towards AWS on X: ""Everything fails, all the time." - Werner Vogels https://t.co/ha8WqvHtMC" / X

“Everything fails all the time.” – Werner Vogels

🧵 Social Media Hit

Certifications are great. In fact they sometime can be a deciding factor to land you a job but certifications without hands-on experience is useless at workplace. So, always don’t strive for more certification, instead build more projects, get more hands-on.

📬 Get in touch

Found something worth sharing? Reply to this email or tag me

Kisan Tamang

— I might feature it next week.

Liked this article? Feel free to drop ❤️ and restack with your friends.

If you have any feedbacks or questions 💬, comment below. See you in the next one.

You can find me on Twitter, Linkedin.

If you want to work with me or want to sponsor the newsletter, please email me at kisan.codes@gmail.com.

See you in the next one! Until then, keep building.

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