Good Morning!
This week is RSA in San Francisco; I’ll be haunting the expo hall at some point, so if you’re in town say hi.
The Last Week in AWS Job Board continues to thrive; thanks for your ongoing support!
Don’t forget that I’ll be hosting a panel at the AWS Container Day (colocated with KubeCon EU)!
From the Community
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Some developer has created “self-healing” programs that fix themselves thanks to AI. I’m increasingly excited about the possibility.
Andy Jassy’s second annual shareholder letter is worth a read; I’ve always enjoyed his writing style and it’s pretty clear that he’s doing this himself rather than farming it out to a corporate comms team.
DoorDash had an article recently about how to use my beloved LocalStack to Speed up Local Development of a Docker Application running on AWS. (Disclosure: I am a small investor in LocalStack.)
Semantic Search for AWS Docs sounds like a great first party feature and an absolutely lousy howto guide, as is found here.
James Governor at RedMonk has a piece evocatively titled The Great Flowering: Why OpenAI is the new AWS and the New Kingmakers still matter. He is of course correct, and on some level the old AWS isn’t going to like what the next decade has in store without some serious changes.
Tailscale sucks says the headline… on the Tailscale blog… about how they ended up installing it on a vacuum cleaner. Oh, okay then.
It’s pretty clear that ChatGPT (pronounced Chat-Gippety) is the future interaction interface for AWS, given their maddeningly inconsistent API story…
I opined on Why Local Development for Cloud Workloads Makes Sense for some workloads.
The UK is gearing up to investigate AWS and Microsoft for anticompetitive behavior. It’s going to be an interest decade in the cloud industry…
Cloud and Shadow IT are inextricably linked. I don’t know as we’ll ever get away from this…
Cloud PCs benchmarks aren’t meaningful says Microsoft. Given how heavily that company relies on "benchmarketing" in every other business line they participate in, I can only assume that their Cloud PCs perform like absolute crap.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: “A Quiet Week” He Says, Tempting Fate
Last Week In AWS: LocalStack: Why Local Development for Cloud Workloads Makes Sense
Last Week In AWS: Your Network Bill is Now Diamonds
Screaming in the Cloud: Uptycs and Security Awareness with Jack Roehrig
Screaming in the Cloud: Viewing Security through an Operational Lens with Jess Dodson
Choice Cuts
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Amazon Chime SDK updates Service Level Agreement – It’s always neat to see SLA updates, just to see what services about which AWS is willing to put its money and its mouth together.
Amazon CodeWhisperer is now generally available – GitHub Copilot Worse is now available for your usage. Individual tier is free, authenticated through BuilderID; Professional Tier is $19 a month per user, authenticated through IAM Identity Center users. I like the model, don’t like the actual product compared to the competition.
Amazon Connect now enables agents to handle voice calls, chats, and tasks concurrently – Just what you want as a customer, the agent assisting you to be massively multitasking.
Amazon EC2 Serial Console is now available on EC2 bare metal instances – These two features have been out for years now; finally we’re at a point where the bare metal experience is on par with what it was decades ago in our data centers…
Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports up to 15 read replicas for RDS Multi-AZ deployment option with two readable standby database instances – "Amazon RDS Read Everywhere" was what they should have called this thing.
AWS Graviton2-based Amazon EC2 instances are available in additional regions – This is one of my big problems with AWS. If I want to figure out if a particular Graviton2 instance is available in a given region, I have to string together a whole mess of blog posts like this one going back through time to the initial EC2 instance type’s launch–or else, try to spin one up and see if it works or not.
AWS Ground Station now supports Wideband Digital Intermediate Frequency – I’m not saying that Ground Station is a service for a very limited subset of customers, but I also kinda think like this update could have been sent to a group chat somewhere.
AWS Lambda adds support for Node.js 18 in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions – If ever I find technology has outpaced me, I’m going to start working on GovCloud to buy myself ten years of figuring out what I want to do next as the state of the art in that environment catches up with today’s present state.
Introducing AWS Lambda response streaming – This opens up a lot of fascinating use cases, as well as improving the perceived latency of Lambda…
Understanding Amazon DynamoDB latency – I was under the impression that DynamoDB latency was caused by you being a jackhole and not predicting your usage patterns in advance and building a single table design pattern in the first place. That’s certainly been the tone of the previous content in this space.
Announcing New Tools for Building with Generative AI on AWS – This is exactly the type of announcement I would expect from AWS in the generative AI space: a bunch of plumbing that the folks who’ll get the headlines, margins, and attention will use to build their offerings. AWS is becoming this generation’s Tier 1 backbone provider.
AWS Now Supports Credentials-fetcher for gMSA on Amazon Linux 2023 – Oh… oh god. If you’re pairing Linux instances to a Microsoft Active Directory in your environment, can you please do me a favor and hit reply to this email and tell me what you’re up to? I’m having a hard time picturing the use case, which tells me I need to talk to a few more of you…
AWS investment in South Africa results in economic ripple effect – Yet another example of an AWS region costing many billions of dollars to build and run. I don’t think most of us who’ve worked in data centers ourselves can really appreciate just what scale AWS is operating at here…
New Global AWS Data Processing Addendum – A new addendum that’s legalese for "oh god please do not regulate us into oblivion" to the governments of the world.
15 cool things we found inside the Spheres, Amazon’s urban rainforest in downtown Seattle – I’m guessing they found "four more AWS services that run containers," "an L9 employee," and "two more awkwardly phrased Leadership Principles." What do you think they found?
Tools
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The AWS CLI now prompts you for commands. At last!
A request for GitHub users: please visit the curl project and give it a star so the creator can drink another beer sooner rather than later. It costs you nothing beyond a mouse click, and I promise you’ve used this tool a lot.
SkyPilot is a framework for easily running machine learning workloads on any cloud through a unified interface. If the data needs are small, this is a solid way to arbitrage between regions and providers for cheap compute on a job by job basis.
This is basically magic: a Chrome extension that spits out a usable CloudWatch Logs Insights query when you just tell it the data you’re looking for.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
