It's Saturday, 1.30pm, and I'm at Heathrow Airport. An inspiring week in London, with Rust Nation and Rust Global 2025, is coming to an end. The importance of Rust for companies continues to grow, especially for safety and sustainability. The article provides insights and trends, because Rust is already a great investment for the future viability of an organisation's tech stack. Whether Rust SAP or Rust Serverless, both are highly relevant for many businesses.
The article is divided into the following sections:
- Rust integrates seamlessly into SAP
- Serverless Rust offers companies an efficient, low-risk first contact.
- Thriving local and global Rust communities provide support and innovation.
- Embedded hardware becomes more reliable and easier to access with Rust.
- Fullstack Rust delivers end-to-end development with guarantees.
- Efficiency is at the centre of automation in Rust.
Rust - Seamless integration with Rust SAP
Rust integrates seamlessly with SAP - A key to one of the world's most important business platforms. SAP, the third largest software company in the world, has been driving business logic in organisations since the 1970s. The complexity of SAP may be intimidating - it's a closed system that requires specialised expertise and funds an entire industry arm.
For me, this is a turning point - I can now offer my customers SAP interfaces for our solutions with a clear conscience and continue to build on proven Rust tools. This is how Rust turns SAP into an opportunity.
I admit that I was hesitant to delve deeper into SAP, because the effort required for a first-time integration with Rust is high. For that to change, I first had to learn about the work of Chris Whealy. With more than 20 years of experience at SAP, he is now working in the Rust ecosystem. There he has developed two outstanding libraries that build a bridge to SAP by simplifying OData integration.
Rust - Offers a low-risk starting point
Where is the low-risk kick-off for Rust? Serverless: AWS Lambda and Azure Functions support Rust as a first-class citizen, perfect for high-traffic functions such as authentication or APIs.
At Rust Global 2025, an authentication lambda was presented in a case study by Luciano Mammino and James Eastham. The Lamba was ported to Rust in one day, reducing costs by over 50%. Imagine a service with 600 million monthly requests - about 3,200 EUR per month with API Gateway. Porting to Rust could save over 500 EUR per month in execution. That means my Rust expertise quickly translates into savings and a return on investment.
Are you interested? Simply arrange a initial call.
As a collector, I will also buy the book in the photo below at some point.
Rust - Thriving local and global communities
Our Code of Conduct? ‚Be wonderful!‘, I announced on our first Rust-Dortmund Meetup in November 2024. A phrase I stole from Ciara, because that's the special thing about the Rust community: it's wonderful. With this in mind, I'm now looking forward to helping with the organisation of the Rust and C++ Dragons Meetup. This way I can benefit from the experience of Ciara, Alex and Matt. Also to bring Rust Dortmund further forward.
This section is personal, but let's pause for a business angle: Rust attracts the best. Companies like AWS, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, xAI, Amazon Prime, Volvo and Renault use Rust not only for the technological benefits, but also for the brilliant, motivated engineers who want to work with it. When you choose Rust, you have access to the best talent.
Back to the personal side. During a talk at Rust Global, Ciara told the story of the Rust Cardiff Meetup. It's now called „Rust and C++ Dragons“ - after the meetup switched to an online format during the COVID pandemic. Her story resonated strongly with me. Like me, she had attended local meetups and wanted to bring Rust to her city, so she became an organiser. We both learnt that it takes a lot of effort to find speakers or sponsors for venues and snacks for local events. Her key message was: adaptability is key, and getting started is easier than you think. So get started!
This is the Rust community in a nutshell: passionate, practical and growing. For readers from Dortmund and the surrounding area, Join the Meetup group – I would be delighted to see you there. You can see a photo of our Meetup in November 2024 above.
Rust - more accessible embedded hardware
It has never been so easy to build your own electronics - real hardware, directly in your own hands. If you've been following my posts, that's no surprise now - I just posted last month (January 2025) about my side project with asynchronous embedded Rust .
Rust also shines here. It is a multi-purpose language that also controls tiny, low-cost microcontrollers. Efficient code results in long battery life for the devices. It is also the second programming language to be approved for the development of the Linux kernel. This is a great vote of confidence from Linus Torvalds in Rust technology.
I am not a hardware guru and for my personal project I started small: I tinkered around with a development board and a breadboard. Great, talking to other software developers sparked more enthusiasm and I plan to go deeper in the future.
This brings me to David Haig's outstanding tutorial on Rust Nation: Bare-Metal Embedded Rust on the Raspberry Pi Pico. The workshop was well thought out and offered great sample code. For example, for WiFi communication, something I would also like to incorporate into my side project. Rust proves time and time again that it is the right choice for adventures with embedded hardware.
Rust - Fullstack delivers end-to-end development
At Rust Nation 2025, I couldn't follow every track - conferences with multiple tracks present you with that challenge. Thankfully, you can soon find some content on YouTube. However, something I kept hearing about was Leptos, a full-stack Rust framework that works with WebAssembly (WASM). Leptos harnesses the power of Rust for reactive web applications. This achieves near-native performance in the browser. The code base runs seamlessly on both the server and client side.
What stood out during the discussions? The fine-grained reactivity of Leptos. Unlike virtual DOM setups (e.g. React), it only updates what changes, using the efficiency of Rust to make everything lightning fast. By combining this with WASM, you get a frontend that significantly outperforms vanilla JavaScript. I didn't attend a Leptos-specific talk myself, but the sentiment was clear: fullstack development with Rust is still on the rise!
Rust - Automation ensures efficiency at the core
Automation is not a new concept - it is a cornerstone of modern life, saving time and reducing costs across the board. Languages like C and C++ have their own tools, often with dubious reputations. However, the Rust ecosystem is characterized by the fact that it builds on decades of experience. This has made it possible to develop accessible and powerful automation tools.
For example release-plz by Marco Leni, a gem that I had been wanting to take a closer look at for some time. At Rust Nation, the time had come: this tool does the routine work for the next release. Highly automated, of course.
It performs semantic version control, generates changelogs from the history of the version control system, and publishes a new release on crates.io (or your private registry). What about flexibility? It's packed with configuration options - and if in doubt, the PR branch can easily be customized manually. To me, it's a perfect example of Rust putting efficiency at the center and streamlining workflows. This allows you to concentrate fully on the essentials.
Conclusion
Rust Nation and Global 2025 were great - the momentum of Rust events is undeniable. From connecting to SAP to lowering serverless costs, from fostering thriving communities to unlocking embedded hardware, and from developing full-stack applications to automation at scale. Rust is the state of the art.
Let us enrich your next digitization project! It's best to arrange a initial call now and then we'll create something wonderful together!