Here’s the final board from the Datadog Illuminated episode with AJ Stuyvenberg, who explains how his team rewrote Datadog’s serverless agent in Rust, and the benefits of doing so!

Read the full board notes here: gist.github.com/wiggitywh…

A lightboard titled "WHY WE REWROTE OUR SERVERLESS AGENT." Three sections: left "The Problem Space" notes that AWS Lambda freezes the CPU between requests and runs code in tiny, isolated sandboxes, while the Datadog Agent was built to be long-running with a 55mb binary and 400ms+ startup, shown with a before/after timeline where startup drops from 400ms to 50ms and the agent continuously flushes data to Datadog during I/O waits. Middle "Why Rewrite?" lists making the agent lighter, eliminating upstream bugs, and switching to Rust for no garbage collection, small binaries, fast startup, and memory safety, with a playful "Suspense" note about more reasons to come. Right "Challenges" notes the team had no Rust knowledge, next to a "Results" box showing startup time improving from 400ms to 50ms, binary size shrinking from 55mb to 7mb, memory reduced by 50%, a 2x reduction in tail latency, and a safe rollout shipping Rust and Go binaries together with failover to the old Go version. Chalk-style text on a dark lightboard.